Chapter 5 - The Nursing HomeDad was watching an old western with the volume too loud when I walked into his room at Oakwood Manor, still holding the sweater and the charm.
"Margaret. You're early this week." He smiled at me, easy as anything.
I didn't smile back. I set the tiny wooden sunflower down on his tray table without a word.
His face changed instantly. All the color went out of it.
"Where did you get that?" he asked.
"Did you see Diane after 1986?"
"No." The answer came out too fast, too clean.
I laid the sunflower sweater across his lap, the brown petal facing up.
"She came back," I said. "In 1992. She brought a daughter with her."
Dad turned his face toward the window, and that was all the confirmation I needed.
"Tell me," I said, pulling a chair directly in front of him so he couldn't look anywhere else. "I found out today. You've had forty years. Tell me now."
His shoulders sagged like something inside him had finally given out. "Your mother was out that day. Diane knocked on the door. She said she wanted to come home."
My throat tightened until it hurt. "And what did you tell her?"
"Your mother had just started sleeping again at night. You'd moved out. Things were finally settling down."
"Settling down," I repeated.
"People had stopped talking about it. About her leaving. About the — the embarrassment of it. Me, not being able to control my own daughter."
"Control?" The word came out of me like a slap.
"That isn't what I meant."
"It's exactly what you said."
He wouldn't lift his eyes from his hands. "She made her choice. At sixteen, she made her choice."
"No sixteen-year-old understands what forty years is going to feel like, Dad."
He flinched at that, actually flinched, and for one second I almost stopped. Almost.
"What happened at the gate?" I pressed instead. "The night she left."
"I caught them there. I told her to come back inside the house."
"And when she wouldn't?"
His voice cracked clean in half. "I told her that if she walked away with that boy, she shouldn't expect to come home again."
Tears burned in my eyes, hot and sudden. "You said that. To your sixteen-year-old daughter."
"I never believed she would actually go through with it."
"But she did. And six years later, she came back anyway, and you closed the door on her a second time."
He covered his face with both hands, and for a moment neither of us said anything at all.
"Did she ask about me?" I finally said. "When she was standing at that door?"
He nodded, still hidden behind his hands. "She wanted to know if you blamed her."
"And what did you tell her?"
"That you'd suffered. Because of what she did."
"Did you tell her I searched for her for years? Did you tell her Mom never once stopped looking, not until the day she died?"
"No."
"Did you tell her I would have opened that door myself?"
His eyes came up, wet and red, ninety years old and looking suddenly like a small, frightened boy. "No."
I stood up.
"You didn't protect any of us, Dad. You just spoke for us. For forty years, you spoke for all of us, and you never once asked if that's what we would have said."
He started to cry, quietly, his shoulders shaking.
Most of my life, seeing him look that small would have stopped me cold. That day, it didn't.
"I love you," I told him, and meant it completely. "But loving you doesn't make what you did any less terrible."
"I thought I was saving this family."
"You saved yourself one uncomfortable conversation, and you left the rest of us holding forty years of unanswered questions instead."
He had nothing left to say to that.
When I reached the door, he called after me, his voice thin. "Margaret. Are you coming back tomorrow?"
May you like
I stood there with my hand on the handle for a long moment.
"I don't know," I said, and walked out.
