My father—and when I say “father,” I mean the real one, the one who stayed, the one whose name isn’t on my goddamn old birth certificate but is carved into every decent part of me—he had this thing for guns. And I was his straw man in Oregon. The gun laws were tight, but he’d come over from Washington, slip me five hundred bucks, and ten minutes later, we’d walk out of a store with a new piece of steel. We did it five or six times. A quiet, beautiful, and completely illegal little conspiracy.
He wasn’t just buying guns to shoot. He was a collector of stories. And there was one story he was obsessed with. The James Bond story. He was hunting for the Walther PPK, the stainless-steel sonofabitch from the movies. The one Bond holds in the opening credits when he turns and fires at the camera. A small, elegant, and completely deadly piece of machinery.
I’d started my own company by then. I was making money. Of course, my bitch-ass wife, back before she went completely nuts, was already converting it over to her money, but that’s a different story. The point is, I had a few bucks, and I was spending some time with my dad while she was babysitting the kids.
We found it in a place called The Armory in Oregon City. A beautiful, ugly, and completely perfect temple to the god of gunpowder. And there she was. The Walther PPK. Six hundred bucks. He held it in his hand, and he transformed. This big, tough, alpha-male sonofabitch, he just… dissolved. He was giddy. Laughing. A little kid on Christmas morning.
But he was a cheap bastard, too. He knew about another place on the east side of town, a little shithole with better prices but a shittier selection. “Let’s go check their price,” he said. So we drove all the way out there. They had a few things he liked, but they didn’t have the Walther.
And while he was distracted, looking at some other piece of steel, I made the call. I got the guy at The Armory on the phone. “The Walther PPK,” I told him. “It’s a gift for my dad. I want you to pull it off the shelf. Put it in the back. If he calls, if he comes in, you tell him you just sold it. I’ll be there in an hour to pay for it.”
My dad comes back over, a disappointed look on his face. “They don’t have it,” he says. “Let’s go back and get that other one. That’s the one I really want.” He was a kid. A beautiful, impatient, and completely obsessed little kid who just wanted his goddamn toy.
The drive back was thirty minutes, an eternity. We get back to The Armory, and he almost runs in, my brother Nick right behind him. I pull the salesman aside. “Here,” I say, and I hand him my credit card. I fill out the paperwork, the background check, the whole goddamn song and dance, and I walk away.
And I find my dad, standing in front of the glass display case, staring at an empty spot on the velvet. A perfect, gun-shaped shadow where the Walther used to be.
He looked at me, his face all thunder and confusion.
“What the fuck are the odds?” he said, his voice a low, ugly growl. “The exact thing I wanted. It’s gone. How the fuck did that happen? What is wrong with our luck? God damn it, I told you we should have gotten it when we were here.”
He was a storm cloud. A big, sad, and completely broken-hearted old man, pouting like a baby who’d just been told that Santa Claus was a lie cooked up by Coca-Cola.
I just smiled. “Dad,” I said, “don’t worry about it. It’s the universe. It’s all good.”
The salesman gave me a quiet thumbs-up from behind the counter. I excused myself, told my brother to handle the old man. I went out to the truck, took the small, heavy gun case, and I slid it under the back seat.
My dad got in the truck, and the air was thick with his disappointment. He was a pouting, grumpy, “fuck you” of a man, and I could tell he was almost in tears. This wasn’t just a gun to him. It was something else.
The next day, we all went out to the woods to shoot. I had my whole collection with me, maybe five or six guns at the time. A Mossberg, a Desert Eagle. I dropped the tailgate, put out the boxes of ammo, the nines, the .22s, the .45s. “Alright,” I said, “everybody grab a gun, grab a magazine, and start loading up.”
And my dad, he was still in a black mood. Bitter. Angry. Pouting like a little boy who’d lost his favorite puppy.
I grabbed the new, hard-shell gun case from under the seat, the one he hadn’t seen yet. I threw it on the tailgate in front of him. “Here,” I said. “Stop being a little bitch and do your part. Load this one up.”
He gave me a mean-spirited look, a flash of the old, tough sonofabitch. He unclipped the two latches on the case. He opened it up.
And he just… looked down.
Christ. I’m telling you this story now, and my own goddamn voice is starting to crack. The tears are coming up. Because you just don’t see a man like that, a real man, a rock, come apart at the seams.
He just stood there, looking at the gun, and his face was a goddamn war of emotions. Confusion, then anger, then a quiet, beautiful, and completely devastating wave of something else. He was angry at me, for making him feel this. For going out of my way to do something for him, when he was always the one who did things for us. He was a great man. The best I’ve ever known. And I hate using that word, “step-dad.” It’s a cheap, ugly word for a man who was more of a father to me than the man whose blood is in my veins.
He picked up the gun. He looked at me, and I could see the tears in his eyes.
“Come here,” he said, his voice all thick and broken. “Come here.”
He grabbed me by the back of the neck and pulled me into him, a hard, clumsy, and completely honest hug. The kind of hug that says everything that two men like us could never say with words.
“I love you,” he mumbled into my shoulder.
A quiet, beautiful, and completely perfect moment of a kind of love that’s different from any other. A man’s love. Honest. Simple. And real.
I had bought him his favorite gun. His favorite little thing. And in that one, small, stupid, and completely necessary gesture, I had finally, after all these years, found a way to say it back.
