A Guy Walks Into A Bar...

The First Meeting

Hi, my name is Jack, but mom has always called me Junior. That's because she named me after my father. My father whom she left months before I was even born. But I'm not talking about they had a fight and she left. No, I'm talking about a situation that was actually a lot closer to a witness relocation. That's how I came to grow up in one of the most remote places in America. Alaska. And that's why my mom never refers to me as Jack. Because she can't even bring herself to utter his name.

When I was a kid I used to wonder why my father wasn't around. As do almost all kids who grow up without one. Mom would talk about him from time to time. From the way she referred to him in the present tense, I concluded that he had to have still been alive. She'd tell me things like we could never ever see him again. That she left him to protect us. That he'd kill us if he ever found us. And that he believed that we were both dead.

But I could see she still loved him a great deal. Her words about him were never laced with anger. Instead there was always a sense of melancholy when she spoke of him. I could see the sadness in her eyes when she would comment on how much I resembled him. And many times I heard her crying when she thought I was asleep. She never dated. She never remarried. It doesn't take a genius to see why. Her heart wasn't open for the taking. Because her heart still belonged to my father.

For years I tried to get her to tell me what happened. What made her fear the man that she was still clearly in love with? She'd never tell me, but would instead promise to tell me when I was old enough to understand. When I went away to college was when I finally realized that she was never going to give me any conclusive answers about my father. So I knew the only way I was going to get answers, was by finding them myself.

I soon found out just how little I truly knew. My goal was to answer the questions I had carried all my life. But all I found, was even more questions. I found spiderwebbed paper trails that only went in circles. Nothing matched up. Nothing my mom ever told me was traceable. I could see that someone went to a lot of trouble to cover up something. But why?

So one day I finally sat mom down. I told her that if she didn't tell me everything, that I'd never speak to her again. I knew that was the one weak spot that would make her cave. I manipulated the situation. And she put up one hell of a fight. But eventually, her face wet with tears, she finally told me everything.

I had come up with a thousand back stories in my head about my father. Twenty years worth of them. Not in one of them, did I even come close to the real truth. Because the plot would have had to have been too elaborate and too horrific for someone my age to come up with. Mom was right to keep things from me growing up. Because I was too young to handle the truth. I'm not sure if I was ready for it at twenty.

But I got it...

Mom told me that she and my father met in highschool and had several classes together. They ran across one another again when they both went away to the same college. He was a science major, she was sociology. They just happened to run across one another one day on the quad. My father invited her for a cup of coffee, and they were together from that day on.

Mom said he had it all, charm, humor, looks, and a genius level intellect. She said falling in love with him was the easiest thing she ever did. She said he put a smile on her face every day. And after graduation, he asked her to marry him. So they got married at the courthouse, just them and my moms parents.

She said they got a small apartment in a bad part of town, but they were happy. My dad worked at a chemical plant. Mom was an intern trying to work her foot in the door of a good company. Within a few months, they learned that I was growing inside my mom's stomach.

She said he was happy about it, but something inside of him changed. She said he became obsessed with getting them moved into a bigger apartment in a better part of town. She said he started doing these side jobs for extra money. She said it took her a few months to figure out that these side jobs weren't at all honest jobs. They were errands for the mob. Something he only confessed to when she caught him with a gun and blood on his clothes.