Chapter 10

Her tears ran riot for the entire hundred miles back to Phoenix. Her husband would be out of town for the next two days—a sudden business something or other—but he was on the cell and ready to join her on a moment’s notice if she needed him. He’d promised her that. She would wait to talk to him. She very much needed to talk to her parents first anyway, and Sam’s dad too. When she talked to her husband she wanted all of what she had to say, all that she now knew, to be vetted and clear in her head. Owen was the only one who had a hope of being able to help her Sam: her children’s dad.

It was 7:30 when she pulled up in front of the man’s house: she’d had to pullover to control her sobbing more than once. Getting out of her car she walked purposefully up the steps to the middle class ranch style she’d visited just the day before.

She waited. The man was ill; it might be a moment.

The door opened. “Abigail! You found him didn’t you?” he said.

“Yes, Aaron, I did. I came as soon as I got back so I could report to you. I haven’t even been home yet,” said Abigail.

“Come in, come in,” he said. She slid by him and took a seat at the dinette table across from the living room. “What did he say?” said Aaron Bradshaw.

“Aaron, I need to get this out before I start bawling again,” she did. “Aaron, our Sam is injured, bad injured and disfigured. He’s not the same man we all once knew.”

He fell into the chair across from her. “His face?” he said.

“Yes,” she said.

“What did he say,” he said.

“Mostly he just railed at me and Owen for our sins. I don’t blame him for any of that. I tried to get him to go to dinner with me to talk things over, but he just flat refused,” she said.

“Did he ask about me?” he said.

“No, he didn’t give me the chance to even bring you up. He didn’t even want to talk about the babies. He thinks, erroneously thinks, that Owen has taken his place with them and that we are intent on cutting him out of their lives. I tried to tell him that he was wrong, but he’s not into listening to anything I have to say. And Aaron, he has to. He just has to. We can help him, all of us: you, me, Owen.

“I’m going to be talking to Owen and we’re going to come up with a plan to help the man. Aaron I know you are on Sam’s side, but I’m going to ask. Can we count on you to back us in this effort? The man needs a lot of help, and it’s going to cost a lot of money. And Aaron, money is the one thing we’ve got going for us. Damn little else, but we do have that,” she said.

“Yes, sure, anything I can do,” said the older man.

“Thank you, sir, it is more than appreciated, and I might add going to be more than necessary, your help I mean.”

They talked a bit longer and then she left.

The door closed behind his ex-daughter-in-law. Or, maybe she still was his daughter-in-law at least on some level. He could see she was sincere in her desire to help his boy. Yes, he was going to do what he could to help her get through to his baby boy; he was determined in that regard. He started to cry. He was too old for this. Daddies needed to be there for their hero sons and daughters; yes they did.

He made the decision. She’d given him his boy’s address and where he hung out, that bar, the one she’d found him at, the VFW. He would go there and talk to him. One thing Abigail Cord was more than right about: Sam Bradshaw was going to need help and he was going to get it, accept it. This was no time for false pride or even desperately crushed hearts.

Yes, he was on his son’s side, as Abigail had noted, correctly noted. But, he also knew that life was not always a simple matter of first choices. Sometimes life just sucked, and people got hurt or hurt each other. One had to go on and hope for better things to come along down the line. What Sam really needed he knew was his mom. She was gone, but Aaron Bradshaw, was pretty sure he knew how she would have handled things were she still alive and with them. That she wasn’t was the sad reality, but he felt, Aaron Bradshaw felt, that she was there with him in spirit; yes he did.

He would go to his son, their son. He would get him to listen to reason no matter what. That was his mission in life. He just had to make sure that he didn’t die first or his son either. That would not be acceptable, no sir, that would not be acceptable.

Abigail Cord was distraught and wasn’t sure what she wanted to do, say, any of it. But talk to her dad, and her mom, was the second step in the process of figuring that out. The first had been to go to see her ex-father-in-law. The last would be to talk to her husband two days hence.

It was getting late, almost 8:45. She didn’t knock. She just went in and hollered.

“Abigail,” said her mom.

“Yes, hi Mom,” she said.

Her dad walked into the room. For a moment he just stood across from her not saying anything. He could see something was wrong, very wrong!

“Honey?” said her dad.

“Daddy, it’s very bad. I mean my ex-husband is in very bad shape and he hates me!” She fell to her knees on the floor and sobbed.

“Daddy what am I going to do?” she said, not even looking up at him.

He knelt down beside her. “Come on, honey girl let’s go into the front room. You need to tell us all about it,” he said.

In the front room the mood was dark, and no one was sitting, not yet at any rate.

Abigail was pacing back and forth in front of the coffee table and literally wringing her hands. The table itself was almost an antique. It had belonged to an uncle, one who’d been a ball turret gunner on a B-17 that went down over France during War II; the story was that his plane was blown out of the sky by German flak in August of 1943.