A Son Comes Home

Prologue CHRIS

I wanted to kill my brother on the day he died. I think back to that with embarrassment now, and with guilt. At the moment his body was being crushed in a tangle of glass and steel, I was hurling his tools against the back of the garage door. I stood in the exact spot where his car should have been, imagining I was pelting him with wrenches and screwdrivers and hammers, denouncing him for his lies and betrayal as he begged me to stop.

David died on Culpepper Highway, a twisting, narrow road–not a highway at all–that slices through a wooded area west of Indianapolis. With almost no shoulder, the two lanes are barely wide enough for a single car. It twists through the woods in unpredictable directions, and yellow signs warning of elaborate curves dot the side of the road. The posted speed limit in some places is only fifteen miles per hour. It has not been resurfaced in decades, and the crumbling blacktop makes for a jarring ride even when driving at a snail’s pace.

My brother did not drive it slowly. He liked the road for the same reason most people hate it: He said it was like a roller coaster except the danger was real. Culpepper Highway features two bridges so narrow, so old, and so damaged that only one car at a time can creep over them. The road and its bridges were the setting for most of the ghost stories I heard during my childhood, those tales of stranded cars on the bridge and mysterious murderers who popped out of nowhere to kill unsuspecting victims.

Culpepper’s woods are so thick that tree branches hang in an ominous–some say beautiful–archway over the road. On the day of his death, David drove his restored 1953 Chevrolet Bel Air. He worked long hours as a mechanic, but even after being in the garage all day, David could still find the energy to come home and work late into the evening on one of his old cars. By age twenty-seven, he had restored eleven antique automobiles, and the ‘53 Bel Air was the only one he still owned.

The Bel Air was in perfect condition when David drove it away from our house that afternoon in July of 1992. Just that week he had waxed it, vacuumed the interior, scrubbed the whitewall tires, and polished the windows. He had wiped down the engine compartment and cleaned out the trunk. The car looked massive and indestructible by modern standards, with its bulky body, big rear fenders, imposing grille, and fender skirts. The dark metallic green top and pastel green bottom were striking and made the car impossible to ignore. I had ridden in it with David before, and everybody would stare as we drove by.

David liked driving his old cars on Culpepper Highway because he said it was one of the few roads that felt as old as the car itself. He hated taking the car out on the big freeways, with what he considered characterless modern cars zipping all around him. Dad had warned him many times about driving too fast on such a treacherous road. You’ve got to drive these old cars with a little respect. You can’t go tearing around like they’re some kind of brand-new sports car. You go too fast!

I don’t think David thought of his driving as either slow or fast. He just wanted the car to feel a certain way when he was behind the wheel. "I need to know I’m really driving it, he would say. What good is having the car if you’re just going to poke along in it slow and straight down these neighborhood roads? Dad wants to park his cars in the garage and polish them. I want to do something with mine."

No one witnessed what David did on that bend on Culpepper Highway. The accident could be reconstructed only by examining the tire tracks and skid marks and the demolished car. David made it through one of the worst curves on the road, a turn so sharp it was nearly one hundred eighty degrees. Despite all the glaring warning signs, David likely drove the car two or three times the speed limit around that curve. There is no room for error on that part of the road. A driver who misjudges will skid over a gravel embankment and end up in the trees. David had driven that stretch countless times, sometimes with me in the car. On many nights since his death I have awakened haunted by the same dream: David and I hurtling around that bend together. I feel the car turning, my shoulder smashing against the door, but instead of straightening again, the car, in the surrealism of dreams, continues to spin, as if it has been picked up by a tornado. I feel the frightening loss of control of my body as it is tossed from side to side. I catch sight of David beside me. He is smiling! Then the bone-shattering thud of the car crashing to the ground, and I cannot catch my breath. I wake up gasping for air.

Once David had made it around the most dangerous section, he must have felt safe as his car started to straighten out again. But he was too far to the right. The Bel Air slid off the road, the right front and back wheels dropping perilously off the pavement and onto the rocky embankment, where they churned furiously as he tried to get the car back onto the road. He might have succeeded if he had been given a few more feet of clear ground, but instead, the car smashed head-on into a tree, crushing my brother in a chaos of glass and metal.

A week later I visited the site where he had died and noticed how absurdly small and common the tree was that had killed him. I expected it to be shattered into kindling, but it stood resolute, barely scratched. My dad and I later went to see the husk of an automobile that had become David’s tomb. My father ran his hand over the smashed hood and cried, as if he were stroking his dead son’s head. It was almost impossible for us to believe David’s death. He was so enormous in our minds that we were certain it would take more than a tree and an automobile to end his life.

David’s death overpowered my grievances against him. I was justified in my anger toward him, for he had finally snared me in his trap of betrayal and deceit, but I had to swallow my rage whole. David’s death transformed him, in the minds of everyone we knew, into my perfect brother. He was forever frozen in his youth, beauty, talent, and charisma, while in my family’s eyes, I lived on as a pale reminder of him.

It had always been natural for my family to compare David and me, and his death only aggravated that tendency. Two years younger than David, I always felt like a smaller version of him. An inch shorter, a little slighter in build, a little less good-looking. We both had dark hair, dark eyebrows, and deep brown eyes that the women in our family coveted. Even at David’s funeral, the comparisons did not stop. As we waited in the lobby of the funeral home, Aunt Shirley said to me, David was so good-looking. Instead of leaving the comment there, she paused for a moment, looked at me, and said, So are you, honey. Her comment annoyed me. Why should she mention me at all? I felt like saying, So are you, Aunt Shirley.

After the funeral, I was lost in a whirlwind of grief and rage so powerful it tore at the relationship I valued most. David’s scheming cost me Beth. Within two weeks of his death, she put off our engagement from Christmas to the following summer, a humiliating postponement, as if she were putting me on probation. Every day the temptation grew for me to escape Indiana. I had been living at home for the summer, and at the end of August I was to return to finish my Ph.D. at Purdue and to teach two freshman composition courses. However, I had another offer. Three of my university friends had invited me to Southern California, where they were teaching at a community college near Los Angeles.

One final catastrophe that summer persuaded me to accept their offer and flee. In the back of my parents’ house, my father had built a two-and-a-half-car garage to make it easier for David and him to work on their cars. When I was home for the summers, I parked my car there. Dad had found that he could squeeze three cars in the garage if he parked one parallel to the back wall. The other two cars had to be driven in very close to the side of that car so the garage door could be closed.

That summer Dad had his most prized possession against the back wall–a '51 Chevy–which meant my car had to be just inches from his. I had told Dad, I'm going to end up hitting your Chevy if you leave it like that.

You won't if you know what's good for you had been his reply.

A couple weeks after David's death, it happened. I had been out late and pulled into the driveway in a distracted haze, as was so often the case that summer. I pulled the car into the garage slowly while the door was still going up, and by the time the door reached the top, my car was only in three-fourths of the way. That night the door malfunctioned, as it did occasionally, and immediately started back down, poised to land on my car.

Suddenly emerging from my daze, I hit the accelerator too hard. The sound that followed was the heart-wrenching crumpling of metal on metal. I backed up in a panic and nearly slammed into the garage door. Then I sat motionless for a full thirty seconds, stunned, afraid to view what I had done to Dad's car.

Eventually I got the garage door open again, pulled my car out, and walked back inside to inspect the damage to Dad's favorite car. The fluorescent light above the workbench illuminated a caved-in front fender and passenger door. I put my hand on the dent and felt the perfectly polished paint crumble beneath my fingers. I ran my hand over the injury as tenderly as if it were the body of a child I had run over on the road. As bad as the damage looked to me, I knew it would look even worse to Dad. I knew that even if I paid to get the car fixed and made all the arrangements to have the work done, he would never be happy with it. To him it would always look damaged. No matter how perfectly repaired a door and fender might look to everyone else, Dad would see it as flawed and would declare that it was impossible to get everything matched just right.

A smashed antique car in my family was a disaster even in the best of times, but I felt certain that in the aftermath of David's death, it would take on huge significance for my father and would sever the frail cord that linked us. This would be yet another reminder of why David was the better son–he restored cars, while I destroyed them. Dad had already lapsed into silence since the funeral. We had never openly argued. Dad would never expend that much energy on me. He had simply turned away and shut me out.

It was daylight before I finally worked up the courage to go inside the house and confess to my Dad what had happened. He was sitting at the kitchen table, reading the paper and drinking a cup of coffee. I stated it as matter-of-factly as possible, not daring to stray from the words I had prepared and memorized. You better come out to the garage. I crashed into the Chevy.

He ran out there immediately in his bathrobe, and I followed. The groan he let out as he first set eyes on the smashed car sent chills through me. I tried to detach myself from the scene. I tried to tell myself that in the long run, this accident might be a good thing. It would help me make the break with him that I had inevitably been heading toward.

Those first moments with him in the garage as he paced back and forth in front of the wreck, trembling in fury, were agonizing. His face and neck were so red, so throbbing with rage, that I half expected his head to burst wide open at any moment. Fortunately, it was an anger that did not engender many words. Instead he mumbled, Just tear things up and leave the cleanup for somebody else. Never took care of other people's things. Just thought about yourself. Tear it up. What do you care?

I didn't say a word to him, just stood silently like the idiot I had been labeled. Despite the tension that electrified the room, the fatigue from a sleepless night in the garage was weighing down on me, and my thoughts would not focus. I debated whether or not to tell him right then that I had decided to leave for California. I opened my mouth to stammer out an apology, but he saved me that torment by storming off to the house, leaving me alone in the garage, staring at a crumpled piece of metal.

Later that morning I planned my escape. My friends in California were still eager to have me visit, so I called a travel agent and booked a flight to Los Angeles for the next day. I called my boss at the magazine to tell him I was quitting earlier than expected. All this activity gave me a wonderful sense of relief. I was finally doing something instead of simply waiting for the next disaster to strike.

That night I said my good-byes. I told Beth that my trip was a much-needed vacation. She opposed the trip, mainly because one of my friends in California was a woman. She also thought I was wasting money that we should be saving for our future. I told her that as painful as it was to leave her, and even though I knew I couldn't afford it, I had to get away. My mother cried when I announced my trip at dinner that night, but my father said nothing. My seventeen-year-old sister, Robin, came to my room late that night to try to talk me out of leaving. She could not understand the problem between Dad and me.

You never even argued! she protested. He'll get over you hitting the car.

I could not bear to tell her the real reason I had to get away from him: the unbearable knowledge that Dad believed if one of his sons had to die, it should have been me.

..................................

I did not see my family again for two years, though that was not my intention. The poison that David had injected into my relationship with Beth continued its deadly work, and our conversations deteriorated from tense to nasty. I had planned to leave California after a week, but then it stretched to two, and my friend Rachel said she could get me a part-time teaching position for the fall semester that paid much better than what Purdue was offering. My friends Chad and Alan said I could continue to live with them and split the rent. Besides teaching, I could study for my exams and take them at Purdue in the spring. I took the job. I simply could not face going back to Indiana.

My plan was to go back for good at Christmas when the semester ended. That would leave plenty of time, I thought, to plan the wedding and make amends with everyone at home. Long before that, though, Beth became so disillusioned with me that she called the engagement off. I could almost hear David laughing in his grave. My father continued his cold silence, refusing my phone calls, so I stayed in California for Christmas, using lack of money as my excuse.

I taught for another semester in Los Angeles and, in May of 1993, returned to Purdue for four days to take my exams. I didn't tell my parents, a cheap little act of spite that I still regret. I tried to get together with Beth, but she did not want to see me.

I went back to Los Angeles to teach for a second year and to start the research for my dissertation. Beth cut off contact with me altogether, but I still talked to my family by phone. Mom and my sister, Robin, called most often, and now even Dad occasionally came on the line for a few minutes of polite conversation. Robin and Mom begged me to come home that second Christmas. They said Dad wanted me to come too, though he never asked me himself. By that time, I really was broke, so I settled in for another Christmas and another semester in L.A.

In April of 1994, Dad, who had had some minor heart trouble for several years, suffered a heart attack and was hospitalized for a few days at Methodist Hospital in Indianapolis. He told my mother that I was not to be informed until he was at home and out of danger. My mother called me anyway. Robin called me, too, several times, and pleaded with me to come home.

In a series of phone calls during the week after my father's heart attack, Mom methodically and insistently made her case for why I should come back for the summer. She said my father's condition was perilous and that he might not survive. She said she would not survive herself if she lost him so soon after losing David. I suspected she might have been exaggerating Dad's condition as a ploy to lure me home, but I couldn't be certain. What if he did die and all this hostility still lay between us?

Mom said my editor at the magazine had called and offered me my old position for the summer, with a fifteen percent raise and the chance at a permanent position if I wanted it. He had called me and made the same offer, but I tentatively turned him down. It was tempting, however, because I had no summer job lined up in Los Angeles.

Assuming that these arguments might not be enough to persuade me, Mom pressed her case on another front. She said Robin, of whom I had always been protective, was spinning out of control, though she would not explain what she meant. Robin would not tell me anything either, but her evasiveness made me think Mom was at least partially right. You've got to help me with her, Chris, Mom said. You're the only one she'll listen to. If you don't do something now, it'll be too late. And if your dad knew what she was doing, it would kill him.

Mom unabashedly used Beth in her arsenal also. She said she had seen Beth at church and was sure Beth was still interested in me. According to her, Beth wanted to clear the air and make things right.

Did Beth say that to you? I wanted to know.

No, not in so many words, but I've talked to her a number of times and that is the distinct impression I got, Mom said.

Well, I've talked to her a number of times too, and I got distinctly the opposite impression.

I tried to point out to my mother that Dad would not want me living at home all summer, that we would never get along. Of course, she had an answer for that too.

He does want you here, Chris. He told me.

He told you he wants me to come?

She paused. I told him I was going to try to get you to come, and he said that was fine.

Well, that's different from wanting me to come. Would he tell me himself that I am welcome?

He wants you to come, Chris. Can't you see that? Don't make him grovel.

I laughed. Only in our family would a direct expression of love or support be considered groveling.

Mom's tone sharpened. He has as much pride as you do. That's the problem with both of you. You have the chance to work things out with him, and it may be your last chance. Don't destroy it just because the invitation isn't worded exactly the way you'd like.

I decided to go home.

I went back for Mom's reasons and for a few of my own. Leaving so suddenly two years earlier had left many things suspended, unfinished, frozen in time. My life was like a movie cut short in the last twenty minutes by a break in the film. I could go back and bring it all to a satisfying conclusion so that I could move on. With my father I hoped merely to have some casual conversations–nothing deep, nothing that explored the depths of the problems in our relationship. The very point of the talks would be their ordinariness, to dispel the mystery of the silence that had stood as a barrier between us for so long.

Even though our relationship was dead, I couldn't get Beth out of my mind. I was convinced that if I saw her just once in an everyday situation–like walking across the foyer at church, where I was most likely to cross paths with her–the mystery that had held me to her would vanish in an instant, and I would be able to bury her in my mind.

Bill Adams, who had been one of my best friends since junior high, flew out to Los Angeles at the end of the school year, and after a week of vacation, we made the two-thousand-mile drive to Indiana. I had bought a car in L.A. after Bill had sold my car in Indiana the year before. Bill was the ideal friend to help me ease back into life in Indiana. We had gone to church and school together, and he had spent much of his teenage years at our house playing basketball and football and running around with me and David and our other friends. We were both in our midtwenties, but of all my friends from high school, Bill had changed the least. He had bushy blond hair and a huskiness from his football days. Our friendship was the kind where we could be apart for long stretches of time, but when we got back together, within fifteen minutes we were as close as we had been before. All across the country he played our old favorites–Billy Joel, Bruce Springsteen, Sting. He talked of girls we had dated and told me what had become of almost everyone we knew. He did everything he could to keep our trip lighthearted, but he knew I was apprehensive about returning.

The people I had left two years ago would have changed just as I had during that time. New layers of complexity would have been added, and it was possible that things would be even worse than I remembered.

I looked to Bill for encouragement, but he knew me too well to try to allay my fears with cheap reassurances. After hearing some of my doubts during the first five hundred miles of our journey, he finally brought me to silence by concluding, You know, you’re probably right. You’re probably making a big mistake.

He was only joking, but I spent the next fifteen hundred miles dreading that what he said might be true.

CHRIS

My father never liked to talk about the past, but he made an exception when he worked on his ‘51 Chevy. The car seemed to coax stories out of him. As he stood in the garage, wiping the fenders with a white cloth or buffing the chrome until it shined, it was as if he were rubbing a genie’s lamp, and out of that car would rise the secret moments of his early life, otherwise closed off to us.

As a teenager I would stand silently off to the side of the garage, trying not to break the spell, while Dad told of what it was like to buy his first car in high school, the pride it gave him to drive it around with his friends and to park in front of the school–one that didn’t even have a parking lot in those days.

My grandfather, who had died when I was only three, came to life through my dad’s fond recollections of the hours they had spent together working on the car. As the garage lights blazed over that black automobile and Dad tinkered with the engine or polished the hood, it was like staring into a crystal ball that revealed the real thing: my father, Jack LaRue. I wanted him to keep polishing, almost believing that if he rubbed hard enough, I would be able not only to imagine the stories, but live them. I would be able to go back there with him and know what he knew, and we would be friends.

When I returned to my parents’ house two years after my brother’s death and saw the terrible condition of his ‘51 Chevy, I finally believed what my mother had hinted. My father was dying.

The first sign of his decline was to see his prized Chevy sitting outside the garage at the back of the house. Dad had never left the car in the driveway–not even for a few hours! The dents I had made in the car two years before had been flawlessly repaired, but the car was spotted with dust, the whitewall tires were dingy, and the windows were streaked with dirt. Incredibly, around the bottom of the car there were actually a few spider webs with pieces of dead leaves and grass in them, as if Dad had cut the grass and just let the clippings fly up onto the car.

I parked in the driveway and walked around the Chevy, amazed. I kicked away some of the leaves that clung to the bottom of it.

Bill walked with me. I forgot about this old car. Is this the one your dad had when you lived here, the one you ran into?

Yes, so don’t remind me, I replied.

Bill did not understand the depth of meaning that accident still held for me. He walked over to where the crumpled metal had been repaired and ran his hand over it. As he touched it I winced, as if he were poking his fingers into an open wound.

Can’t even tell it’s ever been hit, he said. Did your dad ever let you drive this?

I have never driven one of Dad’s cars.

Bill looked inside the car through the driver’s side window. Maybe he’ll take us for a ride, he said.

Dad must really be sick, I said.

You haven’t even seen him yet!

This car tells the story. Maybe Mom’s right. Maybe he really is dying.

Bill let out a quick laugh of surprise. Well, I’m glad people don’t judge how I’m feeling by the way my car looks. They would have figured I was dead a long time ago.

You’re not my dad. He would have left his own kids out here in the driveway sooner than he would have left this car.

Oh, Chris, come on.

You don’t know him.

What are you talking about? countered Bill. I practically grew up here.

So did I, I murmured. But not quite.

Bill looked toward the house and asked, So how does it feel to be home?

My stomach is churning like a cement mixer.

Excitement or dread?

Both. My insides had been twisting from the moment we got off the highway at the exit that led to our neighborhood. Our subdivision was in a slight valley, and when we descended that first hill, for me it was like plunging backward in time. Almost everything I saw contained memories, including the hill itself, where I had ridden up and down on my bike hundreds of times. We wound through the streets to my parents’ home, passing one house after another that belonged to people we had gone to church with, kids I had grown up with, girls I had dated. Bill had spent a lot of time in our neighborhood too, and as we drove past these houses he would say things like, Oh, isn’t that where Kelly lived? Did you know she got married? But I was in no condition to reminisce. Being thrown back into this once familiar place was so jarring that I needed to let it wash over me awhile before casual conversation could take place.

Our neighborhood was made up of mostly ranch-style homes built in the ‘60s and ‘70s. We had moved there when the houses were new and the trees were spindly things propped up with sticks and ropes. Now, after nearly thirty years, the trees and shrubs had grown so large around the homes that it seemed the neighborhood was gradually sinking into them and would one day disappear. As we rounded the final corner, my own redbrick house came into view, with everything about it looking as neat and precise as ever–the shrubbery around the front neatly trimmed, the black shutters recently painted, the lawn cut short and raked clean. Our four-bedroom home had started out with a two-car attached garage and a small patio in back, but over the years Dad had added a front porch, a second driveway to the back of the house, and his treasured backyard garage.

Now as Bill and I stood in the driveway looking at Dad’s dirty car, I worried about this home that was familiar, yet totally new. I had experience dealing with Dad the perfectionist, but who was this man who let his car deteriorate in the driveway? I looked toward the house. The kitchen drapes were closed. The bedroom drapes were closed. The door to the attached garage was closed. Apparently no one was home. That surprised me, because we had called that morning and told them to expect us by dinnertime.

At my parents’ house that meant six o’clock, and it was already almost six-thirty. We told Mom we would take them out to dinner, and that had seemed to relieve her. She had never been all that confident of her cooking, and she didn’t want to be distracted with it on my first day back. I had asked Bill to join us for dinner, thinking his presence would keep dinner lighthearted and prevent any of us from delving into unpleasant issues immediately. I was relieved no one was home. It would give me time to get used to the place again, to prepare myself, and make the reunion as natural and pleasant as possible.

Let’s go on in, I said. It looks like they’re not home.

Do you have a key? he asked.

Yes. But just that moment I heard someone fumbling at the door that opened into the attached garage. I looked over to see Mom in the window of the door, undoing the locks. Then I saw the corner of the kitchen drapes move slightly. Dad was watching us from inside.

Mom was crying even before she got across the driveway. She hugged me for a long time and cried words into my shirt I couldn’t understand. Then she turned to Bill and hugged him too.

We thought you’d never get here, said Mom.

Just a half hour late after two thousand miles isn’t too bad, I said. Is Dad mad at us for being late?

He’s fine, Mom said, turning to look at the door she had come through. Look at you, Mr. California! So tanned. And your hair’s so short. You’re thin! Don’t you eat out there?

I wanted to lose weight, Mom, I said. Why do you have everything closed up? It looked like nobody was home.

Oh, your dad doesn’t like the drapes open anymore. Gets tired of the neighbors looking in.

Neighbors? Why would they– But I didn’t finish because Mom’s hands were fluttering through the air as if to wipe away my words before Dad arrived. He was locking up the doors behind him as he came. He slammed each one hard to make sure it was shut tight.

We’re starving here were the first words my father said to me after my two-year absence.

Mom lost her smile, and her face took on a wary expression, as if she feared Dad might mar our first moments together by venting his irritation. Instead, he kept it mostly hidden and walked over to give me a quick hug, which was more than I had expected. Dad looked better than Mom’s descriptions of him on the phone had made him sound. The only change I saw from two years before was that he looked a little more stooped and his hair looked thinner and whiter. Still, to me he appeared healthy and distinguished. Picture him out of his cotton polo shirt and in one of his dark suits, and he could be at the head of a conference table in a company boardroom: wise, serene, and on the verge of making some monumental decision. He was still employed by such a company, Maximilian Webber, but he had been on medical leave since the heart attack.

You’re looking good, Dad. I was led to believe you were in bad health.

Yeah, they’ve started their death watch, but I’m gonna surprise ‘em, he replied.

Jack! Don’t talk that way, my mother said in rebuke.

"And you, Mom. You look great!" I said, turning her way.

Oh, please, she answered, glancing down in embarrassment. You do, and you know it. The rest of us look older every year, but even with all that’s happened, you’ve barely changed in ten years.

Remind me to make you an appointment with the eye doctor, she said. But she did look good. She had dyed her hair brown, and it was smoothly coiffed. She wore earrings and a gold necklace and a fashionable blouse and slacks. She had warned me on the telephone that she had temporarily failed in her determination to lose weight before I came back, but she looked fine to me. Mom was in her late fifties, and the only sign of aging since I had seen her two years before was a little more wrinkling on her neck and around her eyes. The rest of her face still had the brightness of a young woman.

To me, my parents’ appearance corresponded well with their personalities. Dad had grown increasingly thin and gaunt as he aged, looking out from hard, inscrutable eyes. There was a preciseness about the creases of his pants and the shine of his shoes that was almost military–it said keep your distance, maintain dignity above all. Mom was softer, shorter, plumper; her generous arms looking at any moment as if they were about to reach out and hug you.

Dad shook hands with Bill and then said to me, We’ll get your bags when we get back. I’m ready to eat.

..................................

We drove to the Cattle Country Steakhouse, Dad’s favorite restaurant. For him, a steak dinner with a baked potato and salad and plenty of coffee was the only true meal. Everything else was sissy food. Robin was still at the mall where she worked at a women’s clothing store. She was supposed to meet us around seven. I was glad Bill was along because his presence put Dad on his best behavior. Dad was friendly and talkative, telling stories about being in the hospital with his heart attack.

The part I hated the most was when they took my teeth away, he said. I’ve never let anybody see me without my teeth. Just Helen.

It’s true, Mom agreed. He has always been very particular about that.

Dad continued. "The first thing I did was make them give them back to me. I didn’t understand what having a heart