It was raining the night my son called to tell me the man who ruined our family was dead.
I had known Marcus Bell for close to forty years. Long enough to remember when the phone was something you answered with your whole chest, because a call after ten at night meant somebody had died or somebody had been born and either way your life was about to move. But it was past eleven, and I was already lying in the dark with the ceiling fan ticking overhead, so when the phone lit up on the nightstand I answered the way old men answer, expecting the worst.
“Dad.” My son’s voice was strange. Too even. The voice a man uses when he is holding something down. “Vincent Cole is dead.”
I did not say anything for a moment. Rain streaked the window, and I watched a car’s headlights slide across the wall and disappear.
“When,” I finally said.
“Two days ago. Heart. They found him in that big empty house of his. Nobody there but a nurse he paid by the hour.”
I closed my eyes.
For thirty years I had imagined how I might feel when this call came. I had built the moment in my head so many times that it had worn a groove there, the way a river wears a channel through rock. I had pictured relief. I had pictured something like triumph. Some ugly, private, satisfied thing that I would never say out loud in church.
Instead I felt nothing so clean as that. I felt tired, and I felt old, and I felt the specific ache of a wound that had healed crooked and would now have to be broken again to be set right.
“Dad?” my son said. “You there?”
What happened next changed everything… FULL STORY on the next page.
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