“Dad,” I whispered, staring at the chair, “what are we supposed to do with this?”
Mom began to cry.
She pressed her fingertips to her eyes while I waited.
Finally, she said, “That was his chair.”
“Where?”
“In Hawaii.”
“I figured that part out.”
She looked at me.
“Your father didn’t grow up the way you think he did.”
Dad’s childhood home had become unstable when he was a teenager.
Mom didn’t know every detail.
Dad hadn’t told her everything either.
But for several years, he lived with a foster family.
It was a crowded house, with kids constantly coming and going, too many shoes by the door, and too many plates drying beside the sink.
“And that chair?” I asked.
“Kitchen table.” Mom looked at it. “There weren’t enough matching chairs. Gilbert got that blue one.”
“Why keep it?”
“Because it was his.”
The simplicity of her answer stopped me.
Mom said Dad used to joke that the chair leaned as much as he did.
Nobody officially assigned it to him.
They simply began expecting him to sit there.
Dinner came, and Dad had a place.
Breakfast came, and he had a place.
I thought about the photograph.
I went to the drawer and pulled it out.
“Is this them?”
Mom nodded.
For years, I’d seen only a beach.
Now I noticed the people gathered along the left edge.
Teenagers.
A woman beside the cooler.
Someone crouched in the sand.
Dad’s thumb had worn the photograph smooth around those tiny figures.
Not over the ocean.
Over them.
“He wasn’t looking at the beach,” I said.
