Page 68 of The Tattered Gloves
“Sure,” I answered, trying to picture the hardened face of Sam’s father crying himself to sleep at night.
“That’s not my father,” he replied flatly. “Let’s just say, he’s gotten over her. Many, many times.”
My eyes widened as I finally understood his meaning. “Oh! That’s… I’m sorry.”
He shrugged. “My dad’s never been much for emotions. Hates showing them — well, unless it’s anger, of course. He loves that one.”
I could almost taste the bitterness in the air as he spoke about the man who had raised him.
“You don’t like him, do you?”
He struggled to answer. “It’s not that,” he replied. “It doesn’t matter if I like him or not, you know? He’s my dad whether I want him to be or not. Family is family. You don’t get to choose who you’re related to. But the more I get to know him as a man, the less respect I have for him. He’s just not a good person.”
I let his words sink in, and then I remembered what Addy had said to me the night before as we hung Christmas ornaments. “My aunt says there is no such thing as a good or a bad person, just a sum total of decisions — or at least, that was how I interpreted it.”
“Like a scale kind of,” he replied, his eyes watching my fingers as they traced the grains of wood on the counter.
“A scale?”
“Our family has owned various businesses in this town for generations. I recall, as a kid, we owned — still own, I think — the grocery store down the street.”
I nodded, thinking back to the many visits with Addy to that particular store.
“Before they installed the digital scales at the register, they used to have old-fashioned ones scattered all over — in the produce section, coffee aisle, anywhere customers might need to weigh goods. I, being the incredibly helpful kid I was, used to try and see how many items I could stack on each scale before it would tip.”
“What do you mean, tip?” I asked.
“Unlike the digital scales, these scales could handle only so much weight. I think the highest it went was around ten pounds.”
“That’s not a lot.”
“Well, keep in mind, it was mostly for weighing carrots and lettuce. Not huge bags of flour or six-packs of soda.”
I laughed. “That’s not helpful at all.”
He grinned. “You weren’t there when the six-pack crashed to the ground and exploded. I thought the old woman grabbing her rhubarb next to me was going to have a heart attack right there in the store.”
I gave him a dubious look, part amazement and part shock.
“She didn’t though. She lived, I think. Anyway, the point is, before my tragic accident with the soda, I used to run around the store, grabbing as many different things as I could — small, big, somewhere in between — determined to find as many combinations as possible that would tip the scale.”
“So, you’re saying the soda or the bag of flour are what? Our decisions?” I asked.
“Yeah, why not? Our decisions, good or bad, all make an impact, right? So we make an epic mistake? We cheat on a spouse or” — he swallowed audibly — “leave our family… that’s a big one… so load up a bag of flour. We—”
“Neglect our daughter,” I said quietly.
“Definitely a bag of flour or two.”
“But what happens when you do something good? Say the cheater becomes a nun?”
Sam shook his head. “Not sure that’s a good example, but okay, I see where you’re going. Maybe some of the flour comes off?”
“Some but not all?”
“Maybe eventually. But it’s a pretty heavy bag of flour.”
I hadn’t noticed, but as I was tracing the wood on the counter, Sam had begun a doodle of his own. There on the yellow notepad was a rough sketch of a scale. It was exactly as he’d described it. A round base suspended by two chains. At the top was the actual scale, numbered from one to nine, with small marks in between each number, almost like a strange little clock.
