Life, on the Line by Grant Achatz (book club reads .txt) 📕

I just shook my head, still trying to process what I was now bearing witness to.

When we arrived home, I went upstairs to my room and immediately put on my headphones. I knew that an argument would start when my dad sobered up enough to process everything, and I didn’t want to hear it. A few minutes went by and suddenly my mom opened my bedroom door.

“He snuck out, Grant. I think he’s on your mountain bike.”

“What! Jesus . . .”

“I hid all the keys thinking he would try to take a car or a dirt bike. So I guess he took your bicycle.”

I rolled out of the driveway and turned left down the pothole-riddled dirt road that was the route back to his truck. I figured he would go there and try to fix it. I had driven about three miles when I saw some movement in a ditch about 100 yards ahead of me. I slowed down and was pulling up when I realized it was him. There was Dad, crawling out of the ditch, covered in mud, carrying the bike in one hand.

I got out of the car and walked up to him. “What the hell are you doing, Dad? You stole my fucking bike? Really?”

“I think I hurt my shoulder,” he said without expression. He dropped the bike, and his right hand reached across to his left shoulder. He started to lift his shirt up but couldn’t move his left arm.

I walked him over in front of the car so we could use the headlights to look more closely.

When he lifted his hand away from the area I saw a protrusion lifting his shirt like a tent pole.

We wrestled his shirt halfway off to find his collarbone fighting to break through his skin. “We have to get you to the hospital.”

“No, Grant. I’m fine.”

“Fine? You have a goddamn bone sticking out of your shoulder!”

“I’ll go tomorrow.”

For all of my childhood right through my teen years, in part because of my mother’s tenacious protection of me and her ability to shield and conceal my father’s growing debauchery and drinking, I was able to pretend that everything was fine. He was my dad, and an amazing one much of the time.

Most kids get to go to work with their dad once a year. For them it’s a cool experience to head to their dad’s office and imagine themselves in his shoes, grown up and in a position of power and responsibility. I got to work alongside my dad my whole life. I understood early the sacrifices that were made for our success.

There was a wild irony that came with our relationship. We spent real quality time together hunting, fishing, building the GTO, playing T-ball, and going to karate. He showed me how to ride a motorcycle and throw a football. Then he would simply disappear for a day, a week, or even a year. The time would go by and we would not speak at all.

When he would return home, as he inevitably did, nothing was said. I chose to pretend everything was fine because I so desperately wanted it to be fine. I wanted him to come back to my hockey games, to go fishing by the river, and to cook together at the restaurant.

But he slipped in and out of our lives with increasing frequency. As I grew older I learned about the DWIs, the jail time, and the adultery.

That day in the ditch was my shot at confronting who my father had become. It was the reason I insisted on going to the golf course with my mother—I needed to see him in that state that I had only wondered about, that my mother dealt with her whole life while trying desperately to hide it from me. When I found him in the ditch with a broken collarbone he couldn’t even feel, I thought it might embarrass him enough that he might quit drinking, quit leaving.

But more than that I just wanted so badly to know why. So I took the opportunity to ask him—why he couldn’t take more responsibility, why he couldn’t stop.

With surprising tenderness my dad admitted to his addiction and his inability to control it. He spoke of the hold it had on him and how he had worried that I would fall into the same destructive habits. But ultimately, he believed I’d be stronger than he was.

And so that night, on the hood of the car with a bone piercing through his shoulder, we had a real conversation. I asked him where his addiction came from, when it started, and whether he thought it was genetic—his father had had similar issues—or whether it was brought on by the social upheaval of the sixties. I asked him pointedly about the affairs I suspected him of having and his twenty-five-year relationship with my mother.

I asked him if he would ever quit drinking. I asked him if he even wanted to quit.

We talked for an hour, then we drove home, and he slept all night in the recliner in the living room.

My mother took him to the hospital the next morning.

CHAPTER 3

I was an average student at best. I got good grades in the classes that I found compelling and challenging, like architectural drafting, art, and mechanical drawing. But the core curriculum classes of English, math, and science were across-the-board C’s and D’s. I was more interested in the restaurant than I was in school.

My parents wanted me to learn every aspect of the business. Despite my experience throughout my childhood in my grandmother’s restaurant and at the Depot, when I hit middle-school age my parents made me start over. Now I was a real worker and was relied upon. At twelve I was back to being a dishwasher, but this time as an actual employee. I was allowed to do some basic food prep, and when I was thirteen, I had moved up to making and buttering toast.

At