High Price

He had multiple tattoos and several gold teeth. He didn’t look like anyone I knew but seemed to be in his teens or early twenties.
    “You fucking talking to me?” I said, getting ready to get into it. My brother Ray pulled me aside. We were at a funeral reception, after all.
    “That’s Tobias,” he said as he tried to calm me down. Ray suggested that I could probably understand why someone in his situation might be angry with me. I just stared. I had had no idea that he was going to be there. I’m sure he showed up because my mother and his maternal grandmother were friends and he’d somehow learned from them that I would be visiting. Naively, I hadn’t even considered the possibility that he might attend Grandmama’s funeral. Ray pulled me away and Tobias left. But that was my unfortunate first encounter with my son.
    By that time, I had already been paying child support for three or four years. The paternity suit had been settled almost immediately after I’d gotten the DNA results. I still didn’t feel any emotional or psychological connection with him and I hadn’t had any contact with his mother, other than through the court papers. But I did feel a tremendous amount of guilt about my handling of the situation.
    Tobias took matters into his own hands. The day after the funeral, he came over to my sister Brenda’s house, where I was staying, in order to apologize for how he’d behaved. Now only slightly more prepared for the encounter, I began to talk with him, or shall I say, I began to watch myself listening to him talk. I felt as dissociated from myself in my dealings with him as I was with the rest of my family.
    Tobias was twenty-one at the time and had brought his own son, who was just a toddler. I picked the little boy up and played with him, but it didn’t sink in until later, when everyone began teasing me, that I was actually a grandfather and this was my grandson. Smiling and interacting with the little guy was a welcome distraction.
    Meanwhile, Tobias and I tentatively approached each other, trying to figure out how to negotiate some kind of relationship. I did understand why he was angry; I knew that I had desperately wanted to spend more time with my own father when I was growing up. I imagined how I would have felt if Carl Sr. had denied even being my dad and didn’t even want to meet me after he’d been forced to pay child support.
    I didn’t think I had the right to say much, so I listened and thought maybe I could learn something. I was surprised at how happy Tobias was simply to be speaking with me, despite my cautious demeanor. Perhaps I was a better actor than I thought. I learned that he had grown up to be homophobic and hardened and also that he clearly knew how to take care of himself in the world from which I had once come.
    I did explain to him that I’d had no idea that he’d even been born: his mother and I barely spoke the night we’d spent together or immediately afterward, let alone communicated months later about her being pregnant as a result. First he responded to this defensively, saying, “Damn, you blaming my mom?” I backed off. I said we’d both been young and I didn’t know what she was thinking. I didn’t mean to blame her. Maybe she was scared, I suggested.
    It was then that he told me that she’d told him that some other brother was his father, a guy she’d been seeing at one point when he was growing up. He’d also apparently been told at least once that his real father was dead, so he’d received a number of different, conflicting stories about his paternity.
    I wasn’t sure what to do with this information. The best I could do was to say again that she and I had both been too young and that he shouldn’t be too hard on her. I changed the subject.
    “So what are you doing work-wise?” I asked.
    He said, “Shit, you know what I do.”
    I didn’t quite get it. Maybe I didn’t want to.
    “I’m slinging,” he said, meaning that he was a street-level pharmacist. He seemed almost to be daring me to make something of it. I didn’t know what he knew about my profession or area of interest as a researcher, but I did know that he was trying to tell me that he was strong and didn’t need anything from anyone. I asked a few questions to show him that I got that, along the lines of “How’s business? You making enough to handle your responsibilities?” He nodded affirmatively.
    And when there was an awkward pause, I found myself