He read the chalkboard menu through his glasses, and waved his hand to the bartender.

"Dos Equis, please."

The bartender nodded and walked off to the tap.

As David waited, he found himself craning his neck to catch another glimpse of the old man. Something about that face called to him – something familiar that try as he might he could not place. As he looked at the man, that inner beat sounded ever so slightly. When he looked away the beat vanished.

Perhaps, he thought, he found himself drawn to the man simply through his vague resemblance to David's own father. Outwardly, very few who knew either man would have drawn a physical connection. The bar patron stooped over his table could easily have been sixty or seventy, his hair grayed and on the verge of white and his face deeply wrinkled and pale, bordered by a neatly trimmed and fully white beard that hugged his jawline - the visage of yet another old white man.

David's father on the other hand kept a clean shaven look, his hair salted but still dominantly a deep black, and with a face though marred by hints of age, largely belying those years with a youthful façade. Plus, he was Korean, so there was that, too.

The resemblance, however, lurked in the eyes. Each held a distance, a coldness, that could not be denied. Those alleged portals into the soul revealed only isolation, men held apart from the world.

More, David thought, men at war with the world. Traditionalists isolated by their own intractable minds, imposing false black and white schema upon a world of greys, and hoping for some bygone era of immutable rights and wrongs. Men force-feeding their progeny strict codes of living that hold no foothold in the real world, but exist in a falsehood where the heroes still wear white and the villains mark themselves with black hats.

The old man wore this life not just in those vacant, but stern eyes, but in every part of how he carried himself. His clothes shouted it, from his tweed blazer over his starch-collared shirt and his out-of-place monochrome tie, to his argyle socks peeking out from his worn penny-loafers and the faded flat cap hung on the back of his chair. The chain of a pocket-watch hung from his belt and David could just make out a cane propped beneath the table. Not a curved handled cane, or a cheap walking stick, but a finely polished cane, with a wooden knob top joined to the shaft by a simply ornamented brass ring, the wood real and shined to a perfect gloss. This man lived in the same rigid past of his father, unable to move on with the times.

It had been that rigidity in his own father that served as the founding bond between David and Erika. They shared a history of stern parenting and distant patriarchs and their commiseration in their own separate but uniquely similar upbringings had allowed them to find each other. They took solace in the comfort that came in knowing that they were not alone in their experiences; that they were not the only ones to have lived beneath the constant shadow cast by fathers that ruled with fire and iron while dressing it as love. Each could understand the other in a way very few could.

David had rebelled from his father's traditionalism through art. He had pursued it from an early age, earlier than he could even remember. At first his father had let it be, David's art nothing more than a child's pastime. But as David grew older, his father had rapidly demanded the cessation of all so-called childish fancies.  By the time David had turned eleven his father had hired him a tutor to continue his studies after the close of the school day. These private lessons focused on math and science primarily.

Another tutor came on Tuesdays and Thursdays, however, after the first tutor retired for the day. This tutor provided David with lessons at the piano to which he didn't take in the slightest. His father didn't push him to excel there as he did in his scientific pursuits; not as long as he stuck to the study and the tutor's instructions, which included an hour's practice every night. His father, despite his relative disinterest fastidiously timed these sessions upon his return from work, though he paid little attention to the quality of David's efforts. The piano in Dr. Li's eyes served as barely more than a refined and reluctantly accepted substitute for his child's foolish artistic inclinations.

After a few months of this torture David had come up with the brilliant plan of canceling his piano lessons and holding on to the payments that he had been instructed to deliver to the tutor. His father worked late every night at the hospital and his mother barely knew that he existed.

Mrs. Li had suffered a breakdown when David was six and had been tucked away in a small suite in the back of the house, her deteriorating sanity hidden from the sight of the neighbors, yet virtually untreated due to the shame it would bring on the house. Rather than taking her to a doctor or having her institutionalized, David's father wrote her prescriptions himself and had her medicated in house on the hush.

Drugged into a shambling stupor, Mrs. Li mainly puttered around her three rooms caring to a straw-stuffed babydoll from her childhood, cooing at it and pressing it to her breasts for its feedings. At the time David hadn't understood the severity of his mother's break and the tragedy that had befallen the Li family, but he had understood that between the departure of his afternoon tutor and his father's return from the hospital he could go unmonitored. So, he had canceled his lessons and week-by-week he had saved up that money until he had set aside enough for his very own easel, a few basic canvases, primers, brushes, and a set of oil paints.

Thinking back on it, David didn't know how his eleven year-old self had expected to hide this monstrosity from his father. Beautiful as that easel had been, it had taken up an entire corner of his bedroom and the supplies that went with it were too many to successfully hide in his room, especially as not an inch of that bedroom knew any privacy from his father.

Dr. Li had noticed it immediately upon arriving home that evening. He hadn't yelled or lost his calm in the slightest. That wasn't Dr. Li's way. Never was. He simply saw it, took it in with one calm breath, and nodded to his son. David knew what that nod meant. For a moment he had tried to hold his ground, pleading with his father. Dr. Li brooked no argument. He took one step into David's room, reached over to a half-sized door and unbolted its lock. David had resisted a moment more before Dr. Li began to remove his belt. That had been when David lost his nerve.

Hanging his head he had walked over to the closet, stooped down through its miniature door, and eased into the cramped crawlspace beyond. As his father slid the door shut, clicking the bolt back into place, David had hugged his knees tight against the uninsulated cold and huddled there in the pitch dark. Outside he could hear his father dismantling the easel and bagging up the brushes, paints, and the whole lot.

He knew then that he had been in for a long night. The attic was normal, his alone time to think over his wrongs and pray for forgiveness for his sins. David had stopped praying years earlier, but his thoughts would keep him up nonetheless and long past the time when his muscles had tensed and knotted. Unable to stretch out or lie down in the tight space, David would eventually drift off in a knotted ball propped up against the door. If he leaned anywhere else he risked pushing up against a stray nail through one of the joists. He knew these nights too well, and so he braced for it, flinching with every snap of the easel's wooden frame carried through the thin walls, and every whisper of the garbage bag as the canvases and supplies were hauled away.

When he woke in the morning and his father had finally unbolted the door, David had found his entire purchase discarded on a tarp in the garage. Dr. Li didn't try to return it or ask for his money back. No, David's father simply destroyed it, hacked it to pieces and left the splintered remains of the easel on that tarp, covered in the spilled contents of the paints. The oils still ran, ever so slightly, dripping from the broken fragments and pooling beneath it, as if bleeding out from the mutilated remains of some grotesque corpse.

David didn't cry when he saw what had become of that exquisite frame, of his attempt at rebellion. Instead he had stretched out his sore limbs, calmly gathered up the ends of the tarp forming a loose bag around the broken fragments, and hauled the remains to the trash bin outside. David knew this was his due. Dr. Li had drilled that into him years prior, and so he knew how to take his lumps. Plus, even then David understood that this was far from the worst punishment he had ever received or would receive. Love was harsh and firm, but his father only did it because he cared; because David made him do it, needed him to do it.