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They’re having coffee.
Wilbur saw the text when he was at a party, and when he saw the name, he smiled, told the host he had to go to the bathroom for a minute. He ignored the way his heart dropped and his hands began to shake.
He is an adult.
He has been out of the system for six years. He is out. He has his own apartment, and he is successful. Wilbur is an adult.
The text was brief, succinct, but the message spoke volumes, and he took a few moments to steady himself, to breathe. He hadn’t spoken to his father in eleven years. That’s a long time. That’s a really, really long time.
That wasn’t counting the birthday cards. He’d received the money that he got every other birthday, the pity obligation gift cards. It was fine. Wilbur needed the money. He just detached it from who he was getting it from, because Phil didn’t care. It’s fine. It’s fine that Phil doesn’t care because that just makes it easier not to care himself. He can take the money and go.
But Phil sent the text.
Hey, Wilbur. I know you don’t know me, and I’m sorry. I was thinking about you, and somehow I ended up in town. Do you want to get coffee? If you’re busy, I understand. You’re a successful kid.
No thanks to you, he’d thought bitterly. But he didn’t send that.
He thought about that text for the next two days. What a fucking understatement.
Phil left when he was young. Drugs had been something prominent in their family, and Phil wasn’t- stable. He had been irrational and angry and someone who wasn’t fit to be around anyone at all, really.
So Phil left. Wilbur didn’t have a father. Wilbur hadn’t had a father for a very long time, and it was fine, because he understood. Drugs were a reckless current that held and held and held. Phil was trapped, because Phil, all those years ago, thought a hit would make him happier than his own fucking son.
And it had.
His mother died soon after.
And it was fine because Wilbur barely remembers him, and Wilbur is successful. Wilbur is an adult and Wilbur has an apartment and Wilbur is out of the system. Wilbur is happy.
But the text is itching at him.
Before he regrets it, he sends back, You still able to go?
Phil responds quickly. Says he is available.
For some reason, Wilbur agrees to have coffee with a stranger.
They agree to go tomorrow, to a random small coffee shop near Wilbur’s apartment. He’s been there countless times. He met a pretty girl once, with soft red hair, but she’d run off before he could get her number. He’d been bummed about that for days.
It’s all surreal. It doesn’t feel like anything and it feels like everything and that is so familiar. When his father first left, when Wilbur still thought of him as his father, everything had fallen apart very fast. He’d been young and his mother had been getting sicker, and she was puking over the side of the toilet bowl. It reeked of bile and weed and alcohol.
Wilbur barely knows the coherent events of the day his father left, but he knows the aftermath. His mother had been delusional, gripping Wilbur’s arms in an iron grip, asking him, Why would he leave? Was I not enough? Were we not enough?
Wilbur has asked himself that question for the larger sum of his life. He doesn’t know the answer.
But he can guess.
So on the day of their meeting, he wears jeans. He wears a plain long-sleeved shirt. He pulls a jacket over it, grabs his wallet. Wilbur feels numb and he is moving mechanically because he hasn’t seen his father in eleven years, and here he is, a grown man. He has grown without his father. Wilbur didn’t need him to become smart and successful and happy.
That doesn’t mean Wilbur never needed him in the first place.
He misses his father.
He doesn’t miss Phil. Phil was a drug addict and he was a mess. Wilbur misses the early memories, when Phil had made up jokes between the two of them. When he’d seen the way his mother would roll her eyes at their antics, when she wasn’t sick, when she was happy and they were happy and everything was normal. The memories blur and stick, and now, Wilbur isn’t so sure he didn’t just make all of it up.
He gets in his car, and he hits the key fob. He drives. He breathes.
When he gets out of the car, he sees a spot of blond hair. Wilbur could never forget how his father looks.
He’s sitting outside. His hand is drumming on the table anxiously, and his other is resting under his chin. Phil always did that. It was a Phil ‘thing’. That’s what his mother said.
The sight takes his breath away, and he wishes it hadn’t.
Wilbur had always hoped that his father was still a mess. Scrounging for money just to go waste it on drugs, for his own brief pleasure. Living on streets, dirty and alone. It was irrational, Wilbur knows. It had always been a nice idea, though.
Because Phil is clean cut. His stubble is shaved, and his eyes are clear. His hair is well kept. And it’s worse. It’s worse because Phil is here, eleven years later, and he is perfectly normal. He is able to be normal for himself. He’s able to fix himself now, eleven years later, when Wilbur is an adult and Wilbur has an apartment and Wilbur is happy.
It’s gut-wrenchingly infuriating.
Wilbur needed this Phil eleven years ago.
He clears his throat, wipes his hands on his jeans, and goes to the stranger’s table.
Phil looks up when he sees him, and his lips part, like he’s about to say something but loses the train of thought. They sit there in silence. Phil just stares, and Wilbur is content to let him. He doesn’t know what to tell him. Look at what you left. Be guilty. Feel so fucking guilty.
Wilbur eventually sits down.
Phil smiles at him, and it’s so genuine it hurts. “Hey, Wil.”
He should’ve thought this through better.
But he’s here, so he swallows once, twice. “Hi, Phil.”
“How’re you?” He asks quickly. “I mean, God, you look like you’re doing great. You look just like your mother. She’d be proud to have such a handsome boy.”
Wilbur doesn’t know how to answer that. He just says, “I’m good.”
“Good, good,” Phil smiles. He smiles a lot. That’s another infuriating thing, and Wilbur doesn’t know why. He then clears his throat again, sighing once. “Wow.”
All he does is raise an eyebrow.
Phil laughs. The sound is high and raspy, and Wilbur thinks if he’d grown up hearing it would’ve shaped how his own laugh sounds. “I just- you’re great. You seem great.”
Wilbur can’t hold back his scoff, but he shakes his head, begins to apologize. Phil sputters protests. “I know. I know what I’ve done is wrong, and this isn't your fault, and I’m-”
“Don’t,” He cuts him off quickly. “Don’t do this. I know you might’ve come here to solve some kind of residing guilt, and I get that. But I’m not listening to it. You left.”
“I know.”
Wilbur blinks once. “You left. You’ve gotta deal with whatever shit that makes you feel. I came here for me, alright? I just needed- I had to see.”
Phil nods once. “I know. I’m sorry.”
He’s like a broken record.
“You know that’s not enough, man.”
“I know. I just- I have to tell you. I’m sorry. I’m so, so sorry.”
Wilbur shrugs. “I’m fine. I turned out fine. I’m happy now. Let’s not delve into this, yeah?”
Phil nods again, like he’ll say yes to anything Wilbur says. Maybe he will. “Of course. Uh, well, do you have a job?”
“I’m a cold-case detective,” He admits. “I know it’s morbid. It just- it makes me feel like I’m doing something right. Learning more about those murders.”
“God, Wilbur,” Phil laughs again. “You really are amazing.”
He doesn’t need to hear it from him.
“Thanks,” He says anyways.
Wilbur doesn’t care, but he feels like the polite thing to ask is, “What do you do?”
“Oh, I own a little book store. Nothing much.”
“Damn,” He admits. “I gotta say, that sounds nice.”
Phil nods. “It’s nice. It’s like a vacation-- all the peace.”
“That’s good,” Wilbur says quietly. “It seems like it.”
And he’s not entirely lying.
He is always full of anger. Even if it’s dormant, or if he hides it, Wilbur’s just so mad all the time. At himself. At people. It’s all-consuming, and he hates it, because even after everything, after the drugs and the death and the leaving, he sure does have reason to be mad. He has all the reasons to be mad.
But he’s been mad for so long.
He doesn’t have to be.
Wilbur doesn’t forgive Phil. Wilbur won’t ever forgive Phil, he thinks, because Phil left his mother, and Phil left him. The loneliness will never be something he forgets. But Phil is just a man.
Phil is a person.
Phil is a person who made horrible decisions, and hurt countless people, but he asked his estranged son to get coffee, even though he must’ve been terrified and horribly guilty. He got involved in horrible things when he was young, and it led him down a horrible path. But he is here now, and he owns his own little book shop.
He is trying his best.
Wilbur is trying to understand what it feels like to think about everything, because everyone has thoughts and a conscience. Everyone makes mistakes. Phil is human.
Phil is just Phil. He is a failed father. He is just a man.
So even if Wilbur won’t forgive him, he can listen to him talk. He can tell him more about his job, and the dog he plans on buying. He listens to Phil tell him about memories of his mother when they were younger, before Wilbur was born. He listens. Because his mother had been carefree, Phil says. His mother had been loving and kind and gentle. It’s like music to his ears.
And Phil tells him about the boy that frequents his shop often, with a horribly harsh attitude and a snarky tongue. Phil speaks fondly, and even as it leaves a horrible spike of jealousy deep in his gut, he is able to push it down. He listens to the stories of the boy, and even finds himself smiling and laughing at his antics.
They talk about the weather where they both live, and they steer clear of politics. They order little pastries. They don’t talk about each other, but they talk about their lives, and the things they enjoy. Their passions and television shows. They talk about things that don’t matter because it feels safe, and Wilbur would be lying if he said it doesn’t feel nice. It’s odd. It’s undeniably odd.
Phil offers for Wilbur to visit him sometime.
Wilbur declines at first, but something inside him says he’ll be visiting the south coast sometime.
This is his father. That’s what he likes to think, at least, even though he knows the man that raised him is not the same as this. The Phil Wilbur knows didn’t own a bookshop, didn’t speak to random boys kindly, didn’t order iced vanilla coffees.
But this is the Phil that exists now. This man is different than the one Wilbur had met, and it surely wasn’t the one that he expected. It only fuels the ugly feeling in his chest, but he pushes it aside. He can live with this. He’s okay with this.
Phil is happy. He dedicated himself to healing, to making himself better, and he did it too late for it to save Wilbur. He knows this. They both know this.
But he changed regardless.
That isn’t any small feat, and even if Phil doesn’t know that, Wilbur does.
This man isn’t Wilbur’s father, not where it matters, but he is a man. And despite it all, Wilbur is willing to look him in the eye and shake his hand, not as his son, but as a man who understands what it feels like to lose everything, and to save himself from it, too.