Part 5
He rubbed both hands over his face. “So I’d tell myself I’d call when I could get through it without feeling like that. Then I’d put it off again. After a while, I’d gone so long that I couldn’t figure out how to start.”
The words came faster now, as though the hours he’d spent arranging them were no help once he was in front of me.
“I know how that sounds. You were hurting more than any of us, and I left you there because I didn’t want to deal with my own feelings. But I kept thinking there was time. One more week wouldn’t make any difference.”
His voice caught. He pressed his lips together and tried again.
“When Claire called about the house, I finally understood what I’d been doing. Someone else was living there. I couldn’t even tell her the last time I’d seen you.”
I hadn’t seen him cry since the funeral. Now he was thirty-six, standing in an apartment he had never visited, trying to finish a sentence while tears ran into his beard. My first impulse was to take the blame for something, anything, if it would let him stop.
I reached for the kettle instead.
“Sit down, Nate. You’ll need something hot after that drive.”
He pulled out a chair. I made coffee, put a cup in front of him, and took the seat across the table. For a while, he kept both hands around it without drinking.
“I believe your explanation,” I said. “I watched how hard it was for you when she died. I can understand how avoiding me became easier each time you did it.”
His grip on the cup loosened. He looked at me, waiting.
“Understanding it hasn’t given those years back to me.”
His hands tightened around the cup. “I’m not asking you to forget them.”
“You called when you needed twenty-eight thousand dollars. You came to dinner while you were paying it back. For those two years, being around me was possible.”
He stared at the table.
“I’m grateful you repaid it,” I said. “But I would have been happier with a son who kept coming afterward. I had allowed myself to think that was what we were doing.”
“It wasn’t about the money, Dad.”
“Then why did I stop hearing from you when it was paid?”
He opened his mouth, but no answer followed. I gave him time. Outside, a car door closed, and someone called across the lot to a neighbor.
“All four of you knew where to find me,” I said. “I kept the house. I answered. I made dinner. I think after enough years of that, you stopped believing I could choose anything else.”
I left my chair and stood beside the window. A thin cloud had made the water pale, and two boats were moving slowly away from the landing. I knew which bend in the path their wakes would reach first.
“I don’t wake up furious with you,” I said. “I wake up wanting to take my walk. I have things here I want to do, and I’m doing them without waiting to hear whether anybody will join me.”
He sat silently for a long time. I stayed at the window until I could turn toward him without feeling that old need to fill every silence.
“Can we build anything from here?” he asked. “Anything at all?”
“We can exchange Christmas cards. We might have dinner somewhere once a year, if we both want to arrange it. I can imagine that.”
He searched my face for the rest.
“I won’t be holding every Sunday open. I won’t plan my holidays around people who may come. And I won’t sit in a house where all I have to do is wait for my children to remember the way over.”
“That sounds like somebody you barely know,” he said. “How am I supposed to have a father like that?”
I sat down again. “I had children like that for ten years, Nathan. I learned.”
He looked toward his mother’s pictures.
Before noon, he left. The canvas bag remained beside the chair. Later, I carried it to the storage closet without sorting through it.
In the weeks afterward, I kept expecting the old loneliness to return. Instead, whole days went by when I never checked the phone.
I still missed Elaine. I could be reaching for a spoon and remember the way she’d lean against my shoulder, and have to stop what I was doing. That could happen in any kitchen; moving hadn’t changed it.
What surprised me was how little I missed the arrangement I’d left behind. I had loved my family, and still did, but the evenings I wanted back belonged to the years when Elaine was alive. I had been preparing dinners for people as they used to be, hoping the right food would make them sit down as though nothing had changed.
On Tuesdays, I went to the bookstore. The owner was becoming the closest friend I’d had in decades, partly because he would notice if I failed to come in. He still argued as if the fate of American literature depended on convincing me about a particular paragraph.
I made good dinners and ate them while they were hot. In the mornings, I walked around the lake, came home, and drank coffee beside the window. Elaine’s photographs were within reach, and the empty chair across from me no longer had to be filled before the day could begin.
Three weeks after Nathan’s visit, I booked a ticket to Italy.
Venice first, then Bologna, then south toward the coast. I chose the journey from Elaine’s saved photographs, spending an afternoon comparing places she had wanted to see. At one point, I caught myself turning the tablet toward her side of the table.
The room stayed quiet. I turned it back and finished the reservation.
That night, I laid the travel confirmation beside her picture. I had begun talking to her again, comfortably enough that I no longer lowered my voice. I liked to think she could hear me.
“You’d tell me to make room for them,” I said. “You always could, even when you were exhausted.”
She had remembered whose birthday was coming and called people back when she had a dozen reasons to postpone it. I could see now how often a full table had begun with something she did while the rest of us were occupied elsewhere. I loved her for it, and I couldn’t spend the rest of my life trying to do it alone.
“I’m taking the trip, Laine. I’ll find one of those little outdoor restaurants you liked. I’ll order badly, probably, and have wine in the afternoon anyway.”
I could almost hear what she would have said about my ordering. That made me smile, and then it made my eyes burn.
“When they bring the glass, I’ll lift it for you. You should have been there.”
I folded the confirmation and put it with my passport. The skillet was clean on the stove, my walking shoes stood by the door, and the books for the journey were waiting in the spare room.
I had a flight to catch. Before that, there would be a morning by the lake, and breakfast at my own table.
I took one plate from the cupboard.