Page 99 of When We Are Old

We’d loved one another for a lifetime. It was the one question I always should have asked.

Instead I’d asked the wrong woman, sold my life out.

As I drove back home, I thought of Dad. Would I have ever been able to please him? I didn’t know.

On a whim I stopped in at Mam’s, a strange need to be in the place the memory of the old man was strongest.

“You’re over-thinking everything again, Matthew.” She slid me a coffee across the table. Ewan and Jack were making ice cream soup at the other end of the table.

“I’m not. I’m trying to see a future.”

Mam shook her head and took a sip of her coffee. “You’re looking at the past for your happiness. You think that by making up for what went wrong all those years ago, you can alleviate the guilt you feel about your dad.”

I pressed my lips into a line.

“Do you think he didn’t appreciate you for what you were? I can tell you he did.”

“That’s not true, Mam. He nagged me, told me I had to be better, that I needed to do the right thing for the Carlings. It’s all I ever heard. Be a good man, be a good Carling.”

“Matthew.” Her palm hit the table making the boys jump. “He’s not here anymore. You are the Carling now. You. Who do you want your boys to see when they're growing up? Are they going to see the real you or the side of you that you think they should see?”

“What do you mean?”

Mam’s face dropped, her eyes glassing a little. Steam rose from her mug, obscuring her face a little as she blew on her drink. “Your dad. He didn’t show you the real him either. He showed you the side of himself that he’d been told to show. Don’t do it again. Don't repeat the past.”

“That shop deserves to be ours, Mam. McStandish sold Dad a lie.”

“Matthew, your dad didn’t care. He was so bloody tired at the end of it all, it didn’t really matter any longer. Look at this amazing house I live in. Your dad was happier with this as our home. He didn’t care once the business was gone. Things like that, they come and go: ideas, business, enterprise. They change for the world as the world needs it. Your dad knew that.”

“But Ronnie’s branding idea was good. The world does need that now.”

“Yes, Matthew. But does it need you to be the one standing behind the counter doing it? Is that your dream?”

I thought of the shop. I’d loved smashing it all up, dragging out all the crap Supersaver Foods' cheap furnishings, but if I thought about the man in the picture I drew—the man in green and gold—was that me, or was it my father? I didn’t know.

“Here. Let me show you this.”

Mam pushed back her chair and left the table, going out into the hallway, her tread on the stairs echoing through the empty house. The house was beautiful. There would have been so much space for us growing up as kids. Instead, the three of us were squished into a small house next to the second shop, three bubbling teenage boys in closed quarters. It hadn’t all been bad though.

She came back down clutching an old folder, curled around the edges.

“I’ve told you that your dad used to draw.”

“Yes, I know. You told me Pops made him give it up.”

“Here.” She pushed the folder across to me.

“What is it?”

“What, you want me to spoil the surprise? Just open it.”

Small pieces of paper slid out, browned and delicate. Pencil drawings with the most precise details of a baby stared up at me.

“That’s you.” Mam pointed at one gently.

“Me?”

“Yep. You wouldn’t stay still long enough, so he ended up taking a photograph and getting it developed to use, but I think he always tried to base them on the real-life version of you, not the one captured in print.”