"He fall back asleep?" I asked Olivia. She was standing behind me; had just come up to the roof.
"Yeah. Kept looking for you though," she said quietly.
I snorted. "He shouldn't have."
"Why not?"
"A sour old bastard putting the kid back to sleep... He needs his mother."
"That sour old bastard has been putting him back to sleep for the past two weeks. I don't understand how he suddenly can't do it. I thought he was doing quite a good job of it, acting like a father would, certainly more than the uncle he is." She was standing next to me now, about an arm's length away. "But he wasn't acting anything close to a sour bastard."
"Don't you mean 'sour old bastard'?"
"No, because he has been acting like an old bastard." I could hear the very slight amusement in her voice. "Thinking he's too old to take care of his one and only nephew. Doubting his abilities to raise a child simply because he happens to be fast approaching sixty and that scares him shitless. Because he's going to have to retire soon from a job that he loves and hates in the same breath. And he doesn't know what he's going to do to support his nephew after that. If only his nephew were a little older, he'd leave and go to college sooner, be able to get his inheritance money sooner. Of course, the thought of his nephew leaving scares him shitless too. Looks like the old bastard is scared shitless all over."
"What a way with words for a lady."
"Lady? Old man, I'm your conscience." And she left me to stand on that damned roof in the August heat and think on what she had said. Excuse me, what my conscience said.
But she was right, on all counts, except maybe the one about not being sour. I could teach a lemon or two what sour was. Old bastard scared shitless of this new world he's been thrust into. That's all I was. I didn't want the responsibility of raising Ben, but at the same time, I didn't want him to grow up and have to walk into the world. I was scared that I'd do something wrong, but I think I was scared of doing something right. How would I know either way? It would be too late by the time I could tell, wrong or right.
I could walk into a building where I knew there to be a man with a weapon. Could interrogate the hell out of a guy three times my size. Could bicker and argue with Elliot or Fin until they were on the brink of punching me. Could go inside a building ready to collapse if it meant saving an innocent person. And I wouldn't be scared. Not really.
Talk to me about raising my nephew and it's a whole different story. About doing right by him. Raising him into a fine man. Letting him go into the world. And I was scared shitless.
Although, perhaps fear is all relative.