Ricky Best was not simply riding the MAX Green Line home on that Friday evening in late May whose events catapulted Portland into a collective paroxysm of horror. His was not just a rush-hour commute.

The 53-year-old father of four was riding the light rail home to a new family-focused stage of life after two decades in the U.S. Army.

The train carried him toward a waiting family and a Memorial Day holiday weekend pregnant with plans. A Friday night barbecue. A 40-mile circuit hike around Mount Hood with his kids.

His oldest son, Erik, had gotten busy with his freshman year of college and they hadn't hiked together in too long.

But five months have passed since that night, and their hike never happened. Erik Best now thinks about how to become the man his father would've wanted, without his dad there to show the way. The 19-year-old tries to draw purpose, not bitterness, from the event that stole a husband and father from his family.

Erik wears the camouflage Army hat his father loved and starts a sentence with words that are hard to hear: "After dad died."

♦♦♦

Happy Valley was supposed to be a refuge. This was where Ricky Best wanted to become a grandfather, spend time with his family and make up for moments missed during his 23 years in the Army.

Erik, a sophomore at the University of Portland, grew up knowing the dangers of his father's job. Ricky didn't share many details with his four kids: Erik, Isaac, David and Tramanh. People live in a bubble, he'd tell them.

At dinner, he'd sometimes talk about what passed for light moments in places like Iraq, including the time he had to grope a camel blocking the road to make sure it hadn't been equipped with an improvised bomb.

When his mom was gone, Erik remembers pressing his dad: What's it really like? Ricky would demur. Looking in his eyes, Erik says, he saw a primal side of his father. He could tell he had seen things he couldn't contemplate. "You felt a shiver run down your spine," he says. "Like ghosts dancing."

They were a military family, and they moved so much growing up that Erik lost track: Born in Oregon, then on to Texas, Hawaii, Texas, Maryland, Texas, Kentucky, Oregon. Or something like that. "Home was where family was," Erik says.

Then Ricky retired, and it was just Oregon. Ricky got a job working for the city of Portland's Bureau of Development Services. After a career in the military, he'd joke, the hardest part of each day was deciding what to wear.

Ricky and Erik found a way to spend time together by working in the yard. Two nights before Ricky died, they trimmed the ornamental pines until dark. Erik can't recall what they talked about. What he remembers is how it made him feel. "At times, he seemed more like a friend when we'd have those conversations," he says.

They planted grapes together and were building an arbor to hold them.

Erik finished it this summer, without him.

♦♦♦

What happened on that train became national news: three people stabbed, two of them fatally, by a white man shouting hate in a country with a resurgent white supremacy movement and a president who resisted denouncing it.

Erik knows this. And he does not want to talk about it. No, he allows, the president did not call with his sympathies.

This is the thing: Erik saw goodness in people after the attack, including the outpouring of love and grief and humanity on the chalked wall at the Hollywood Transit Center. But he also saw selfishness on the same rough cement surface, the messages contorting his family's tragedy into other peoples' politics.

"I don't want to politicize my dad's death and use it as a petty talking point," Erik says. "What I want is for it to be remembered as an act that can remind us that we're all human beings and should come together."

Ricky didn't try to shelter Erik from the existence of the racism he confronted on the MAX. Erik remembers a story his father told him while stationed in Kentucky. Ricky encountered members of the Ku Klux Klan recruiting outside a grocery store one night.

While his wife, Myhanh, paid for groceries, Ricky sidled up and began a conversation, feigning interest.

Then his wife, who escaped Vietnam after Saigon fell, came out. He had met her during an accounting class at Portland Community College and they had fallen in love.

He took her by the arm, looked at the white supremacists, and did what those who knew him remember him doing so often.

He smiled.

♦♦♦

So much of what's happened since May is a blur, filled with grief and hard days during which Erik says he must remind himself to put one foot in front of the other.

He is composed when he talks about his father. He pauses and draws in long breaths, but doesn't shed a tear. You can't mourn all the time, he says.

"You either have a choice between wallowing in self-pity or doing something positive with your life," he says.

Erik sees his path now as a way to fulfill his dad's wishes. Erik hadn't been sure what he wanted to do with his life. He says his trajectory seemed to crystallize the night he learned his father had died, as he felt the weight of becoming the man of the house descend on him. He's studying pre-med.

"It would be terribly cruel and unfair for me to expect my little brothers or sister or mother to shoulder the burden," he says. "She lost her soulmate. What sort of person would I be to not step up? If you could help someone carry their cross, why wouldn't you?"

He's thought about joining the Army and becoming a trauma surgeon. Or maybe he'll be a dentist or a neurosurgeon. "Because it's the hardest," he says.

♦♦♦

Five months after Ricky's death, Erik still sees his father in the memories he replays in his mind's eye.

In one, Erik is a freshman in high school, riding the bus home. His father is retiring from the Army, awaiting his honorable discharge. He isn't due back in Oregon, not yet.

But the school bus pulls up and there Erik's father is, standing in the driveway, leaning on the green CRV, a smile on his face. After 23 years and so many deployments, Ricky Best is finally home, ready to start a new chapter.

Erik moves toward his father – not a run, but a slow, purposeful march – and looks him in the eyes. Even now, he doesn't remember where these words came from.

"It's been too long," he tells his dad. "Too long."

— Rob Davis

rdavis@oregonian.com

503.294.7657; @robwdavis