Chapter 63 Richard
CALEB
I had been saying I was going to see my father since August, which meant I had been finding reasons not to since August, which meant the thing had been sitting in the back of my chest for four months taking up space that I kept trying to reclaim by telling myself I would deal with it next week.
January arrived and I stopped finding reasons.
I called him on a Tuesday and he picked up on the second ring and I said I want to come Thursday, and there was a pause on the line, not long, just long enough to tell me the call had mattered more than he was going to say, and then he said I will be here.
The city apartment was not what I had built in my imagination over four months of preparation.
I had imagined something diminished. Something that communicated consequence visually, the specific smallness of a man who had lost the leverage that had been holding his world in shape. What I found instead was expensive furniture arranged in a space that had not yet become a life, a kitchen that had not been cooked in, a view over the city that was excellent and impersonal and told you nothing about the person looking through it.
He met me at the door.
He looked the same.
I stood in the doorway for a moment with that fact and felt the specific disappointment of having prepared for something that did not arrive and having to adjust in real time to what was actually in front of you.
He was still Richard Kessler. Still controlled. Still the version of himself that had been performed for so long the performance had become indistinguishable from the person.
We sat at the table by the window and he had made coffee that was not how I liked it and I drank it without comment because some things were not the point.
He talked first, the way he always talked first, presenting information he had gathered from public sources about my season and my contract review as a demonstration that he had been paying attention in my absence, which was its own kind of reaching toward something he did not know how to reach toward directly. I let him finish. I had learned this year that letting people finish was often the most useful thing you could do.
When he stopped I said: I am not here to update you on my career.
He looked at me and said: Then why.
I thought about the answer I had been working on since August.
I am here because I wanted to see you, I said, and feel the way I feel right now in a room with you. I have been carrying around what I would say when I saw you for months and the honest version of it is just that. I wanted to be here and feel what being here feels like.
Which is how, he said.
Like someone who made the right choices and is living inside them, I said. Not despite you. Just regardless of you. That is what I wanted to feel and I feel it and I wanted you to be able to see it.
He was quiet for a long time.
The January city spread out gray and uncommitted through the window behind him.
I made mistakes, he said finally. With the girl.
Her name is Mia, I said.
He looked at his coffee.
I made mistakes in how I handled the situation, he said again, and I understood that this was the closest he was capable of getting to what I needed him to say and that I was not going to wait for the full version because the full version might not exist.
You used a dying woman's illness as leverage against an eighteen year old girl, I said. That is not a mistake. A mistake is a miscalculation. What you did was a choice made with full information and I need you to understand that I know the difference.
He did not say anything.
I looked at him across the table and felt something I had not expected to feel. Not anger. Not satisfaction. Something quieter than both. He was just a man who had learned very young that control and safety were the same thing and had built his entire life inside that equation and had never once been required to examine whether the equation was true. Everything around him had simply adjusted to accommodate it until the year it did not.
I am not going to cut you off, I said. You are my father and that is not something I can make nothing regardless of what happened between us. But I am not letting you back into my life the way you were in it. You do not get to fund things or manage decisions or insert opinions into choices that are mine to make.
He looked up.
What do I get, he said.
The truth, I said. If you want it. I will tell you how the season is going when you ask. I will come for dinner occasionally. I will answer your calls when I have time to.
And the girl, he said.
Her name is Mia, I said. She is going to be an oncology nurse and she is the best person I know and you do not have a vote about her.
He looked at the table for a long time.
We talked for another hour after that, about hockey and about Walter and about the apartment on the west side and whether I was eating properly, which caught me so completely off guard that I almost laughed, and I saw him register that I almost laughed and something shifted fractionally in his expression that might have been the closest he had come to laughing at himself in a very long time.
At the door he offered his hand.
I shook it.
I walked out into the January city and stood on the pavement and took stock of what I felt.
I felt okay.
Genuinely and specifically okay, not as a performance of okayness but as an actual condition of being. The visit had been hard and real and now it was done and I was still standing and none of the things I had been afraid of feeling had arrived.
I called Mia and she picked up on the first ring.
Hard and okay, I said before she could ask. Both at the same time.
She was quiet for a moment.
Genuinely okay, she said, and it was not a question exactly, more like a confirmation she was asking me to give rather than just assert.
Genuinely, I said.
Good, she said. Come home.
Same time tonight, I said.
Same time, she said.
I started the truck and sat in the parking lot for a moment before pulling out, feeling the January air come through the cracked window, and thought about the contract review on Monday and what Porter thought it was going to say and what I had been looking at in a browser window since February of last year and the very specific thing I was going to do in January that had nothing to do with contracts or hockey and everything to do with a girl who had been telling me since the beginning to say things like facts rather than confessions.
Monday first.
Then everything else.