you, Joseph? I’m building you a business. Setting you up for life. And this is the thanks I get?”
Bob owned and operated a successful construction company called Harper & Sons. He built McMansions all over the Bay Area and made shitloads of money, and because that was all he cared about, he assumed it was all the rest of us cared about too.
Even when Sam was alive, Bob wasn’t an especially pleasant guy to be around. One of Bob’s most prominent traits was that he didn’t think he was ever wrong. Domineering and brusque, he was that guy at the table who would say a thing was black even if he knew it was white, just to start an argument.
I didn’t have the nerve to challenge Bob, but Sam would spout off and call bullshit on him all the time, which you would think would piss Bob off, but it had the reverse effect. Bob believed it meant Sam knew how to be a leader. He used to tell his friends how Sam was a bull and was going to take over the business one day.
I was what a nice person might call a sensitive kid: shy, awkward, and generally nonconfrontational. Bob often referred to me as a pussy.
Taking all of these factors into consideration, I didn’t care that Bob was avoiding me because I didn’t want to be around him any more than he wanted to be around me. Except that I did. That’s the rub for all kids with shitty parents, and don’t let anyone tell you differently. You only hate them because you love them and you want them to love you back. And never was that truer than the Saturday in question, because it wasn’t any old Saturday, it was my birthday, and Bob had promised to hike from Mill Valley to Muir Woods with me to celebrate.
When Bob was in college, before he started working in construction, he’d been obsessed with trees too. He’d moved to California from Spokane to study Forestry at UC Berkeley and could identify every tree and plant he saw, no matter where we were. Ingrid maintains it’s the greatest gift my dad ever gave me: my love of trees. And it’s why I loved hiking with him. When we were still a family, he and Sam and I would spend hours on the trails every weekend, exploring, foraging, and investigating the forest. Bob was a different person when he was in the woods. He was funny and patient, and all the good memories I have of him are from those times.
Bob and I hadn’t hiked together once since Sam’s death, and I’d been looking forward to it for weeks.
Twenty minutes before he was supposed to pick me up, the phone rang. The answering machine clicked on and I stood beside it, listening to Bob leave a message about how there was a running race happening on Bridgeway and a bunch of streets were blocked off and it was going to be a nightmare for him to make it over to Mill Valley and yadda yadda yadda, he was sorry but he wasn’t coming.
“We’ll go before the summer’s over,” he said. “I promise.”
I picked up the receiver and slammed it down as hard as I could. The asshole never even wished me a happy birthday.
And he wasn’t fooling me. He lived one measly town south of Mill Valley, and sitting in a little traffic in order to spend time with your kid on his birthday didn’t seem like too much to ask.
Over the years, being lonely has become the standard for me. It feels normal now, like a bad leg wound that turned into a permanent limp, and I accept it. But back then loneliness was a new, excruciating state of being, and there were only two things that made me feel less alone. One was playing guitar and the other was being in the woods, and that day I opted to spend my time doing both. I was going to hike as planned, and I was going to take my guitar with me, Bob Harper be damned.
I had filled my backpack with what Bob told me to pack when he thought he would be coming: two turkey sandwiches, a couple cans of Dr Pepper, iced oatmeal cookies, and a canteen full of water.
When I realized Bob wouldn’t be accompanying me, I added my portable CD player, a couple CDs, and a small notepad and pen, in case I got lost