Some days are just HARD

 Jay wasn't sure what he wanted to hear from Lindy's dad, Frank. They'd met up at the place where Lindy was taken. It seemed it was a wait-and-see kind of thing. 

"I've been down this road with her mother," Frank sounded like it was old news. Like if he could, he'd shoot Lindy out of her misery with the gun under his pickup seat.

Jay felt a little strange just being with the old man. Honestly, he never knew what to expect out of him, other than the worst.

"Well, what can they do?" Jay didn't think they would give her shock treatments. It couldn't be totally mental? Could it? "Are you sure Lindy had a safe home life when..when she was growing up?"

"What do you mean?" He turned to Jay as if he had no business to ask him.

"Nothing, it's nothing." It wouldn't do any good to talk about Lindy as they waited to see her. That's when he told  Frank how his mom felt about Frank and Jay's older half-brother Lenny.

"That boy's in jail," Frank shook his head as if that wouldn't do. He hugged himself hard. 

"Remember, you didn't have a good start, either," Jay told him. Sure, Jay went on a bit about how Lenny was in an orphanage and he had always been a street kid, even taking on somebody else's identity. "But he is my brother and he is your son."

Frank nodded but didn't say anything. 

Finally, they were asked to follow someone down a bright lit hall. There was somebody in a wheelchair that slightly resembled Lindy out in a garden. They could only see her from behind the glass. This was as close as they could get to her.

It wasn't easy to see Lindy this way. There was a miserable feeling to Jay that this was all his doing. If only they'd never met. If only he hadn't wanted..oh what did he really want?

"If only I.." He cleared his throat as he teared up. "I don't guess I deserve to know who my father really is." He nodded with his hands shoved into his black duster. He stared down at his beat-up black Converses.

Frank looked over at him. "Well, I can tell you who he is," Frank said.

"What? You knew him?"

"You look just like him," Frank nodded. "Your poppa was a priest."

"A priest!" Jay practically came unglued. He didn't believe Frank.

"Well, it might have happened before he went into the priesthood. He was a good kid. Always did what his folks said. They wanted him to be a priest. And your momma must have been sweet on him, evidently."

"Were they gonna run away together, or something?"

"That I don't know, I was in prison then. Last I heard Ramon got killed by a roadside bomb. He was in the army." Frank told him he was a good man. "I'm glad he had a kid like you." Frank grinned then.