Four Hours in the Dark to Dad
“Lacey Ann,” he said. “Let me say it. Before the doctor comes.”
“Dad…”
“Let me.” He swallowed. “You said I wasn’t in the room.”
My stomach clenched. “Dad, I shouldn’t have said…”
“You were right.” He looked at the window, not at me. The oxygen hissed. “I wasn’t. Not like you meant.”
I waited.
“Never told a soul. Not Pastor. Not Roy.” A breath. “I didn’t stay in that shop.”
I stared at him.
“Last hour, I came out.” He stopped to breathe. “Stood outside the window. In the flowerbed. Your mother’s hydrangeas.”
“Dad,” I breathed.
“Couldn’t make my feet go through that door.” His voice cracked. “Pulled a calf out of a frozen pond once. Bare arms. Couldn’t walk in and say goodbye.”
I took his hand in both of mine.
“Heard you singing. Through the glass.” He rested. “‘Softly and Tenderly.’ I thought, she’s doing what a man ought to do.”
I could hardly see him.
“Ashamed. Couldn’t look at you after.” Another breath. “Then you said it at the church. So true I couldn’t stand it. So I went hard on you.”
He closed his eyes and opened them.
“Forgave you that afternoon. By suppertime.” His thumb moved on my knuckles. “Couldn’t make my mouth say ‘come back.’ Poor thing to keep, pride. I kept it ten years.”
I could only hold his hand harder.
“It wasn’t only you, Dad,” I said finally, and my voice shook. “You drove her to every appointment. I watched you sit in the truck outside the oncologist’s with your hand over your eyes, and I never said a thing.” I wiped my face. “I picked the one sentence I knew would go deepest. I aimed it. That wasn’t grief. That was cruelty.”
“You were twenty-two.”
“That’s not an excuse.”
“It’s a reason,” he said. A breath. “Reasons count with the Lord, I’ve found.”
“I should have called you the next week,” I said. “Any day of ten years. I had your number. I was proud, too.”
“Well,” said my father, with the ghost of a dry smile, “you come by it honest.”
We both laughed, a little, and the laugh turned into something else, and for a few minutes neither of us said a thing. The sun lay across our joined hands.
“Dad,” I said. “Say it. I need to hear it out loud.”
“Said it already.” He drew a breath. “Say it again. Yes. Lacey Ann, I forgive you. Asking you to forgive me.” Another. “The shop. The window. The door.”
“I do.”
His eyes were shining. “Your mother’s verse. Over the sink. Remember?”
I remembered. It hung in a frame over the kitchen sink all my childhood, in red thread on cream linen. Be ye kind one to another, tenderhearted, forgiving one another, even as God for Christ’s sake hath forgiven you. Ephesians 4:32. I had looked at it while I dried a thousand dishes.
“Read it every morning,” he said. “Ten years. Figured it’d stick.”
“It stuck,” I said.
“I think it did,” said my father.
Dr. Haines came by at nine, a tall, tired woman with a clipboard. Pneumonia in the right lung, she said, on top of a heart in what she called a flare, pumping at about a third of what it should. Antibiotics in the line, a water pill to pull the fluid off. If he kept responding, he could go home in five days.