Page 105 of The Puck Bunny

Her hand is on my shoulder, then she squats down next to me. “I can feel your tension, your anger and sadness. It’s so mixed and volatile.”

I snort. “Yeah. I know.” My voice breaks. “Fuck, this is hard.” I have no idea what to do or say, but I have so much pent-up energy coursing through me I feel like I’ll snap if I don’t let everything that’s bottled in me get out.

“I feel like I’m going to crack in two and I don’t…” I can’t talk or I’ll choke. Emotions well up like lava in my throat, burning and stopping everything in their path.

She holds onto me, not saying anything, her arms vibrating with her passionate emotions, letting them rule her.

“Goddam it, Dad.” I spit the words from my soul. “I wanted to be there. I wanted to say goodbye, to tell you how I felt—how I feel…” I can’t say the words. I’m shaking.

“Go on,” she whispers. “I bet he’s listening.”

“I wanted to tell you I love you, that I always wanted to make you proud. I’m not sure I ever did. Not really. Not the way it counts—with the family.”

She wraps her arms around me tighter, but doesn’t say anything and I’m glad. I don’t need her to tell me he was proud. Those words have been said by Mom, by Lenny, by Mr. Derico… by everyone. Except Dad. I needed to hear them from him. He loved me. I know that.

But was he proud? Did I do what I needed to do to make him truly proud?

“It’s never too late,” she says, answering the question in my head

. lift us both to a stand and stare another minute at the grave, his name blurring.

Tears stream without me realizing it, not until she wipes my cheeks with her gloved hand and kisses my eyes.

I take in a ragged breath and the afternoon rays of the sun strike me through the bare tree branches. “Shit. We’re going to be late to dinner.” The weight and the pain fade into the background, descending into that place buried beneath the moments of everyday life—where I’ve always pushed them.

We walk back to the car and we get inside. When I go to start it, she stops me.

“Take a minute. I’ll text your mom to let her know we’ll be late.”

“If I don’t keep moving, it may take more than a minute,” I say. Trying to bury the unanswered questions back where they belong, relegated to the unsolved problems box, the one that maybe should never be opened if I don’t have the solution.

“I’m glad he wasn’t cremated,” I say out of nowhere. “Mom’s friends pressured her to do a cremation, but she couldn’t bear o. Said she wanted to be able to visit him and an urn just wasn’t the same. Plus, her family and Dad’s are all buried here. She wanted him here with them.”

“It’s so peaceful and beautiful here.”

“You should see it in May,” I say as if we’re having a casual Sunday-after-church discussion, as if she’s part of my past, part of my hometown life, the life I left more than ten years ago for the big time. “You fit in here,” I say and she furrows her brows. I laugh. “Not the cemetery. I mean here, in Portsmouth, my home town. I haven’t fit in for a long time. Since I left for college.”

“For the big time,” she says and I snap my head around to look at her like she’s somehow found a way to read my soul.

“That’s what everyone called it—what Dad called it—the big time. Except…” I stop, remembering that day in the bakery when he’d been telling the guys in the back that his son had hit the big time. I’d gone in because Mom had told me the guys wanted autographs. She’d had to push me out the door because it felt odd that my dad’s friends would want my autograph. I was just Joe’s son. I’d also thought Dad would think I was being too cocky—he'd often thought that.

“The day after I got drafted, I went to my dad’s bakery,” I say. “I didn’t want to, didn’t think he’d want me there signing autographs for the guys. But when I got there, he was telling them I’d made the big time and… he’d said it with pride and a great big grin on his face.” I turn to her. “I was surprised. They all wanted me to sign their L.A. Stars shirts and he laughed, but tolerated it. I remember being uneasy, wondering when he was going to shoo me out because he had real work to do, but he didn’t that day.” Well, damn. I’d forgotten about that day. That one day. One hell of a day.

I cup her chin and raise her face to see into her eyes. “How did you know?”

She looks confused. “Know what?”

“About the big time? About my dad?” I laugh because I know I sound ridiculous. “Never mind.” I pull her in for a kiss, the kind that comes from down deep, that needs to connect past the physical.

As I taste her sweetness and soak in her warmth and generosity, my irrepressible dick—where she’s concerned—threatens to take over my intentions.

“I knew your dad was proud of you,” she says.

Her words slam me with truth and, for the first time since he died, the mention of my dad doesn’t slice me in half with guilt and pain.

I feel a wave of deep sadness, of loss, and it’s not pretty, but it’s what I need,.

“Dad would have liked you,” I say, taking her face in my hands and kissing those lips as she turns that delicious pink that never fails to rile my dick.