The Morning I Paid My Father Back

I didn’t say anything. I didn’t trust my voice.

“Tyler’s a good man,” my father said. “I knew it the first time I met him. He looked at my trucks like he’d want to know how they worked, not what they cost. I think that’s what scared me. He’s not somebody I could look down on. So I had to try harder.”

“You hurt me,” I said quietly. “You hurt him.”

“I know.”

“It doesn’t just go away because you showed up.”

“I know that too.” He finally turned to look at me. “I missed the first half of that aisle, Kayla. My dad walked you the first half because I wasn’t man enough to be there. I’m going to think about that every day I’ve got left.”

I believed him. I still do.

“Then don’t make me ask again,” I said. “For anything. Not for you to come to Thanksgiving, not for you to sit with Tyler at Christmas, not for you to show up when we have kids. Just be there.”

He nodded. He couldn’t talk.

I put my hand on his arm, the same way I had in the church.

“The seat’s still yours,” I said. “It’s always going to be yours.”

Grandpa

The DJ, who was really Donna’s brother Mike with a phone and a speaker, called for the father daughter dance a little after nine.

I had planned to skip it. When I had made the list a month before, I had crossed it out with a pen. But Mike didn’t know that, or maybe Donna told him to call it anyway.

My father stood up. Then he looked across the barn at Grandpa Harold, sitting on a hay bale with his cane between his knees.

My father walked over and held out his hand to his own father. Grandpa looked up at him. I saw his chin shake.

“Go on, Dad,” my father said. “You walked her first. You get the first dance.”

So I danced with my grandfather to an old Alan Jackson song, under the lights on the trusses. He could barely move. We mostly stood in one place and swayed. He held my hand in his rough old hand and kept his cane hooked over his other arm.

“I want to tell you something,” he said near the end of the song.

“Okay, Grandpa.”

“I was hard on your daddy. Too hard. I didn’t know any other way to be. My father was hard on me.” He swallowed. “I never told your dad I was proud of him. Not once. Not when he opened that lot, not when he paid for your grandmother’s funeral when I couldn’t. Not ever.”

“Grandpa.”

“I waited fifty eight years,” he said, “to see my boy do what he did today. Walk back in a door he walked out of. Hand somebody what’s theirs and mean it.” His eyes were full. “I didn’t think I’d live to see it. I’m glad I did. I’m glad it was for you.”

I put my face against the shoulder of his brown suit and cried, right there in the middle of the pole barn, and I did not care who saw.

When the song ended, my father was standing at the edge of the concrete. Grandpa let go of me and limped over to him. He put his hand on my father’s face, the way you would a little boy’s.

“I’m proud of you, Rick,” he said.

I have never seen my father cry like that. Not when my mother left. Not when Grandma died. He stood there in his work clothes with his father’s hand on his face and cried like his heart was coming out of him.

Then he wiped his face on his sleeve, came over, and held out his hand to me.

“Can I have what’s left of this one?” he asked.

Mike had started the next song. I don’t remember what it was. I just remember dancing with my father on the concrete floor of a hog barn, with hay dust in the air and my husband watching from the cake table, and feeling like something that had been broken a long time was being set right.