He called at nine at night and said, “I heard it’s tomorrow. Can I come.” Not a demand. He’d found out from his sister, he’d been drinking again, and he asked once. And I said: “You had a chance to say something true in December and you said that instead. Stay home.” Then I hung up before he could answer, which is the part my daughter doesn’t know and the part I’ve been turning over for six months, because he did call. He asked. He gave me the opening and I closed it with a sentence I’d been rehearsing since Christmas.
I wanted to win that phone call. That’s the honest description. He humiliated my husband’s memory in front of two children who barely remember their grandfather, and for three months I carried that around getting sharper about it, and when he finally reached out I was more interested in delivering the line than in what happened after. The photograph the next day wasn’t an oversight either. I picked it out. I looked at four of them and chose the one where I’m laughing.
Six months of nothing. His wife sends the grandchildren’s school pictures, which is her being decent and probably not his idea. What I keep landing on is that he was nineteen when his father died and he never once got to be angry at him out loud, and everything he said at Christmas was aimed at a man who couldn’t hear it, and I know that, and I knew it in December. My daughter is right that I did something I can’t undo. She’s wrong that it was the wedding. It was nine o’clock the night before, when a forty-one-year-old man asked his mother if he could come, and his mother had a better sentence ready.
