The Broom I Handed My Son In Law

“I’ve been in that house three weeks by myself,” he said. “It’s real quiet. You hear things when it’s quiet.” He rubbed his jaw. “My dad used to clear the whole table. One arm. Everything on it. Mom would have it cleaned up before he got his boots on. I always swore I’d never be that bad.” He laughed, and it was not much of a laugh. “And I wasn’t. I only ever threw the one plate at a time. I thought that made me a different man.”

I did not say anything.

“Nobody ever told me to clean it up,” he said. “Not one time. Not my mom, not Amanda. You’re the first person who ever handed me the broom. I hated you for about a week.” He looked at his hands. “I don’t know how to do it different, Glenda. I don’t know how you learn it at thirty-five. I want my family back and I don’t know what to do.”

“I’m going to tell you something I only just told my own daughter,” I said. “My father did what you did. He did it for forty-one years, and my mother swept, and he went to his grave a deacon who never once looked at what was on that floor. Do you know why I’m sitting here talking to you?”

He shook his head.

“Because when your little girl asked you, you swept. You did it badly and you did it mad, but you got down and picked up the pieces. My father would have walked out to the barn. So I think there might be more to you than there was to him. I might be wrong.”

He did not move.

“Here is what I’ve got for you, and it’s the only thing I’ve got. I can’t give you Amanda. She’s not mine to give and she’s not yours to take back. But Pastor Jim knows a man in Columbus, a counselor, who sees fellows on Tuesday nights. Men who grew up at tables like yours. You go. You go every week. Not so she’ll come home, because she may never come home, and you need to hear me say that. You go because that little girl is going to have a daddy for the next fifty years no matter where she sleeps, and you get to decide what kind.”

“And if I go?”

“Then you can see Ava here on Saturdays. At my table. I’ll cook, and you can tell me if it’s dry.”

He made a sound that was not quite a laugh. He put his cap back on and stood up.

“Tuesday,” he said.

“Tuesday. Seven o’clock. I’ll have Pastor Jim call you with the address.”

He went that first Tuesday. He went the second. The third Tuesday he did not go, and Pastor Jim told me so, and I thought, well, there it is.

The fourth Tuesday he went back. He told the counselor he had sat in the parking lot the week before for forty minutes and could not make himself walk in. Then he walked in. He went every Tuesday after that for fourteen months, and as far as I know he missed two, once for the flu and once when the shop had him on a rush job in Schuyler.

He did not get my daughter back.

I want to be honest about that too. Amanda rented a little two-bedroom on the east side of Columbus that January, six blocks from Ava’s new school. She went to full time at the dentist’s office. The divorce was final the following summer, and nobody fought over anything, and he has paid his support by the fifth of every month. She told me once that she had forgiven him, and that forgiving him and living with him were two different things, and that it had taken her eleven years and one glass of milk to learn the difference.