Page 77 of Moonshine Lullabies

“How about dinner?” he asked. “Tonight.”

I nodded, “At your folks place?” I didn’t know where that was.

He shook his head.

“Nah,” he said.

I nodded, and he gave a nod too. “I’ll come back an’ get ‘cha. We’ll take the truck.”

“Alright, sounds good.”

I’d be lyin’ if I said I wasn’t worried about meetin’ Jessie’s daddy. I mean, his children were somethin’ else, but the pain that Jess harbored made me worry about what kind of man I’d find on the other side of the table from me.

Cypress came back around and I went and washed up. We took his truck to this place out in the bayou. It was almost just a shack of a bar on the side of the road. A place we’d ridden out to and had some down-home Cajun cookin’ including fried alligator and nutria on the menu.

We went on in, and Cy immediately threw some chin to a man in a booth around the bar area who’d raised his hand. I recognized him from the night the house had got shot up the night Jessie an’ me were in it, but I hadn’t seen him too good in the chaos of flashing lights and a haze of adrenaline.

I went over with Cy and sat across from him and didn’t know how to feel really when Cypress got in next to me effectively pinning me in.

It struck me again, how the man across from me wasn’t what I pictured when it came to Cypress’s daddy. For one, he wasn’t a big dude at all. He was small, like Jess.

He had a serious and unreadable expression on his face, and that face? There wasnomistaking that Cypress was this man’s child. They were spittin’ images of each other, there.

I looked from him to Cy and back again and tried for a little humor to break the ice as he stared at me with a hawk’s eyes from beneath the curved bill of his baseball cap.

“All due respect sir, but what the hell you feed your kid to get him this way?”

The joke worked, I think. His lips twitched into some kind of smile but they quickly flatlined, as he looked me over.

“I wish we’d met under better circumstances, boy,” he said and I didn’t take any insult at how he’d called me ‘boy.’ I was seeing his daughter, to him I was a boy. He had the look of a man who’d had his whole damn world rocked, but also, a fire in his eyes that was a cold one, I tell you. The ice-cold fire of calculating revenge.

“Can’t really say we met back at my daddy’s house. A lot going on that night.”

“I surely do myself,” I said nodding and and he nodded himself.

“My boy says you got my Jessie-Lou to open up to you the way she ain’t never opened up to me or her mother, an’ I’d like to know how you did that.”

I folded my hands on top of the table between us, unconsciously mirroring how he had his hands on it first and I don’t know. It felt like it was an unspoken signal that we was past any kind of pretenses an’ we was just layin’ it out. All cards on the table.

It was a raw and uncomfortable feeling, and I wouldn’t flinch if he wouldn’t.

I reckon that if he was here an’ askin’ he was willin’ to hear it, and the least I could do was be just as bold and bald faced an’ tell the fuckin’ truth.

Still, I did so as respectfully as possible.

“All due respect, sir, I reckon you ain’t one for any bullshit an’ ain’t here fixin’ to bullshit you. By the same token, I ain’ t always best at comin’ off all gentle like, an’ so I say this with absolutely no disrespect, and no ill will in my heart, but, sir? All your daughter ever wanted from her family was to know she was loved… an’ she doesn’t. Feel loved, that is.”

The man in front of me bowed his head, and rightfully got emotional, pressing his finger and thumb into his eyes and when he’d gathered himself some, he looked up at me.

“I don’t know where I failed her so much as her daddy that she didn’t think she could come to me,” he said.

I shook my head, “I can’t speak truth to power on that, sir. I can only tell you what I reckon, and what I reckon is only guessin’.”

He nodded. “All I did was listen,” I said. “A little patience, a little quiet, and I guess I loved her an’ she felt it. That, an’ I confess, as strong as your daughter is, at the time that she told me, she was scared.”

He nodded and I went on.

“She just got woke up and in that place between asleep and awake, she done forgot where Tate was, and I guess when she’d calmed down, she got to thinkin’ and all she could think was that if somethin’ happened to her, that her ex would get Tate and she knew an’ her ex knew… he ain’t that boy’s daddy.”

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