“Beer?”
“For me, too?” John seemed surprised. “Sure, Will.”
“There’s Christian Moerlein in the ’fridge. Open a couple of bottles and let’s go upstairs.” It still made Will feel strange that John called him by his first name. He had married Cindy when John was a baby and he was the only father the boy had known growing up. But once he was in high school, Will was no longer “daddy” but Will. He wondered what John called his real father in Boston.
They tramped up the stairs, through the bedroom, turning on lights as they went, and Will led him out on the small deck.
“Wow,” John said.
It was a “wow” view. This side of Liberty Hill was high enough that they could see over the rooftops of the townhouses across the street and into downtown. Directly in front was a vacant lot, enhancing the vista. The air had turned cool and the skyscrapers floated in the liquid black sky above the trees. The city brooded around them on its hills and inside its ravines beneath the green abundance of the changing season. The Queen City of the West, but the West had moved on. It was still a beauty. The night was quiet except for the steady distant rumble of Interstate 71.
Will set his cane against the railing and eased into one of the two chairs. The weight of the day was full on him now and he had been looking forward to the chance to actually sleep tonight. It would be a rarity. At the moment, he didn’t know if he could even get up again.
“How do you handle it down here?”
Will sipped his beer. “I like it.”
“The riots were right over there. And all the blacks…”
“Oh, John, there’s all sorts of people in this neighborhood. You weren’t raised that way, and as I recall you didn’t like it out in the suburbs.” He took a deeper pull of the Christian Moerlein. “So are you going back to Portland after the summer?”
John said he didn’t know if he would return. He had liked the city but thought college was boring. Will might not have been his real father but he couldn’t stop worrying about this baby who had become a man in the quick-time that was the dark gift of getting older. He had been such a sweet little boy. Then adolescence, and they had lost him. He was aimless and angry, an indifferent student except for music and art classes. This, even though Will and Cindy had skimped to put him in a good high school before Cindy started to make real money at the bank. Will blamed himself. Cindy was gone more and more with work. Some of her positions required travel, and then there were her serial affairs. Will should have done more, but he, too, worked long hours on homicide. John had often been left to raise himself.