The Good Father

It was just a book, he told himself. Not even a good one at that. Jean had hated every second of it. Yet out of his whole shelf it was the one he reached for the most. While the other books watched and collected dust, rotting and yellowing, Jean only cared for one. It was just a book, he told himself, when he found the torn pieces of paper strewn across the floor. Not even a good one at that.

He remembered the terrible stupidity of the book, his memory was not the problem. He remembered hating the way the author spoke, the way she told the story, the pace. He would have normally tossed the book after a couple chapters but this one he looked forward to. Every page he read he grew to hate it more, and with every stupid plot line or phrase of words he looked up from the hardcover and basked in the stupidity of the novel with his dad. His dad was never easy to talk to. He always seemed to make Jean feel a sense of shame in his tireless efforts to speak with his father. Jean felt like a beggar, trying to create dialogue in the littlest moments, pushing a short conversation way past its due ending. On a good day Jean was able to pull more than a one word answer out of his father, a small victory that was more often than not, short lived. However there was something about these moments, Jean reading, his dad sitting closer than normal, that seemed like an invitation on both ends. The way Jean read in the living room and not his bed room. The way his dad lingered longer than usual after getting home from work. Jean didn't know what it was about his complaining that opened his dad up, maybe it was his dads interest in books or maybe his never ending knowledge in all things literature, but Jean savored every moment.

Opening the book now always gave him a tight feeling of nostalgia in his stomach. The back of his throat never failed to sting and his eyes never failed to water. He was only a chapter away from finishing when his Dad died. A chapter Jean would try many times to read, but never did, plagued with a feeling of emptiness in the absence of his father.

Jean had sat on the couch that night, reading in a purposeful slowness, waiting for his Dad to come home, exhausted from work and collapse next to him on the couch. It was both of their ways of subtly spending time with each other. But Jean had sat there, only half reading, for hours. Every voice he heard outside or car door slamming was not the voice or car door slamming that he was waiting for. Eventually he fell asleep. He did not know it yet but that was the last unturned page in the excruciating book Jean would ever bring himself to read.

Now looking back Jean wished he could have kept his younger self in that eternal sleep, even though his Dad was gone the moment he sat down that night to read, it was always his awakening the next morning that he looked at as the final shattering of his world. Jean longed for the cluelessness that he felt when he closed his eyes that night. He longed for the sense of hurt he felt, thinking his father abandoned their nightly tradition, he would have traded that feeling for tormenting feeling of grief he felt now, anytime.

It had now been three years since his Dad died. Jean was a man now though he did not feel it. He knew that he should no longer sift through the pages when he was alone. Read the chapters him and his Dad poured over the most and replay each conversation in his head. But his father was a cold, emotionless man. Often responding in simple grunts or head nods but that time together brought out the first dad Jean had ever seen in his father.

Now Jean stared at the torn and shredded papers of the book. His new puppy darted around the room as he stared at the one thing that allowed him to reminisce on the good moments with his dad. Over the years, with the fading of his father, Jean had been looking back at his father as a cold and callus man. A man that only seemed to be living because he had not yet died. It was the book that brought him back to the good moments with his dad, and now it lay in pieces, wet with his puppy's saliva.

Jean's dad was not a good man. He knew this in the way he lost his temper, the way he spoke about the people absent, the way he often slept on the couch away from Jean's mother. But in those nightly moments with him Jean was able to forget everything that fed the hatred for his father. And now, the one thing that brought light to his fathers memory was destroyed.

The moment that he had feared since the death had now come. This book had brought Jean his dad, not the cold shell of a father that he had known most of his life, but a someone that would glow in the dark space in Jean's memory. But that's just what this version of his father was, a memory.

Jean had grappled with the man that his father was, but in the destruction of the only string of light that was between them Jean cried, not out of sadness but fear. Fear that the true man that was his father was now no longer a hidden memory, but his first now. The memory of his father was no longer under the cloak of the memories of his dad. He was now left only with the truth. Jean was left with the man, not the memories.