Page 128 of The Last Second Chance
“I have no fucking idea.”
28
Jax putin a full day on the farm and a full night in the brewery. He didn’t know whether to be grateful to or pissed off at Carter and Beckett for taking advantage of his current predicament by burying him in work. It kept him physically preoccupied, but his mind and his heart never wavered from Joey.
He trudged in the front door well after midnight and was greeted by Meatball’s soft “woof.” The dog’s white tipped tail thumped a lazy rhythm against the floor.
“What are you still doing up, buddy?” Jax whispered, shucking off his coat and stuffing it in the closet.
The beagle slowly worked his way up to his feet and wandered over for scratches. “Come on. Let’s have a snack,” Jax said, leading the way back to the kitchen. He pulled his laptop out of his bag and set it on the island before peeking into the fridge. He grimaced at the disgusting tofu scramble leftovers that Carter and Summer had for dinner.Vegetarians, he thought with distaste.
He settled on a mixing bowl of cereal and shared some—minus the milk—with Meatball in his food dish. Jax settled on a barstool and reached into his bag for his charger, but his fingers brushed an envelope instead. He pulled out the folder that held the stack of his father’s short stories.
It seemed every time he read one of his father’s essays, some nugget of truth resonated with him. And he could really use his father’s words of wisdom now more than ever. Unwinding the red string, Jax slid the stack of stories out. He’d been slowly shuffling the essays he read to the bottom of the pile.
He paged through, until his father’s still familiar handwriting scrawled across the paper caught his eye.
There was no title, only the opening line…
Today was the hardest day I’ve ever endured as a father.
Jax knew without a doubt what day his father was talking about and guilt simmered in his gut. He and his dad had never spoke of what happened that day and there was part of Jax that didn’t want to expose himself to his father’s take and pain on the accident.
But there was a louder part, the writer in him who needed to know. Needed to peel back the layers to look at the whys. So he read on. It wasn’t a carefully crafted story like the rest of his father’s writings. This was a stream of consciousness, a purging.
Today was the hardest day I’ve ever endured as a father. A typical day was followed by a typical evening. Phoebe and I were washing up the dishes after a late dinner. Beckett was out with the girl-of-the-month, as we’d come to call his dates, and Jax was due back from his date with Joey any minute.
And then the phone rang.
Phoebe answered it with her cheerful “Hello, Pierces.”
And I saw the color leave her face in an instant.
“I didn’t know which son it was. But I knew it was one of them. No other news delivered could make my wife’s heart stop like that.”
Was it Carter in Afghanistan? His first deployment was a source of pride and terror. He’d been gone long enough that I’d stopped being afraid of the telephone ringing. But it all came back now.
“It’s Jax,” Phoebe said, her face white as the clean sheets she’d just put on his bed that afternoon.
The phone tumbled from her grip and I took it. Who? What? Where? I peppered the police on the other end with rapid-fire questions.
Alive. Jax was alive. That’s all they would say and they were even cagier on Joey’s condition. Yes, she was in the car. Yes, she was going to the hospital with Jax. But that’s all they could say.
We grabbed keys and were out the door in a heartbeat. Silence reigned in the car, but we’d known each other too long to not hear the unasked questions that echoed in the other’s head.
How badly were they hurt?
How had it happened?
What could we have done to prevent it?
What if … What if the one thing neither of us could bring ourselves to think happened? What if we lost him? What if we lost her?
At the hospital, Phoebe jumped out while I parked. The visitors lot felt like it was miles away. And that long walk under lonely streetlights and that full summer moon was an out-of-body experience.
In front of me, the glow of the Emergency Room sign. The answers I sought were through those glass doors. But I wasn’t sure I was ready for those answers. Wasn’t sure I could live with those answers if our son had been taken from us.
It’s funny the things you think of in moments like that. A whirl of chaos, a windmill of every nightmare imaginable, shows itself. I saw a funeral, a wedding, scars, and blood. I thought about Jax when he was seven and I taught him to drive the tractor. His mechanical aptitude had quickly surpassed either of his brothers’. His love of all things with engines. That car that he was so proud of, the one that the cops told me was now wrapped around a tree just past Diller’s pond.
