Day 2.

When I was 9 we lived on a lake for a summer. I guess we lived there for a fall as well, but I remember almost nothing from that fall. Shortly after we celebrated Thanksgiving, we piled into our truck and moved to Minnesota. My dad was alive then. He was happy

At the time there seemed nothing odd about my dad not working for almost six months. About moving overnight to a small house on a dead-end dirt road. Weeds, left to grow all spring, reached to the window sills. A wood deck wrapped around the entire back of the house. The lake was still in the evening and I'd sit watching him throw a stick for our dog until it grew to dark to see, and Sandy would whimper and cry and beg and splash, and my dad would laugh and it would echo across the lake, and the lights reflected across the water, and the cicadas would sing and it was still. Fox hollow drive.

We drove over the Catawba and pass Stan's Bubble-up. Stan's was a biker bar perched on the side of the river. I know this because in April, two month before we moved from Charlotte, my dad stood outside Stan's at 4 am. That was a month before shots were fired at our house. Before police would knock on our door almost every day. Before a sheriff sat at our kitchen table, while I watched star trek, and showed my dad a handful of pictures of man who had been beat to death with a sledge-hammer. That was the month when my dad felt he would succeed. It would work. We'd buy a boat. His kids would go to college. He had won.

I wonder what he was thinking as he stood there watching the humid darkness begin to give way to morning. As he dug his feet into the gravel and reached down to touch the river. As he picked up a rock and mindlessly tossed aside. As he watched the lights of scuba divers appear and disappear. I wonder what he was thinking knowing the most expensive thing he had ever owned was resting, it's headlights shining through the murk, on the bottom of that river.

We are the same age now. Me and him. His wife and three children asleep at home. Drunk bikers stagger by as his features are momentarily illuminated by the blue and red of flashing police lights. I'm sure his shirt was tucked in. His shirt was always tucked in. Those years in Charlotte he smelled like sweat and asphalt. Even at church, in a clean plaid shirt and jeans, you could smell the roofs on him. Like tar. Like heat.

He had let Chip drive the truck home that night because by the time my dad got off the roof, the dump was closed. Chip had a gold chain and long curly hair that always seemed wet. Chip's wife was cheating on him. I guess that night he realized it or grew tired of it or was drunk or was angry. He drove the truck to bar, put it in neutral and ran inside. The truck, with it's aimless headlights illuminating the muddy water, slowly slid down the bank and floated into the river.

The room was quiet and dark and he could hear the rhythm of my mom's quiet breathing. The windows were open. He pulled on his pants, then a shirt, quietly closed the door behind him and started his truck. This was not how life was suppose to go.