Chapter Four: Father Figures
Daniel gave one last look at the neatly scrawled note from his secretary. He did not throw it out, as was his habit. He instead opened the small top drawer on the right side of his desk, cleared some space, and set it down as if the slightest movement would cause it to shatter. An hour before the note came, the telephone rang the first time. When he finally heard it, when a slight chink in his concentration formed, he picked it up, immediately dropped it back on its receiver, and cursed the day it had ever entered his office. Then he plunged himself back into work. The phone rang five more times, and though he knew it was urgent (because if it were not, whoever was calling would have called his secretary rather than going straight to his line), he pulled himself away from his work long enough to yank the phone cord out of the wall. Having it reinstalled would require hiring a technician, but even a few hours of peace and quiet were worth a phoneless existence. Phones were the one piece of technological advancement he despised. Messenger boys, and sometimes girls, were to be had in abundance. Not only did it stop a couple scraggly children from prowling the streets, but it took the damned immediacy out of the matter of communication.
Daniel knew at least two people who had telephones in their cars. Though he found the technology of a wireless telephone fascinating, he knew that this small innovation, this “mobile phone,” as the British manufacturer called them, would be the decline of western civilization, and not a slow one at that. The wall-bound telephone was bad enough. When he had first put the telephone in his office years ago at the suggestion of his partner (damn him) Derek, its clattering ring had drawn him out of both wondrous conversation and inspirational creative thought countless times. It was three months after its installation that he began to ignore it. In the past fifteen days he had started to pick up the phone only to hang it up right away, and, as he tore it from the wall today, he wondered whether he should remove it altogether.
“But Derek (damn Derek) would pester me until I had another reinstalled,” he said as he sat back down in his desk and cleared a spot amidst the heap of papers.
Daniel pulled out a piece of drafting paper, set it on the open space, and tried to decide which was worse: the constant ringing of the telephone or the voice of Derek. Or Derek’s gait? Or his upturned slanted head as he thought through some problem? Or his face?
“His face,” David decided. “Most certainly his face,” for Derek had not always been an annoyance to Daniel Fleet. They had met just after the war. Both were drinking at a dirty bar. Daniel had been able to sell enough trinkets on the street to pay expenses for the next two month and was celebrating. Derek, a Society brat, was engaging in a pastime of Society youth: dress in dark colors, dirty one’s face, and exist among the lesser until the bars closed and they went staggering out of poverty and back to their four-post beds and silk sheets.
Daniel spotted Derek as soon as he entered the run-down bar. These Society brats were always easy to spot. For whatever reason, those born of the upper crust always underestimated the impoverished. These youths assumed that their servant’s attire mirrored the rest of the population, so they always went out into the darkness of the city and those bars looking like an ironically freshly pressed pair of Levi’s or oiled and un-scuffed cowboy boots.
Derek had talked to Daniel first. Daniel assumed it was because he was less intimidating than the rough, aged, and weather-worn faces of most men in the bar. When Daniel had first met Derek, he was not annoyed by his voice which was rather sweet to the ears. He was not annoyed by how Derek walked which was so smooth it reminded Daniel of the movement of a dancer. Derek’s thoughts caught the mind like a good story. His assessment of the world was clear and logical. The only thing that annoyed Daniel about Derek at that time was his thin, effeminate face. He looked too much like a woman with his soft features and his tied back hair and his full, flushed red lips. Daniel found the Society youth fascinating, but looking at him was like eating an overly sweet pastry or chocolate confection. Daniel’s eyes and his mind were drawn into that face as a man is drawn into the face of a beautiful woman, but his stomach turned sour as he looked fully, for this was not a woman but a man, a man with woman features, nature turned on its head, an unholy union of the two, drawing the eye like femininity, repulsing it like the ghastly form of the male.
But just as the overly sweet desserts were only enjoyed by women (and to a degree that bordered on carnal sensuality of transcendence), so too did women fall into the features of Derek. In the five years since meeting him, Daniel had watched countless women lose themselves in those disgusting, unnatural features. Daniel had watched as they stared as if lost in thought. He watched as their hands went up to play over their mouths, as their breath came out heavy, as they bit their lips and sighed.
Why? He always wondered why. Every man he knew found transcendence in the femininity of women. The feminine enthralled them, and the myriad of true feminine expression lowered them into some base animal instinct and, at the same time, made them transcend their earthly existence. True femininity filled a man to overflowing, and Daniel assumed that true masculinity would excite a woman as much. But after Daniel had met Derek, this idea shifted in his mind. Women were not concerned about men. Women did not feel rapturous about men in the same way men felt rapturous about women. Women, as a whole, saw men as men see men: utilitarian bodies, gross beast bodies from which to avert their eyes.
No. Women were not interested and were not even capable of stumbling over their words as they talked to a burly bearded man capable of bending rebar. Women were interested in this feminine expression of man: Derek. They were interested in the womanly, the weakness. They fell over Derek and panted over Derek and wondered over that abomination-face because women were only interested in one thing: women. Men swooned over women. Women swooned over whatever they could find that was as close to a woman as possible but still a man.
Daniel did not like women. He found their form to be as close to divine as anything, but he hated dealing with their essential nature almost as much as he now hated dealing with Derek. They were not a lower species from men, no, not at all. He had known enough women not to think that. Daniel knew the deep twistedness of the male. The unbearable nature of woman came from not understanding her depravity. From birth she was told she was the softer sex, the civilizing half of humanity. Men were violent. Men waged war. The extermination of God’s chosen people was headed by the male half of the species. Daniel knew that both halves were just as bad, but because the female half had never wielded power as the male half had, she had developed a belief that if only men were replaced by women in those positions, the world would fall into warless, painless, conflict-free harmony.
The feminine mystique was certainly more complex than the male. Not better, not more useful. But because its complexity, Daniel worried that if women ever seized the reigns of power, they would not throw humanity into the lawless violence of war, but an over-lawed existence that tied hands of all persons with invisible fetters. “Don’t curse. Don’t smoke. Do this. Do that. You were out too late tonight.” And these rules that women naturally placed on children would be accentuated, would be obese with power as so many kings had been in the past, and they would swallow up the minds of everyone until these moralizing limits so shrank minds that niceness was a cardinal virtue, sharing was elevated above all else, and offensive speech became so taboo that a man could barely utter an order at a café without bringing the killing power of government down on his head.
The blacks had been freed a hundred years ago, but the country would shackle its own citizens because this stupid western idea of the greater divinity of woman.
And the erring nature of woman could be easily glimpsed when they gawked at the effeminate features of his business partner Derek.
He had once liked the man. He had once found life in him. Derek had been a kaleidoscope of youthful colors, rebellious, a risk-taker. Every time Daniel would make the short journey across the hall to show Derek another prototype for a product, the Society youth would spring from his chair in excitement. About once a month, Daniel brought a new product or piece that would improve an existing product, and every time Daniel presented each new idea to his partner, Derek would jump up in excitement. The division of labor quickly became clear. Daniel delivered ideas, and Derek turned those ideas into money.
This symbiotic benefit lasted for three years. But during the fourth year of their partnership, the enthusiasm for Daniel’s ideas dwindled. That kaleidoscope youth faded. He became gray. He became flat. For the past six months he had waved his hand in the direction of the factory floor. He always said how the business was doing just fine. The rhetorical question of “Why do we need to change anything?” left his mouth. Daniel’s ideas sat on a shelf above his door, the newest a small handheld radio powered by transistors. It did not give as good of a sound as the radios they already made, but it was portable and cheaper to produce than the home radios they now sold. Derek said something about being in competition with themselves. Why undercut their own sales? No other product like this transistor-powered radio was cutting into their market. Why add one?
Et cetera.
Et cetera.
It was a bombshell idea, but Derek was too much of a fool to admit it. Too much of a fool to see. The strength of his youth was that he saw everything in full color. Sometimes his vision was colorblind, but at least he saw the business as bigger than the bottom line. Now this gray man only saw money, money and security. And if it would sink his partner, Daniel would have wished bankruptcy and destitution on the business. Besides merely hating Derek’s feminine features, Daniel had grown to hate everything about the man, his delicate hands, his moderate voice, his stilted gait, his perfectly pressed suits.
The fact that he was the one who insisted a phone be installed in Daniel’s office was the icing on the cake, or rather, the shit-icing on the shit-cake. The phone, of course, of course, would have been an extreme annoyance, a ringing Satan from Hell, but the fact that Derek had been behind putting it in his office made its ringing worse.
The ringing, ringing, ringing was mitigated by a quick tug on the cord that brought the contraption to silence and plaster out of the wall. The thoughts of his partner were replaced by the note that was now in the small drawer of his desk, a note he had read quickly. A note whose words he comprehended individually, but a note that he could not fully comprehend until he had read it at least four times. Now every word echoed through him as he tried to work:
Daniel, your father is in the hospital. A robbery at the store. Serious. Please come quickly. – Mother
“An attack,” he muttered. He had sent the messenger boy away too quickly. He had a wish to send a note back for clarification. What had happened in the attack? Did the attacker or attackers have weapons? Every question seemed to circle his mind but one: how is father doing?
He wanted to know. Sure, he wanted to know, but the relationship between himself and his father had become tainted. It was a disagreement, a fight, an outburst; he was not sure what to call it. A shattering, and all the king’s horses and all the king’s men did not even know which questions to ask to begin putting it back together.
He pushed the thought of his father out of his mind. The note was in the drawer. “Out of sight, out of mind,” he muttered and went back to work. He drew a new prototype. He knew it would receive quick rejection from Derek, but he drew it anyway. He pulled a line; a hospital room pushed its way into his consciousness. He drew a half-circle; his mother’s short form stood in the room, just a silhouette. The circuitry came alive on the page; the solemn figures of his brothers flanked his mother. The page filled. The doctor droned. He heard a machine beeping. A cart shuffled outside in the hall. He heard a knock at the door. Daniel heard a sigh from Ezekiel, that same stressed out, tired sigh his younger brother always gave. Isaiah commented. Jeremiah asked a question. A knock again.
Daniel looked up. The knock had not been from his thoughts of the hospital but from here, from his office door. He glanced at the clock. Fifteen minutes had passed since he had started to draw his new prototype. Fifteen minutes had passed since he had read that note, hid it in his desk drawer, and tried to stop himself from painting that picture of the hospital, his mother, his brothers, and—
“Come in,” he called as he pushed the rest of the thought aside.
He did not look up at first. He kept his face fixed on the paper before him. He scratched out a few missed lines, and he wrote a few notes on the bottom to explain the functioning of certain parts.
“Daniel.”
Daniel looked up. A tall thin man stood before him, the age of his father. He was dressed in a tailored suit. A gleaming watch was on one wrist, and he wore round spectacles. As he entered, a peace seemed to radiate from him and fill the room. Joseph Walker. One of the—if not the—primary and most important businessmen in the city. He had started out his career in academia, law, and after a two-year university career at Yale, he had opened a firm in Chicago. Then his father became sick. Joseph Walker moved back home. He tried law, but what he called, “The Negro Dilemma” drove him into politics which eventually drove him into the technological sector of the economy. He manufactured computers. Daniel did not see why the man had decided upon computers. He did not see how something irrelevant to the general public could ever make one rich, but Joseph Walker became eminently successful in the computer industry in only a few years. “Technology, Dan,” he said. He always called him Dan when excitement overtook his formality. “I don’t see why computers won’t be one of the largest industries on earth in the next fifty years.”
Joseph Walker was not just an important businessman (perhaps the most important in the city). Of the millions of people who inhabited the planet, he may have been in the top ten, and if not the top ten certainly the top one hundred. But to Daniel, he was something more. When Daniel had left his parents’ home, he had nothing. He had lived on the streets. It was fall. The weather was beginning to get cold. With enough money to buy a little food but not enough to find proper housing, he had sought out the refuge of a diner for warmth and had ordered the largest meal they had on the menu.
Joseph, though dressed more modestly, had been sipping coffee nearby, and after Daniel had ordered food, he had commented on the appetite of the young man.
Daniel had nodded back at the question. He did not speak. He instead felt a burr of annoyance go through him. The had man reminded him of his father in some way. Daniel could not pinpoint the exact aspect of the man that reminded him of his father, but every time he looked at him, he swore the two men must have been related, maybe distantly, but related, certainly. Was it the cadence of his voice? Was it his posture? Was it a feature all fathers shared and so seemed to be of the same lineage?
“Your mother, I’m sure, could make a better meal than the cook here,” Joseph had continued when Daniel did not answer.
The waitress scoffed.
Daniel laughed.
“I heard about your father,” the now older Joseph said to Daniel as he closed the office door.
Daniel thought of the note in the top drawer. He conjured the hospital room. He saw his mother. He saw his brothers. He pushed the next thought away before it could fully form in his mind.
“You’re still working?” Joseph asked. Daniel heard concern in his voice.
Daniel finished pulling another line. He looked at the clean draft he had just drawn, perfectly straight lines, not a single smudge from an eraser; he had not always been so good.
Daniel set the pencil next to the paper. He looked up to Joseph. He found comfort in those warm, sympathetic eyes, and he wished he had been born to this man rather than Ebenezer Fleet. How much better it would it have been to grow up under the rich tutelage of Joseph Walker. Joseph’s wealth did not even factor into Daniel’s wish. Joseph loved knowledge. Joseph took risks. Ebenezer Fleet was a harsh taskmaster who saw the world as little more than pain and struggle. Ebenezer was a defeatist. He believed man lived life. He suffered. He died. When it was all said and done, he would be judged, and if he found himself securely under the grace of the almighty, he would arrive in paradise and live in the eternal present of that divine eternal presence. Reward would come posthumously, and no satisfaction would ever be found in this life. The whole purpose of humanity was not progress. It was something else to Ebenezer Fleet. Of course, Daniel was never told by his father what that was.
Joseph did see humanity as having a divine spark of some kind, but he told Daniel he thought that spark had sprung up in the human animal out of accident. The first ape had used his tongue to utter an idea. Idea sprang into idea until mankind attained a creative genius and called it divine, because that is what it was. Somehow humanity had achieved the thinnest sliver of the divine apart from a deity. But humanity, in his estimation, was incomplete.
Joseph Walker was a practical man, a utilitarian. He realized he was mortal as all men are. Time was precious, and, therefore, doing anything to waste that time was discarded. Religion was one of those things. A spiritual reality was unprovable and disregarded by him, but the idea of divinity was not disregarded by Joseph, because Joseph had seen divinity. He had experienced it in himself, and he said he experienced it in Daniel. According to him, it was a wholly human creation, but instead of the full purpose of mankind being suffering to arrive in a new Eden completed by a god-figure, Joseph saw humanity crawling out of this partial divinity into full divinity. The destiny of mankind was to fully shed his animal skin and become God. An incarnate Christ did not complete humanity and the story of humanity; in the estimation of Joseph Walker that would be achieved by man himself.
Though Daniel did not know if he agreed with Joseph’s ideas in all their details, he sympathized.
“I heard about your father,” Joseph said.
“Might have been his fault,” Daniel answered.
Joseph frowned, disapproving, like a father. “Do you plan on working until you forget?” he asked.
“If I can. It isn’t as if I can take a day off,” Daniel answered. He glanced down at the design he had just drafted. He was sure Derek would reject it as well.
“Daniel.” This word from Joseph held the care of a doting father. “You’ll fail. Some things cannot be ignored. Death. Love. Passion. When a rift forms between two people who are so close, it turns into a shallow ghost stuck repeating the same painful memory.”
“My father and I aren’t close. We were never close,” Daniel answered. He hoped the retort would shift the conversation. The relationship between Daniel and his father, as he saw it, was a broken situation. What he needed was not advice about his father. He had another problem. That problem sat across the hall in a plush office. His name was Derek. If only Joseph would help him navigate the sick prettiness of his stubborn partner.
Joseph did not answer Daniel’s retort at first. He only smiled, as if he knew what Daniel had intended the comment to do.
“Dan,” Joseph said as he continued to smile. His eyes were warm, slightly amused. “There is no relationship between a father and a son that isn’t close. Even if that man is a tyrant, it is the most important relationship in your life. You come from your mother, but your fate is tied to your father’s, who he is, what he has done, whether good or bad. He is, if not the pattern you find yourself falling into out of genetic impulse or obligation, at least catalyst for your lifelong behaviors, emotions, and beliefs.”
Joseph’s face softened, the serious softness of a father only wishing to keep a beloved son from harm.
“We haven’t yet gone beyond these bodies, Daniel. We haven’t freed ourselves from the necessity of mother and father. We only have an infant psychology that can do little more than make dogs drool, and if I were to hazard a guess, I would say brain science we now have is little more than wasted energy.
“Perhaps in your lifetime, you’ll one day be able to be free of the physical restraints of the body. Freed from your DNA. But fifty years, twenty-five, even ten years is too much to waste in this short life. The only way I have found to avoid this piddling fate you now find yourself in is making amends, forgiveness at the least, letting it go.”
“My father hasn’t talked to me for ten years,” Daniel answered. It was his last-ditch effort at ending the conversation. Even before it left his mouth, he knew it would not work. And he knew exactly how Joseph would respond.
A big smile spread across Joseph’s face. He almost laughed. He gestured to the room, but he was really gesturing to the world and reality itself. “When I met you, I liked you right away. That does not happen often, maybe three times in my own life. Why? You are willing to do what others won’t. You’re willing to jump off the cliff without knowing whether you’ll be able to build your wings on the way down. You have fire. Even when every fiber of your being revolts against what you need to do, if you must, if conscience, virtue, success, whatever requires it, you will do it.
“And that is why I am the one who came into your office unannounced and is the one who is talking to you about it right now.”
Daniel nodded. He only nodded.
Daniel shifted the car into third gear. The hospital was only a few blocks away. Daniel had lied to Joseph about not being close to his father. He might have even been his father’s favorite child. The favoritism was due to the order of the world. His father loved work. His father loved his business, and Daniel did as well. When Ebenezer Fleet told his sons they had to help him at the store, Daniel jumped at the chance. It was not just that. Every time Daniel was at the store, his father’s eyes lit up with pleasure. The man moved faster. He seemed a decade younger, and every step of his old man’s seemed to have a spring in it. But the change in the old man did not last.
At fifteen, Daniel noticed that a specific candy bar sold well in other stores, and he suggested his father order some and place them in front of the till.
His father barely waved the suggestion away as if it were such a bad suggestion it did not even deserve a thought. Daniel let the rebuff go without much thought the first time. It was few months later when he was rebuffed again.
Daniel passed the hospital, turned into the parking lot. As the car stopped, the sun shone in his eyes. He let the warmth fill the car. He saw the white blinding light. He saw the red and black of his eyelids. He saw the dashboard, and finally he saw his father in his mind, that slowly stooping man.
Three more suggestions from Daniel on how to improve the store brought a bark from his father. Another brought a growl. Daniel remembered the silent months that followed, and those silent days were sour days, endless days watching the clock.
Daniel grabbed the door handle. He swung the car door open. As he stepped into the hot sun of the parking lot, he brought a hand up to shield his eyes. Sand and gravel crunched under his feet as he walked to the hospital doors. A man opened the door in front of him, and after the man had passed, Daniel grabbed the door and slipped inside.
“Time to make amends?” he asked himself as he stepped into the light green hallway of the hospital. A nurse rushed past as he moved to the reception desk. The receptionist was distracted by a telephone call, and he waited in silence for her to finish it.
When he was still working at his father’s shop during those silent days, he decided the only way his father would pay any mind to his ideas was if he saw them in action. His father was hesitant to try anything new. His was a generation that had been filled with optimistic youth. It was a turn from the barbarism of the past toward a period of enlightenment and technological advancement. The world was being examined and every day new theories were being developed. Throughout the history of mankind, people had been living very much the same generation after generation. And in his father’s lifetime, in an instant, factories sprang up. Electric light lined the streets. Automobiles chugged past. The first flight. A whole generation of young people looked toward the future with hope.
Then marching off to the First World War. A frontline of millions. A whole population mobilized. Tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of young men dying in a single battle, and more than a million dying in some. The hopeful youths were reduced to numbers. And Daniel was sure this was the reason behind the rigidity of his father.
No. His father would not simply try something new. No. Daniel needed to trick him. Daniel needed to implement the idea, let it work, and show his father the benefit of taking the risk.
“Can I help you?” the receptionist asked.
Daniel said his father’s name. “Ebenezer Fleet.” The receptionist checked a blackboard.
“Room 223B,” she answered and pointed down the hallway to Daniel’s left.
Daniel waited for further instruction, but the receptionist stuck the phone back to her ear and continued to talk.
Daniel nodded, though he knew she would not notice. Then he turned and started down the poorly lit corridor. The antiseptic smell curled up into his nose and he grimaced. He did not like this place.
At seventeen, Daniel’s uncle became sick. His father was the only remaining sibling, so, for two weeks his father was forced to go to Ireland to take care of his brother’s estate.
Because the war was on, Ebenezer’s eldest son was off to war, so the duty of running the store was left to Daniel. Daniel only changed one thing. He was cognizant that any change was likely to upset his father, so he only ordered the candy bar he had first suggested to his father. It was a simple formula for a treat: chocolate, nougat, caramel, peanuts, but young people loved it, especially young men, and Daniel thought he knew why:
Daniel only knew a few of the United States presidents. He knew of Lincoln. He knew of Washington. He knew of the one that was fat that had died in a bathtub or something like that. One of them had given too long of an inaugural address and paid for his sins by dying a few days into his presidency. Most were boring to his seventeen-year-old self, but Robert Dalimore, Robert Dalimore was more like a cowboy than a president. More like a tough detective, a great hunter, or the Count of Monte Cristo. The person of Robert Dalimore had always caught his boyhood imagination, and Robert Dalimore always carried around candy bars, and he always carried around a certain kind. And it was often said that he would pull them out during cabinet meetings and snack.
When his father left for Ireland, Daniel bought several boxes of these candy bars. He set them up near the till. He put a sign in the window, and he watched as they disappeared. And Daniel felt delight. His father had painted work as being an inevitable drudgery to his sons. He did not say it aloud, but each of his boys knew he saw that little shop more as a daily sacrifice than a joy.
Daniel felt pure energy as he watched the candy bars disappear from the shelves. He kept every dollar made from them to the side to show his father. He was certain, he was completely certain, that his father would come around quickly to at least try something new.
His father was silent when he returned from the funeral. When Daniel tried to speak to him, to get him to notice the candy bar sales, his father brushed off the conversation.
“Not now. Not now,” he told the young Daniel.
Daniel had turned away from the man miffed, but he did not get across the store before he heard a yell followed by a grunt followed by a crash.
Daniel stopped at room 223B. He looked through the window. He saw Ezekiel, Isaiah, and Jeremiah looking down. He wondered how long he could stand outside without them noticing.
He did not want to go in. It was an odd psychology within him. He was not certain he wanted to make amends. Maybe he was still angry, maybe a little, and he knew his reaction did not make sense. His father’s reaction to the candy bar warranted a couple weeks, maybe a couple months, of silence, but ten years? But he knew it was not his father’s outburst only. He had screamed at Daniel about the candy bars. He had thrown them in the garbage. Daniel had responded by tipping over two shelves. His father had stomped toward him, and both had screamed at each other for a half an hour, and then Daniel had picked up a bottle of beer and sent it through the front shop window.
Then his father got silent.
As a young man, Daniel had been terrified. He knew he had gone too far. He had allowed himself to get swept up in the emotions of the situation, and he had just placed an expense on his father’s business from which he was not sure it would recover.
His father took a long breath in as he stared across the shop at Daniel.
“Find somewhere else to sleep tonight,” his father had said.
And Daniel could tell by his father’s voice that he was just barely keeping himself from ringing his son’s neck.
“Leave.” His father pointed to the door. “Leave,” he sneered.
Daniel more than remembered the memory; he felt it, but he knew the rift between his father and himself went beyond the fight in the store. It had grown into something more.
Daniel sighed, and he noticed he was not staring at his brothers through the glass. Instead, he was staring at the glass and his face reflecting off of it.
“Time to pay the goddamn piper,” he said. He sighed again. Eight years had passed. He had always assumed he would make amends with his father someday, but he would have much preferred another ten years to work out how he would make those amends. Now this amending had been thrust upon him by some emergency (whatever that was) that brought him to this door.
“How’s it going, dad?” he mumbled to himself. “Eight years, eh?” He chuckled. “Eight years.” The smirk fell from his mouth. “Eight goddamn years.” He shook his head.
He wondered if he should not go in at all. No one had noticed him. He could turn away. Walk down the hall. He could tell everyone that he had been stuck at work, he had been stuck in traffic, whatever. And in a week his father would be better and avoiding the man for another ten years would be simple.
He nodded. He had made up his mind. He would leave. Everything would be fine. But before he turned away, Ezekiel looked up. He saw Daniel and nodded him in.
Daniel muttered a curse under his breath. He had waited too long.
“Time to pay the goddamn piper,” he said again.
He reached out. He turned the handle, and he pulled open the door. He prepared himself to confront his father. He prepared himself to hastily, awkwardly put their relationship back together.