Free Men in the Making by Bruce Machart

I might never come back. In a way, it made sense to me even as I was leaving: my father had been killed before I was born; she had to let me go, had to let me learn who he'd been. But even that morning on the bus, turned around in my seat and all mixed up in my guts—even then I had the feeling that what hurt her most was not letting me go, but having to stay behind.
    She'd met my father while vacationing with her parents on the Texas coast near Matagorda Bay. He'd been down from his father's farm in Shiner for the weekend, fishing with friends, and two months later he'd driven his old Chevy truck up to Oklahoma to ask for her hand and bring her back home with him. Half a year later he left for war, four months after that he was in the ground, and she'd moved from Texas up to Tulsa where her parents lived, and where I was born.
    Married less than a year before she was widowed, she couldn't have known my father all that much better than I did, and I imagine what she did know was full of holes, voids she could only dream of filling. When I think about it today, I can almost put words to that nine-year-old inkling I had swirling in my stomach the morning I left for Grandpa's. I can see my mother kissing me goodbye and putting me on the bus. I can watch her through the back window as the bus rolls away, watch her standing there, her summer dress swirling around her knees, one foot on the curb and one in the highway, not waving but watching, watching her son go south, and I know she wished she were going too. Instead, she was heading north with Stan Kittridge, the balding banker who would introduce her to his relations in Chicago, and who would marry her the next summer. Who would buy us a house on the red clay banks of Hominy Creek and drive us to Dallas for Cowboys games some Sundays, and who, much to his credit, told me I could call him Stan, just Stan, though he would become over the years more like a father than the man he was to me that summer—some stranger in a necktie who never took his shoes off, who always winked at me for no good reason, and who called my mother a peach.
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    Before my visit that summer, all I'd known of Grandpa Havleck was sharp words and sharp steel. Every year since I could remember, he'd sent me a new pocketknife for my birthday, and though I'd handled them endlessly, pulling out the blades and inspecting the engraving for some secret message, all I'd ever found was the manufacturer's name and the grade of stainless steel. When I'd ask my mother about him, she'd frown and find something that needed doing around the house, something to keep her hands busy while she talked. "He's a bitter pill," she told me, "and I don't want you thinking that's how your daddy was, 'cause he wasn't. He was outgoing and loud sometimes, but always kind. Your Grandpa Havleck, he's all eaten up on the insides with guilt, says one thing and feels another. Deep down, though, he's good people. Has to be, else he couldn't have fathered your father."
    Before my trip, I was warned to expect some strange behavior, a little ribbing here and there, a bunch of what my mother called "macho hooey about Texas-this and Texas-that."
    What I didn't expect, even after having spent most of August with the old man, was for him to sit me down in the porch swing out back of his farmhouse in Shiner, fish a cold bottle of Lone Star from the cooler he kept by the door, and slap it into my hand.
    "There you go, boy," he said, and once he'd pried the caps off the bottles, he slipped the bottle opener into the chest pocket of his T-shirt, gave it a little pat for safekeeping, took a swig of his beer, and then shot me a look of disgusted confusion.
    "Whatcha just looking at it for?" he said. "Go on, you little Okie. Drink it. That there's a Lone Star you got, and if ever there was a little Oklahoma green-ass in need of some liquid Texas, it's you."
    Grandpa hiked his jeans up under the enormous hump of his belly and rubbed his head, which