Chapter 4 - The Man Still in the Driveway
He knocked about twenty minutes later.
Wade opened the door. I watched from the kitchen doorway.
My father stood on the porch with his jacket squared on his shoulders and his hands where you could see them, like he'd stood out there and worked out how to look before he raised his knuckles.
"I'd like to talk to him," he said. "Five minutes. That's all I'm asking."
Wade looked at him a moment. Then he stepped back and opened the door the rest of the way.
My father came in. He stopped when he saw me.
"Five minutes," I said.
He nodded. His eyes moved around the kitchen — the kettle, the three mugs on the counter, the wooden box on the table — and I watched him take the measure of it. The plain weight of the room. A kitchen that ran fine without him in it.
He pulled out the chair across from me and sat. Mom stayed by the counter. Wade leaned against the far wall with his arms folded, not blocking anything, just there.
My father glanced at him. "Could we maybe—"
"No," I said.
He let it go. He folded his hands on the table.
"I know I don't have the right to walk back in here and expect anything," he said. "I know that."
I waited.
"But I've been keeping an eye on you from a distance for a while now. Longer than you'd think."
Something moved in my chest. Not warmth. More like the hair going up on my arms.
"What does that mean?" I said.
"I've been in touch with your school. And with your coach, two seasons back. I asked him to keep an eye on you for me."
The kitchen went quiet in a new way.
"Coach Doyle?" I said.
"He never told you." My father said it like it was a mark in his column.
"You paid him."
"I asked him to look out for you. I made a donation to the booster club. It wasn't—"
"You paid a man to watch me and not tell me."
"I was trying to stay connected to your life."
"That's not connected," I said. "That's spying."
Mom set her mug down on the counter. The click of it was small and hard.
"Gary." Her voice had changed. The flat was gone. What took its place was worse — tired, and completely certain. "Listen to yourself right now."
"I was trying to be involved—"
"You were trying to feel involved," she said. "Without paying the price of actually showing up."
He turned toward her. "You never would've let me—"
"You never asked."
The silence after that had a weight to it.
Wade hadn't moved off the wall. My father looked at him, and I could see the next calculation running — another angle, another door to try.
"You've been good to him," my father said to Wade. "I mean that honestly. But there's a lot coming — college applications, money decisions, his whole future — and I have resources you don't have. I'm not saying that to be cruel. I'm saying it because it's the truth and somebody in this room should."
Wade looked at the table. Then back up at him.
"He got picked for the state STEM fellowship last spring," Wade said. "Full selection. Forty kids out of the entire district. You know about that?"
My father was quiet.
"We drove two hours each way for the interview," Wade said. "He wore a tie he borrowed off me because he doesn't own one. On the way home we stopped at a diner and he ordered the priciest thing on the menu, because he already knew he'd gotten in before anybody official said so." Wade paused. "You want to know how he knew?"
My father shook his head.
"Because he'd earned it," Wade said. "Every night. At that table."
He pointed at the kitchen table. The same table the box was sitting on. The same table where the two of them had done chemistry at eleven at night.
My father looked at the table like he was seeing it for the first time.
"I can still be part of his life," he said. But the certainty had drained out of it.
"That's up to him," Wade said.
Everybody looked at me.
I thought about the box. About fourteen letters, written and never mailed. About a woman who got sick last winter and didn't tell me how bad it was until she was already on the other side of it, because she didn't want me carrying that fear around.
"I need to read the letters first," I said.
My father frowned. "What letters?"
I put my hand flat on the lid of the box.
"The ones she wrote him every year," Wade said quietly. "On his birthday."
My father looked at my mother. She didn't look away.
"You wrote to him?" he said.
"I wrote to him," she said. "He never got them. That was my call. I wasn't ready to explain you to a kid who was still sounding out words."
Something crossed my father's face that I hadn't seen yet. It wasn't anger. It wasn't him working an angle. It looked like the front edge of him understanding what he'd actually thrown away.
"I'd like to come back," he said. "After you've read them. If you'll let me."
I looked at my mother. She gave me nothing — no nod, no shake of the head. It was mine to answer.
"I'll think about it," I said.
He stood. He took his jacket off the back of the chair. At the door he stopped and turned around.
"The car," he said. "It's yours either way. I'll leave the keys on the porch. No strings on it."
He set them on the little table by the door and left.
The three of us listened to his shoes cross the porch, go down the steps, cross the gravel. The car door opened and shut. The engine turned over.
Wade pushed off the wall and picked up the kettle. He topped off my mug without asking.
"You don't have to decide anything tonight," Mom said.
"I know," I said.
I opened the box.
The first letter was dated the year I turned four. Her handwriting was younger then — looser, less sure of itself than it is now. The paper had gone soft along the folds.
Dear baby, it started. You won't read this for a long time. Maybe never. But I needed somewhere to put all the things I can't say out loud yet.
I got through the first three words of the next line and had to stop.
May you like
Mom sat down across from me. She didn't say anything. She just sat there.
That was enough.
