“I don’t know, Lincoln,” she said, sounding exhausted, as if this were an ongoing argument she’d given up winning long ago. “People change.”
Why, he wondered, was he so resistant to that possibility? Just last night Mickey had tried to convince them he was no longer the same person they’d known back in the seventies, but wasn’t he really just talking about disillusionment? Okay, sure, the night he and Jacy became lovers, he’d discovered something about himself that surprised and frightened him. He’d always thought of himself as a chip off the old block, the sort of man who, like his father, always knew what was right and did it. Certainly not someone who hid in the trunk of a car to avoid military service. And after following Jacy into that motel room, he no doubt felt changed, and from that point forward everything he did—from using money Jacy had stolen from her father to buy instruments and sound equipment, to drinking too much and smoking too much weed—had strengthened his conviction that he was no longer the same person. But wasn’t that the point? If he was feeling shame, it was himself he was ashamed of, not some new person born of moral weakness. Adam didn’t become a different man after eating the apple. He was who he’d always been, except miserable.
And yet. W. A. Moser attending Mass? That did feel like a sea change. Was it possible the old man was actually admitting, albeit obliquely, to being wrong about something? Not Catholicism, of course. That wouldn’t happen in a hundred lifetimes. But wasn’t his attending Mass with this new woman tantamount to confessing he’d been wrong to insist on his wife’s conversion? And therefore wrong to oppose his son’s marrying a Catholic? Wrong to taunt him for the better part of four decades for a betrayal that existed only in his own imagination?
“Tell him I’ll come visit as soon as I get back,” Lincoln said.
“Is that wise?” she replied. Because he’d made similar promises many times and broken as many as he’d kept, and the latter had been more out of duty than love. Why keep making halfhearted promises? was his wife’s point. Because, he wanted to say, maybe it was time to stop pretending, even to himself, he didn’t love the old bugger. After all, paternal love was permitted, even if your father could be summed up in a single word and the word was impossible. Even if he was Wolfgang Amadeus Moser.
* * *
—
THE HOSPITAL’S WAITING ROOM was mobbed. Lincoln offered to stick around, but Teddy said there was no reason to if he had better things to do. He’d shoot Lincoln a text when they were finished with him. Ten minutes later, when Lincoln knocked on Coffin’s apartment door, it was Beverly who answered. She was wearing the same loose shorts and sweatshirt (the latter probably Coffin’s, since she was swimming in it) she’d had on last night at Rockers. They both said “Oh!” at the same instant, and then, in the next, “I wasn’t expecting…”
When she recovered enough poise to invite him in, Lincoln said no thanks, perhaps a little more emphatically than necessary. Yesterday, at the Vineyard Gazette, he’d allowed himself to be attracted to the woman and enjoyed that she seemed attracted to him as well. At the time it had seemed harmless enough. Today, though, nothing felt harmless. “I just stopped by to see how Mr. Coffin was doing,” he told her. Not the whole truth, but still.
“That’s nice of you,” she said, “but he went out a couple hours ago and didn’t say where he was going. Anywhere I’m not was my impression.”
“I’m sorry to—”
“I’m a scold, it seems.” She made a face that signaled a mixture of resignation and exhaustion. No doubt they’d spent the morning arguing about the surgery he’d vowed to skip last night at Rockers. “Nothing I say seems to get through.”
“Maybe he’s hearing more than you think,” Lincoln told her, though he had no idea whether or not this was true. “I know he cares for you.”
“He told you this?”
“Not in so many words,” Lincoln admitted weakly, “but he can’t seem to go more than two or three sentences without alluding to you. It’s none of my business, but is his son still in the picture?”
“He told you about Eric?”
Lincoln nodded.
“No, he took him to the ferry the night he…hurt me. Told him to never come back or he’d…” No