Part 16
Part 16 of 27 of Eleven Years of Thursdays by Helen Abbott
Patty was expecting me. She had the good cups out again.
“I wondered when you’d get to this,” she said.
“Did my father know?”
“Sit down, Claire.”
“Aunt Patty.”
“Sit down, because I’m going to tell you, and you’re not going to be able to stand up for it.”
I sat.
“Your mother told him in the spring of 2016,” she said. “About two months before your wedding.”
The porch. The yard. A dog barking three houses over.
“She held it a year,” Patty said. “She held it a whole year by herself, and then she couldn’t, and she told him at that kitchen table on Kenwood on a Tuesday, and she told me the next morning because she had nobody else on this earth to tell.”
“And what did he do?”
“He listened to the whole thing. He asked two questions. Where is he, and is he safe.” Patty’s hands were flat on her knees now. “And then he said, I buried my son.”
“No.”
“He said, I buried my son in August of 2014, and I am not doing it twice.”
I got up. I sat back down. There was nowhere to go on a four season porch.
“He never went,” Patty said. “Not once. Two and a half years, and he never got in the car, and your mother asked him at Christmas and she asked him in the hospital in Springfield when they told him about the liver and she asked him nine days before he died, and every single time he said no.”
“Why?”
“Because he was frightened, honey.”
“That’s not a reason.”
“It’s the only one there ever is.” Patty picked up her cup and put it back down without drinking. “Your father was a man who fixed boilers for thirty years. He could not fix this, and he could not look at a thing he could not fix, and that is the whole of it, and I have hated him for it and forgiven him for it about four hundred times.”
I thought about Christmas of 2014. A gas station phone. A man picking up in a house on Kenwood and hearing something in the first half second and putting the receiver down.
“Did she tell Danny?” I said. “Does Danny know Dad knew?”
Patty looked at me, and it was the first time on that porch that she had looked frightened of me rather than for me.
“No,” she said. “And that one’s yours now.”