“Why keep it?”
“Because it was his.”
The simplicity of her answer stopped me.
Mom said Dad used to joke that the chair leaned as much as he did.
Nobody officially assigned it to him.
They simply began expecting him to sit there.
Dinner came, and Dad had a place.
Breakfast came, and he had a place.
I thought about the photograph.
I went to the drawer and pulled it out.
“Is this them?”
Mom nodded.
For years, I’d seen only a beach.
Now I noticed the people gathered along the left edge.
Teenagers.
A woman beside the cooler.
Someone crouched in the sand.
Dad’s thumb had worn the photograph smooth around those tiny figures.
Not over the ocean.
Over them.
“He wasn’t looking at the beach,” I said.
Mom shook her head.
“Not usually.”
Dad left Hawaii at twenty when an opportunity opened on the mainland.
Nobody forced him out.
His foster family encouraged him to go.
He expected to return.
But one year became several.
Oregon became a job.
The job became a life.
Then Mom.
Then me.
“So why didn’t he go back?”
Mom looked toward the window.
“At first, money.”
That made sense.
“Then?”
“Work.”
“And after that?”
She went quiet.
“He thought he’d waited too long.”
“Too long for what?”
“To show his face.”
I frowned.
“They were his family.”
“He didn’t use that word easily.” Mom picked at the corner of a condolence card. “The longer he stayed away, the more embarrassed he became about staying away.”
It sounded ridiculous.
It also sounded exactly like Dad.
“Where do you fit into this?”
Mom looked at me.
“What?”
“The whole story. Dad told me I’d understand you if I knew it.”
She pushed her chair back.
“When we were first married, he compared everything to Hawaii.”
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