Chapter Text
One. What’s Past Is Prologue.— William Shakespeare
The idea that Adam could be the architect of his own escape was the only thought that got him through high school. Once gone, he thought he would never look back, that he would never want to. It took four years to earn his undergraduate degree, another three to earn his law degree, another two to establish his reputation as a shark at a large firm in Manhattan. Along the way, he took a chainsaw to his accent, worked the worst jobs in order to afford the best clothes, and bent his morals into a pretzel to know the right people. At nearly thirty, he had everything he ever thought he could possibly want.
The only problem was how much he hated it—all of it and himself most of all.
It was while pondering this deep well of self-loathing that Adam discovered he did actually need to be able to look himself in the eye when he shaved in the mornings, which meant that perhaps bespoke suits, a view of Central Park (no matter that the view relied heavily on imagination from his tiny loft), and finding a loophole in every argument were not everything. That was a tough pill to swallow when his main job duty was to crush the opposition whatever the cost.
Worse than that (and much to his horror), he also discovered that he couldn't stop thinking about going home and that home meant Henrietta instead of his slick if sterile apartment. No one could be more surprised by that realization than he was, if there had been anyone he could confide in, but once he thought it, it was like an itch that he could never reach.
Not that he tried.
How many nights had he wished to be away from there when he was a kid? To be anywhere that wasn’t his hometown? To be exactly where he was now?
He spent another miserable two years launching himself at this carefully cultivated life that he had he thought he wanted, compressing his soul into something nearly unrecognizable, while trying to pretend he wasn't homesick—not for his parents, never for them, but for the town itself and for the person he once was.
Adam thought that maybe he could have gone on like that forever—people have lived with worse things—but then came the call.
He hadn’t known his mother’s sisters very well. He remembered them only as people his father hated but his father had hated everyone so that didn’t count for much. Sitting at his desk at Parker, Mansfield, Parker, and Schultz, listening to a woman who called herself his Aunt Clem, whose voice sounded exactly the same as his mother’s, Adam had gripped the receiver until his knuckles turned white, the plastic creaking under the pressure. He couldn’t remember having ever met her and so in his mind, the face he conjured was his mother’s as well—faded and tired, mouth set in a hard, unforgiving line that somehow conveyed the belief that kindness was a weakness, the skin around her eyes tight and broken by fine lines.
“I just thought you should know,” the woman said.
Adam had been lost to memory at the first sound of her voice. “Thank you,” he whispered, forcing his voice steady. Inside, his heart pounded in his chest, the sound a rush in his ears.
“Robert Parrish was always a son of a bitch,” she carried on, her accent slurring the epithet into a kind of a song sum’fabitch. “Figured he would drive his truck into a tree but the cancer got him first. Wasn’t sure if you’d want to know but I thought you should.”
“Thank you,” he said again, surprised by the sound of his voice. “I haven’t spoken with anyone in the family in years. I didn’t know he was sick.”
He didn’t explain the strange tradition he followed with his mother every Christmas and Mother’s Day when he would call, the line on the other end silent except for the distant sound of cars or dogs in the background until he would whisper his well wishes that always left him feeling empty and inadequate before he would hang up. Did he love his mother? Had he ever loved his father?
“Funeral’s done. Should’ve called sooner but we didn’t reckon you’d come anyway. It’s done and now you know.”
When the phone line went dead, Adam touched his fingertips to his cheeks and found them wet. He sat up straighter in his office chair, finding his chrome and glass surroundings to be incongruous to the conversation he just had. He pushed his forefinger into a slow circle on the trackpad of his laptop to wake it up, the text of the brief he had been working on springing back up onto the monitor. He stared at the blinking cursor but couldn’t make sense of it.
His father was dead. No reason to think of anything except the motion to dismiss that needed to be filed by the end of the day. His father was dead.
The decision to go back had the effect of setting off a bomb in the middle of his carefully constructed life. He was so stunned by his own actions that he couldn't even find the words to explain to Ashley, the woman who had agreed to marry him, why he had just quit his job, broke his lease, and packed a bag, much less explain why he could no longer marry her. He knew if he told her about his father—everything about his father—that she would have understood. Maybe. He couldn’t imagine this would ever make any sense to her because sensible, logical Adam couldn’t even organize his own thoughts about it. He just couldn’t be here anymore. He needed Henrietta and he couldn’t even explain it to himself.
To her, he just said he needed time.
And she was willing to give it to him.
Technically, she told him to sort himself out and come back when he was over his midlife crisis and ready to grow the fuck up as tears coursed down her small, red face, chucking a pair of impossibly high Manolo Blahnik’s one-by-one at his retreating back, but he thought maybe it amounted to the same thing.
The thing was as soon as Adam drove his rental car down Henrietta’s Main Street, the buildings and shops faded in the late afternoon sun but still so familiar, something settled in his chest and he felt like he could breathe for the first time in years, maybe ever. He wanted to hate the sight of Mountain View High School as he idled across from it at a stoplight, heading for a hotel near the railroad tracks, but found himself curious instead. As the light turned from red to green to yellow for the second time, he wondered at the changes he could see and fought a rising tide of memories—of pep rallies and final exams and the cafeteria’s strangely delicious rectangular pizzas. When his thoughts landed on Blue Sargent, the first person he had ever kissed, he smiled for the first time in what felt like years.
Checking in to the Sleep Inn, he grinned at the soft, musical sound of the clerk’s Henrietta accent and let his own slip out, amazed that his mouth remembered how to soften his vowels and clip his g’s.
“Local,” the woman asked, mildly surprised. She looked at him with new eyes and let her smile go a bit wider.
“Yes, ma’am. I’ve been away for a bit, though.”
“It’s always good to come back home. You have people here?”
Adam shook his head, lowering his eyes as he picked up a ball point pen and clicked it once and then again. “Not anymore. Not for a long time.”
“Henrietta’s still home, though,” she said, her voice telling him that she was an authority on the matter.
He nodded as he signed his name at the bottom of his credit card receipt and took the key from her. He found couldn’t disagree.