The Father Who Found His Voice

Waiting for Them to Come Home

The last two days of that week passed differently than the first six had. Maurice’s speech kept firming up, unevenly, some sentences arriving whole and others fracturing halfway through, exactly the kind of uneven progress Earlene had told me to expect and not be discouraged by. He tired quickly and needed long rests between conversations. But by Friday evening, he could hold a genuine back-and-forth exchange for ten or fifteen minutes at a stretch, longer than he’d managed in eight months combined.

We talked about a great many things in those two days, filling in some of the silence that eight months of one-sided conversation had left between us. He told me stories about his own father, who had built the house we were sitting in, and about a sister named Ruthie who had died some years before I ever joined this family, the same sister he’d mentioned the first night, the one this family had, in his words, “decided had outlived her usefulness” once she got old and needed help of her own.

“I watched them do it to her,” he told me, slower now but steadier, “and I told myself if I ever got the chance, I’d make sure it didn’t happen twice under my own roof.”

He asked me, more than once, what I wanted to do about Kelly and Phil, about the account, about all of it, and I found I did not have a clean answer. I did not want revenge. I did not think revenge was a thing that improved anybody’s dignity, mine included. I wanted, more than anything, to be seen the way Maurice had apparently been seeing me all along, and I wanted him to be able to say so, out loud, to the people who most needed to hear it.

“Then I suppose,” he said, taking his time with each word, “we’d better let them come home and find out.”