The Toys My Brother Threw In The Fire

Everybody laughed. Kyle laughed hardest. Kyle asked for that story, when he was little. He would say, “Tell the one about Pal, Dad.”

“I told it wrong,” my father said. “Every time. I left out the whole back half.”

“What’s the back half?”

“I went up in the haymow and bawled till it was dark and my mother had to come find me with a lantern. I didn’t speak to him for most of a month. I’d lay awake and hate him. I was seven years old and I’d lay there with my hands in fists.” He held them up, those big knuckled hands. “And I never did forgive him for it. He’s been in the ground since 1989 and I haven’t yet.”

A car went by. He waited for it.

“It didn’t make me tough. It made me quiet. It made me the kind of man who sits in a lawn chair with a plate on his knee while his grandson’s toys burn. And I took that and I told it to my boy like a brag. Thirty years I told it. I taught him that’s what a father does.”

He turned and looked at me then, for the first time since he had come up my walk. His eyes were red all the way around.

“Kyle didn’t come up with that on his own, Jenna. He got it from me. I put it in his hands like a pair of tongs.”

I had the rabbit in my lap. I was holding the short ear.

“What do you want from me, Dad?”

“Everybody’s coming back out at noon for leftovers. Same as always. Kyle and them don’t head home till after.” He swallowed. “I’m going to say it to him. Out at the pit, in front of the whole bunch, right where I told it wrong all those years. I’m going to say the back half.”

“Good.”

“I can’t do it by myself.”

It came out of him so small I almost did not hear it.

“I’ll get out there and he’ll grin at me and I’ll fold. I know I will. I’ve folded for that boy since he was fifteen years old, and I folded for my father before that. But if you’re standing there.” He stopped and started again. “If you’re standing there with Noah, I’d have to look at the two of you. I don’t believe I could fold with you looking.”

He was not asking me to make peace. For the first time in my life my father was on my porch asking me to help him pick a fight he should have picked decades ago.

“I’m not saying sorry to him,” I said.

“I’d turn you around and send you home if you tried.”

Behind us the screen door creaked.

Noah was standing there in his dinosaur pajamas with his hair flat on one side. He looked at his grandfather. Then he looked at what was in my lap.

He did not run. He walked over the way you would walk up on something that might fly off. He picked Clover up with both hands and turned him over and found the short ear.

“He got hurt,” Noah said.

“He did,” my father said. “Your grandma fixed him the best she could. She couldn’t get the others, bud. I’m sorry. She tried.”

Noah put the rabbit under his chin and breathed in.

“He smells like Grandma’s house,” he said. And then he climbed into my father’s lap, rabbit and all, which he had not done since he was a toddler, and my father put his arms around him and looked out at the street and cried without making any sound at all.