The Christmas My Father Threw Grandpa Out

I do not say any of this to excuse my father. I say it because understanding how a man gets to the point of shoving his own father’s wheelchair through a door into a blizzard is different from forgiving it, and I have done the first without ever quite managing the second.

Frank moved into my spare room the following week, officially, no discussion needed since neither of us wanted to discuss it, and for a few days things were almost peaceful in the strange, bruised way things get peaceful right after something breaks. I went back to work at the plant, because I had worked logistics and scheduling at Hendrick Cabinet Works for nine years, ever since I came home from college with a business degree and no better offer than the family business, and my father was, on paper and in every practical sense I understood at the time, my boss’s boss. I kept my head down. I did my job. I did not speak to Steve except when the work required it, and he did not speak to me either, which suited both of us fine.

Then, on the Sunday after New Year’s, Frank cleared his throat over breakfast and asked me, in a voice steadier than I had heard from him in years, to take him somewhere.

“Where?” I asked.

“Just drive,” he said. “I’ll tell you when.”

He did not tell me much. He gave me turns, one at a time, in a voice that had none of its usual hesitation, and I found myself driving a route I did not recognize, out past the plant, out past the elementary school, out past the little diner on Route 9 where I have eaten a thousand grilled cheese sandwiches, and then onto roads I had never once had a reason to drive, wide roads with deep ditches and old oak trees, past a stretch of land with white fencing that seemed to go on for half a mile.

“Grandpa,” I said, when the fencing gave way to a stone gatehouse and an iron gate taller than my car, “I think we’re lost. This is somebody’s private drive.”

“Keep going,” he said.

The gate began to open before I had even slowed down all the way, which should have told me something, and a man in a dark coat stepped out of the little gatehouse and raised a hand, not to stop us but to wave us through, and as we passed he leaned down to my window with a smile I did not understand yet.

“Welcome back, Mr. Hendrick,” he said, looking past me at my grandfather. “We heard you might be coming out this way again.”