He said, “If she’s really coming, she’s going to ask why her mother stopped bringing her, and I can’t tell her that I asked her to.” I stood in the doorway holding the chess set and suddenly understood why his voice sounded frightened. I asked him what happened in 1998, and he sat down before answering. He told me my mother had stopped bringing me because she had started drinking again, and he had confronted her about it. She had told him that if he ever contacted me directly, she would make sure I never saw him again. He said he chose silence because losing six years with me was better than risking the rest of my childhood.
I asked him why he hadn’t told me once I became an adult. He said he had tried twice, but both times he backed out because he was afraid I would think he had been trying to replace my mother. Then he opened a drawer and pulled out a stack of birthday cards, all addressed to me and none of them ever mailed. He had written one every year since I was twelve. I read the first one and started crying before I reached the second paragraph. He had written about the chess tournaments he watched on television, the school plays he wondered whether I had performed in, and the daughter he hoped I would someday have. Then he looked at me and said, “I never stopped being your grandpa just because your mother stopped letting me be one.”
I put the chess set on his table and told him I had brought it because I wanted my daughter to meet the man I remembered. He asked whether she knew about him, and I said I had told her every story I could remember. Then he started crying and said he had been afraid I would come back angry. I told him I wasn’t angry at him—I was angry that two adults had made a decision when I was twelve and let me spend twenty-nine years believing it was mine to forget him. He reached across the table and moved one of the chess pieces toward me, just like he used to when I was six. Then he smiled and said, “You’re still terrible at this.” I laughed for the first time since I walked in, and I told him my daughter would be there Saturday. This time, nobody was going to stop him from meeting her.
