The Proud Father
His bottom lip quivers as he rises before the judge, the jury, and the television cameras. He is your son, your only child, and he recently turned eighteen. In his new navy-blue suit and tie—the navy-blue suit and tie you bought him with the money you and your wife had saved for his first semester at Dartmouth—he reminds you of his six-year-old self, a boy with a high blush and a hairless face.
As you watch him, your chest tightens, your left arm goes numb, and you wonder if forty-six is too young to have a heart attack. Your son is being tried as an adult, and you wish you could trade places with his attorney, the man you can’t afford, the man with a wizened white beard and a hand resting on your son’s shoulder. You want to be close to your son, to hold him.
Your wife squeezes your hand and whimpers. You want to hold her as well, despite her threats of divorce and the accusations that you failed to raise your son to be a decent man. She used that word: decent.
You glance across the aisle at the alleged victim and her family, her father hugging her as she wipes her eyes and waits. You want to believe that she perjured herself. You want to believe that she is trying to save face for the bad decision she made after she left the party that night, drunk, with your son. You want to believe that she consented, and that your son—in a terrible moment of unchecked passion—accidentally bit her breast then apologized, like he testified. You want to believe that you’re all decent people, parents and children alike, and that something occurred that night in a bedroom behind a locked door at a teenage house party, something as ambiguous as a Rorschach test, something utterly unknowable and mired in reasonable doubt.
And now, as the head juror stands in front of your son, and your wife’s hand is sweating and her breathing is labored, you watch him, your boy. He’s the boy you coached in Little League, the second baseman and lead-off hitter on a last-place team; the boy you taught to whistle through an acorn; the boy you taught to jump a stick shift by pushing it down a hill and punching the clutch; the boy you taught to tie a Windsor Knot, something your father taught you. This is your son, and you know, beneath the banter and the bravado, there is a sensitive kid, someone you’ve been proud to call your son for eighteen years—an honor roll student and an average athlete, a boy who writes poetry but is too insecure to share it with anyone other than you and your wife and, allegedly, the girl across the aisle. And you know—and this is what startles you from sleep—he won’t fare well in prison, being so young and fresh-faced and hardly needing to shave.
You wonder, as you squeeze your wife’s hand and ignore the tightening in your chest, if your son did what the girl said he did to her, if the events happened the way the girl, talking through choked sobs, testified. You wonder if your son—and this terrifies you the most—is capable of being so monstrous. You question yourself and your own decency.
“Has the jury reached a decision?” The judge asks, peering over her bifocals.
“We have, Your Honor.”
The bailiff takes the slip of paper from the head juror and hands it to the judge, who reads it, stone-faced, and hands it back. Your wife whimpers again. Your son squeezes his eyes shut and bites on his bottom lip to keep it from quivering. For a second, the courtroom is as airless as a catacomb. The head juror clears his throat. The cameras click, all of them pointed at your son.
Your heart beats with your son’s heart, and you are back to a Christmas morning, your son smiling, silver wrapping paper wadded around him. Later, as your son played his new video game system, giggling with joy, your wife asked if you wanted to try for another. You made love that night. But after the tests and procedures, the false hopes and expensive attempts at In vitro fertilization, you eventually accepted that you were happy to have one—the proud father of his only son.
As the head juror reads the decision, your son’s head drops like the tendons were cut in his neck. When he turns to you and wails, and your wife wails, too, your legs give as you try stand, and your chest tightens.
“The Proud Father” appears in the forthcoming collection A Better Loser (Roadside Press).
Nathan Graziano lives Manchester, New Hampshire, with his wife and a pug named Buster. He is a teacher, journalist and author of ten books of poetry and fiction. A new collection of short fiction titled A Better Loser will be published in October by Roadside Press.
