Chapter 4 - The Driveway
There were cars lining both sides of my street — more cars than I'd seen there since Eleanor's funeral. My porch light was on, and beyond it, string lights I didn't recognize were strung along the eaves of my own house, the kind you'd hang for a party.
For one terrible second, my first thought was that something was wrong. That someone had died, or there'd been some kind of accident, and people had gathered the way people do.
Then I saw Marcus.
He was standing on my front lawn in a collared shirt, and beside him was Denny, and beside Denny was Denny's wife, Priscilla, holding a sheet cake with both hands like she was afraid of dropping it. And behind all three of them, spilling out onto the grass, were my grandchildren — five of them, ranging from six years old to seventeen, and every single one of them was holding a piece of poster board.
I sat in my car in the driveway with the engine still running, my hands shaking on the wheel, and I read the signs one at a time as my eyes adjusted.
CONGRATULATIONS GRANDPA
CLASS OF THIS YEAR
WE'RE SORRY, DAD
I don't remember turning the car off. I remember Marcus opening my door for me, the way he used to when he was small and I'd come home from a double shift too tired to do it myself.
"Dad," he said, and his voice cracked right down the middle of the word.
I stood there in the driveway in my cap and gown, diploma still in my hand, staring at my sons for the first time in three and a half years.
"What is this?" I managed.
Marcus rubbed the back of his neck, a gesture he'd had since he was twelve years old and about to admit to something. "Carol Ann called me."
That surprised me more than the string lights had. "Carol Ann?"
"She got my number off something of yours, I don't even know what. Called me a month ago. Told me you were about to graduate, and that she thought it was a damn shame your own sons hadn't seen you study for four years straight, and that whatever we thought we were protecting by not calling, we'd gotten it backward."
Denny stepped forward, his eyes red-rimmed already. "She sent us pictures, Dad. Of you at the library. Studying at that coffee shop with her. She said you'd failed a class your first year and gone right back and taken it again instead of quitting."
"She had no business—"
"She had every business," Marcus said. "Because we were sitting around thinking you were up here blowing through Mom's money on some vanity project, and instead you were..." He stopped, and I watched my oldest son's throat work as he tried to get the rest of the sentence out. "You were doing the hardest thing I've ever heard of anybody doing. At sixty-eight. Alone. And we weren't speaking to you."
I looked past them at my grandchildren, still holding their signs, my youngest granddaughter, Josie, six years old, clearly having no idea what any of it meant beyond the fact that there was cake and everyone seemed to be crying, which to a six-year-old is simply what grown-ups do sometimes.
"We should have called," Denny said. "Every single Christmas we didn't call. Every birthday. We had this whole story in our heads about you wasting Mom's money, and we never once asked ourselves what you actually needed it for."
"It wasn't Mom's money," I said, and my voice came out rougher than I meant it to. "It was ours. Hers and mine both. Forty years of both of us going without so you two could have what you needed. I never once resented giving you that. But I earned the right to spend what was left of it on something that made me feel like a person again after I lost her."
"I know that now," Marcus said. "I'm sorry it took me four years and a phone call from your friend to understand it."
Priscilla stepped forward with the cake, which read, in slightly crooked blue icing, CONGRATULATIONS DR. BRAGG — a joke, since I'd only gotten a bachelor's, not a doctorate, but I laughed anyway, a real laugh, the first one that had come easy in longer than I could remember.
"I'm not a doctor," I said.
"You're a college graduate at sixty-eight who didn't quit when his own kids stopped calling him," Marcus said. "That's close enough to a miracle that we figured the cake could exaggerate a little."
May you like
Josie tugged on my gown. "Grandpa, are you gonna cry?"
"I already am, sweetheart," I told her, and she seemed satisfied with that answer, the way only a six-year-old can be.
