because thinking about them damn near drove him crazy.
Ethan shoveled for maybe half an hour, working up a good enough sweat that he took off his winter coat and tossed it onto one of the benches. It was cold, but there was no wind, and with the sun shining and all that shoveling, he was hot has hell. It was about that time his father joined him, and in another twenty minutes, the two of them had the pond cleared. He stuck his shovel into the snow by the bench and took the beer his dad offered.
“Supposed to get another foot tonight,” Frank said, eyes on the sky.
“Yeah?” Ethan followed his dad’s gaze, noticing a buildup of clouds to the left over the lake. “When’s it supposed to start?”
“Overnight. Midnight maybe.” Frank smiled. “Good thing too. The Jacobs clan is headed over later, and damned if we’re not going to get in a game of pond hockey. Last year, all I had was Georgianna and some of her pals to back me up. She might be a great soccer player, but the girl has two left feet when it comes to skates.”
“Don’t let her hear you say that,” Ethan replied with a chuckle. A weird expression crossed his father’s face, and suddenly, the air changed, or something changed. “What?”
His father cleared his throat and took another pull from his can before answering. “It’s nice to hear you laugh is all. You’ve been in the dark for so long, I forgot what my boy looks like when he’s happy.”
Ethan glanced down at his boots and worked away the sting in his eyes. “I’m sorry,” he said slowly. “I kind of disappeared there. I just didn’t know how be around people when I was so goddamn miserable. It was easier to be on my own than to try to pretend I was okay.”
“You’ve had a tough road. I know Rick was like a brother to you. And I know what it’s like to lose someone so young and unexpectedly.”
Right. Ethan slowly nodded. “Uncle George.”
“He only held you once, a few months after you were born. He’d come home on leave to see the family and his girl, to catch up with his pals. We had a couple of nights where we acted like complete idiots, closed down the Coach House until Sal asked us to leave. It’s a small miracle your mother didn’t kick me out of the house. But she knew my little brother meant the world to me and that he was leaving to head back to Iraq to serve. And he did.” A sad smile touched his father’s face. “I never saw him alive after that.”
His father tipped back his beer and finished it. He looked good, his dad, but he was grayer than before, and there were new lines around his mouth and eyes that Ethan hadn’t noticed. He’d checked out these last few years, and it made him wonder what else had passed him by while he was busy disappearing from life.
“I miss him.” His dad glanced his way. “That’s not something that goes away, not even after thirty years. . I suppose that I’ll feel the same way when I’m eighty. God willing, I live that long. There’s a connection with that kind of love and pain, and it manifests in many ways. Sometimes, usually in the morning, in that sweet spot between dusk and dawn when the sun’s about to break open the day, I’ll wake up, and that’s when it happens.”
Ethan waited for his father to continue, but the man took a few moments before he did.
“The light is soft and shimmery when it falls through the window and tumbles into all those dust particles. They swirl about like little tornadoes and become something. If I stare long enough, I see him. He’s young and healthy and alive.”
The conviction and sadness in his father’s voice touched something inside Ethan, but he clamped his mouth shut tight, afraid that if he spoke, all those things inside him would fall out and it would be a mess, and that was a can of worms he didn’t want to open. Not yet, anyway, and definitely not today.
“I see a lot of him in you.” His dad’s voice was gruff, though his eyes were soft when he looked Ethan’s way. “Just like him, you’re strong willed. You play hard and love harder. You’re loyal to a fault, and you take everything that’s bad and keep it inside, and