Free Sometimes the Wolf by Urban Waite Page A

of the beer, tipping the bottle back, trying to calm his nerves. There was nothing he could do but wait it out, and when the spring on the kitchen door opened and then snapped shut, Drake already knew it was his father simply from the way the boards on the back porch took his weight. Drake didn’t turn and he waited for Patrick to come down the steps and sit next to him. His father’s hand on Drake’s shoulder as he sat. The first time they’d touched in twelve years. The feeling strange on Drake’s skin.
    “Thinking some deep thoughts?” his father asked. He was holding a beer in one hand and he twisted the top off with his other. When Drake didn’t respond, Patrick said, “This was always where I found you when you lost a basketball game.”
    “It’s been a while since high school,” Drake said. He finished the beer in one pull and set it on the step beside him. The smell of the yard all around him, fresh turned earth from a few days before, left to bake in the sun.
    “Sheri asked me what she should plant this year,” his father said. “I told her I don’t have a clue about that sort of thing. Your mother was always the one who dealt with the growing season.”
    Drake nodded. A desire in him to just come out with it. To tell his father everything.
    “You’ve made a life of it here,” Patrick said.
    “I’ve tried.”
    “Your mother kept a garden in the exact same spot.”
    Drake nodded again. “I remember.” He felt dazed, his body thrown off balance as he looked into the rows of turned earth, avoiding his father’s eyes.
    “I know you didn’t choose this life. Coming back here. Taking the job with Gary. I should have told you that earlier on,” Patrick said. “I meant to tell it to you years ago. I’m sorry about that.”
    Drake nodded.
    “It was easy money for me,” Patrick said. “Your mom died and by the time you finished high school there was so much debt. I couldn’t figure any other way. I was the sheriff, there was no moving up, there was no way to make more money. I really didn’t know what else to do.”
    Drake turned and looked Patrick over. The clean shave on his face. The way he used to look when Drake was a boy. The same familiar way Drake remembered seeing him every day. His hand running over the skin of his cheek and along his jawline as he talked, his fingers searching out the small imperfections, the little scrapes he’d given himself.
    “I could have waited,” Patrick went on. “There were things I could have done. Legal things. But I didn’t have the patience for it and the bank was telling me I needed to make my payments or they were going to take the house away. It felt like they were trying to take your mother away from me all over again.” Patrick held a hand to his face, pinching the bridge of his nose. The sound of his breath amplified in his palm, whistling between his fingers. “I know it was wrong,” he said. “It was all wrong . . .”
    Drake didn’t say anything, he didn’t want to speak, even knowing it was his turn, that his father wanted him to say something, Drake couldn’t do it. Patrick wanted him to tell him it was okay and the past was the past. At one time Drake thought maybe he could, but there just was no doing it now, not after everything he’d heard that morning. And now Drake feared if he said anything it would come out hateful, the words tearing up out of him like blood from a wound.
    “When your mother got sick I knew things would be different. And when she didn’t get better, when she kept getting worse, I knew the life we’d planned would never be.” Drake listened as his father took a sip off the bottle and then set it back on the wood. “Somewhere in there we jumped the tracks,” his father said. “One life going on the way it should have been, and another taking a completely different path.”
    “Dad, don’t talk to me about this anymore,” Drake said. His voice quivering in his throat. “I don’t want to hear it