The Courthouse
Friday, the second of October, I got up at five and could not eat. Ingrid stood behind me in the bathroom in her robe while I shaved, and she said, “Does your dad know the time?” and I said yes. I told her he had said he does not do crowds. It was a lie I had told her three weeks before, in a kitchen, to keep a bigger lie from getting out. She looked at me in the mirror. She did not say anything.
We drove to Fenner separately, because Marit wanted to ride with Ingrid. I got to the courthouse at nine-fifteen and sat on a bench in the hall for half an hour, looking at the floor tile. The courthouse clock was four minutes slow.
I saw him come in, and I would like to say I was glad. I wasn’t. My stomach dropped through the floor. He walked in wearing the navy suit I knew from my mother’s funeral, with his hair combed wet, and he took the very last bench in the courtroom, in the corner by the window, and folded his hands, and did not look at me.
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I thought: he is going to say something. He is going to stand up and say something in front of everybody, and I will have earned every word. He did not. He sat there, in the clearest light I had seen all month, like a man waiting for a bus.
And I understood, looking at him from the front of that room in a gray suit I had borrowed from Rollie because I did not own one, that I had been wrong about everything. He had not come to cause a scene. He had come to be in the room.
Ingrid came through the side door with some yellow flowers she had picked out of a neighbor’s yard on the way. She stopped at the top of the aisle. She looked up the benches and saw my father, and her whole face opened, the way a window does. She had not known. I had told her he could not come.