Chapter Three: Before
He left when I was six years old.
I know this because I remember the specific morning — the way the light came through the kitchen curtains in yellow stripes, the smell of burnt toast, my mother’s voice talking to someone on the phone in the low, careful way she used when she didn’t want me to hear. I know this because I stood at the top of the stairs in my pajamas with the little ducks on them and I understood, without being told, that something permanent was happening.
He came back once that year. He stood in the doorway with his coat still on and he looked at me and he said, you’ve gotten tall, and I remember thinking: it’s only been four months.
After that, the visits were irregular. A birthday here, a Christmas there — always a few days late, always slightly hurried, always with the quality of someone passing through on the way to somewhere more important. He sent money when he remembered. He called on the wrong date more often than the right one.
My mother never said anything cruel about him. She was careful in the way only very hurt people learn to be careful. She would say, your father is busy, and your father has a lot going on, and later, when I was old enough, she stopped saying anything at all and simply answered my questions with a small, tired smile that said: I know. I know.
I grew up. I learned to not need him. Or I learned to perform not needing him, which is different but looks the same from the outside.
I went to college on a scholarship I won myself. I got a job. I built a life — small but solid, like a house built by someone who has had to learn construction one room at a time. I was proud of it. I didn’t think about him often. Or I told myself that.
When I got the call that he was sick, I went to the hospital once. He was asleep. I sat in the chair beside his bed for forty minutes and looked at his face — older, smaller, less frightening than I remembered — and then I left without waking him, because I didn’t know what I would say.
I didn’t know if he would say anything either.
He died eleven days later.
The lawyer’s office called the day after.
