Acres of Perhaps by Will Ludwigsen

Author:Will Ludwigsen [Ludwigsen, Will]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781590213650
Publisher: Lethe Press
Published: 2018-11-17T05:00:00+00:00

So I was the action figure. I testified and saved Henry from the electric chair but not life in prison. That life was short—he died eight years into his sentence—and I never spoke or wrote to him because there was nothing to say. Sorry my father was evil? Thanks for saving us from him as long as you did?

During the rest of Henry’s trial, Milona put us up in a hotel a few towns over, expensed to protect us as witnesses but also to buy us time. He persuaded the prosecutor to have my father picked up on conspiracy, solicitation, firearms charges, anything that would stick even briefly. We had four hours before he made his bail to carry out our suitcases. Mine had the Millenium Falcon jammed inside with my clothes.

But the cops investigated and they kept an eye on him, making him act human long enough for Mom to make the arrangements with the money she’d been hiding to get us back up north and living with my grandparents. It was hard on only her income, and there wasn’t much magic in those years except what we got from frozen dinners together in front of the television. Quiet. Together. Safe.

My dream was for my father to go to prison, for my mother to testify about everything he did and was, for me to tell that courtroom that he was the one worse even than Henry. It turns out, though, that suggesting a murder isn’t quite a crime. Neither—quite—is loaning a rifle to a man who happens to use it for one. My father hid his whole life behind “quite.”

And for the rest of that life, I was his amateur parole officer. We didn’t speak, we didn’t exchange letters or cards—I only checked for his name in the Florida legal databases. He remarried and his new wife died. He remarried again and she died, too. He had a few brushes with the law, including an investigation into the third wife’s car accident, but nothing stuck. If the Leaning Lincoln had affected him at all, I couldn’t tell the difference from his sad declining life.

I did see him at the end. The hospice called me, having looked up my name online. They told me the cancer had spread from the colon, a cancer I hadn’t known or cared about, and if I wanted to see my father, it had to be soon.

Lindsey tried to talk me out of going and it almost wasn’t hard, but in the end, I just wanted to know what he’d say.

I found him in his bed beside a large window facing the woods. His head was all I could see above the sheets and the body beneath them seemed withered to a stalk. I’m sure if I got him to his feet, he’d lean like that Lincoln until he fell.

His sunken eyes locked onto me, and I’ll admit I allowed myself an instant of hope that I’d see something in them that had grown or blunted or tamed with thirty years.

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