I don’t think he liked being around me, and I couldn’t blame him. Who wants to be around a sullen kid who doesn’t talk? Bob would ask me questions and I would just stare at him. Then he would blow his top, grab me by the shoulders, and try to shake the words out of me, shaking so hard I could hear cracks and pops in my neck and back like I was being adjusted by some kind of lunatic chiropractor.

When that didn’t get me to open up, Bob would shout about how hard he worked and ask me why I didn’t understand that all of it was for me and Sam, and now that Sam was gone, I was all he had. “Why can’t you appreciate all I do for you, Joseph? I’m building you a business. Setting you up for life. And this is the thanks I get?”

Bob owned and operated a successful construction company called Harper & Sons. He built McMansions all over the Bay Area and made shitloads of money, and because that was all he cared about, he assumed it was all the rest of us cared about too.

Even when Sam was alive, Bob wasn’t an especially pleasant guy to be around. One of Bob’s most prominent traits was that he didn’t think he was ever wrong. Domineering and brusque, he was that guy at the table who would say a thing was black even if he knew it was white, just to start an argument.

I didn’t have the nerve to challenge Bob, but Sam would spout off and call bullshit on him all the time, which you would think would piss Bob off, but it had the reverse effect. Bob believed it meant Sam knew how to be a leader. He used to tell his friends how Sam was a bull and was going to take over the business one day.

I was what a nice person might call a sensitive kid: shy, awkward, and generally nonconfrontational. Bob often referred to me as a pussy.

Taking all of these factors into consideration, I didn’t care that Bob was avoiding me because I didn’t want to be around him any more than he wanted to be around me. Except that I did. That’s the rub for all kids with shitty parents, and don’t let anyone tell you differently. You only hate them because you love them and you want them to love you back. And never was that truer than the Saturday in question, because it wasn’t any old Saturday, it was my birthday, and Bob had promised to hike from Mill Valley to Muir Woods with me to celebrate.

When Bob was in college, before he started working in construction, he’d been obsessed with trees too. He’d moved to California from Spokane to study Forestry at UC Berkeley and could identify every tree and plant he saw, no matter where we were. Ingrid maintains it’s the greatest gift my dad ever gave me: my love of trees. And it’s why I loved hiking with him. When we were still a family, he and Sam and I would spend hours on the trails every weekend, exploring, foraging, and investigating the forest. Bob was a different person when he was in the woods. He was funny and patient, and all the good memories I have of him are from those times.