Page 106 of The Maverick
My father held very still.
"There's a lot to unpack there," he said.
"I imagine."
"I owe you an explanation. All of it. The whole story. When there's time."
"When there's time?"
"Tommy."
"All right."
He took half a breath. He didn't move from the doorway.
"Dominion Hall," he said. "And everything in it. Everything that comes with it." He swallowed once. "It's yours. And theirs. It's been built to protect you. All of you. That's the whole point of it, son. That's the only point of it."
The room did its thing again.
I kept my face level. I'd been raised on level. The unit had built me on level. The level was a thing I could keep up under almost any operational pressure, and what was happening to me right now qualified as operational pressure of a flavor I had not previously sampled.
I didn't speak.
He didn't push.
He stood in the doorway and watched me, and after a long second he did the thing I had not expected.
He went quiet.
He stopped delivering. He stood there with his hands at his sides and let me have the room. He understood, in a way Iwas going to have to think about later, that the bombshell was bigger than the bombshell. That what he'd just said wasn't a piece of information. It was a structural reset of every piece of information I'd believed about my own life, and a structural reset of that magnitude wasn't a thing a man could carry in real time in front of a stranger who happened to be his father.
He gave me the silence.
It was a kind of grace.
After what felt like a long time, he said:
"Take the night, son. Think it through. We'll talk when you're ready."
I nodded. Once.
He held my eye for another moment.
"I'm sorry," he said. "For all of it."
He waited.
He was waiting for something. A reaction. A word. Anything I might give him that he could carry with him out of the doorway and into whatever room he was going back to in this house I had now learned belonged to me as much as it belonged to him.
I didn't give him anything.
It wasn't cruelty. It was that I didn't have anything to give. The interior was empty. The interior had been spent on Rebecca this morning and on Craine this afternoon and now on this, and there was nothing left in the cupboard, and pretending there was would have been worse than honest emptiness.
He waited another long second.
Then he turned.
He walked away down the carpeted hallway.
