…your pride. That was the last line. I laughed, a little drunk, and asked what it was. Mara didn’t laugh. “Green door, number fourteen. Maple Street. Behind the pharmacy,” she said. “Dad’s been there for eleven months. The hospice nurse said tonight or tomorrow.” I hadn’t spoken to my father in ten years. I thought he was in a nursing home in Ohio. I’d been paying for it every month, by direct deposit, so I wouldn’t have to visit.
“There was no nursing home,” Mara said. “I sent your checks back to your account every month. You never noticed.” Forty people were staring at us now. “I married young because Mom was sick. I stayed in this town because Dad needed someone. Last year he couldn’t walk anymore, so I rented the apartment behind the pharmacy so he could hear the church bells. I go every morning before work and every night after.”
I looked down at the key in my hand. “Why didn’t you tell me?” Mara smiled again, that terrible gentle smile. “You were busy becoming something, Rob. He asked me not to make you choose.”
I drove there with the hazard lights on. I don’t remember the road. The green door was exactly like the photo. I used the key at 11:38. He was in a hospital bed by the window, so thin I almost didn’t recognize him. But his eyes opened when I said, “Dad,” and he whispered my childhood nickname, the one nobody had used in thirty years.
I sat with him until 3:12 in the morning. I told him about my job, my promotion, my apartment. He didn’t care about any of it. He held my hand and asked if I was happy. I told him the truth for the first time in ten years: no. He squeezed my fingers and said, “Then go home, son. Your sister will show you how.”
He passed a little after sunrise, with both of us there. Mara made coffee in his tiny kitchen and handed me a cup without saying a word. I told you up front how this ends for me. I moved back home in the spring. I didn’t become anything. I became her brother again.
