Part 25
Part 25 of 27 of Eleven Years of Thursdays by Helen Abbott
I carried the thing about our father for two years and three months.
I want to be honest about why. It was not nobility. In the beginning it was cowardice, and in the middle it was habit, and near the end it turned into something worse, which was that I had started to enjoy being the one who knew. I had spent thirty three years being the daughter who was told nothing, and it turns out there is a flavor to holding a piece of somebody else’s life in your mouth, and I understood my mother better in those two years than in all the time she was alive, and I did not care for the understanding.
What broke it was ordinary.
We were cleaning out the garage on a Saturday in April, the second April, and Danny found a coffee can of drill bits with our father’s writing on the lid, and he stood there with it and said, not sadly, almost warmly:
“At least he never had to know.”
I put down what I was holding.
“Danny.”
“I’ve thought about that a lot,” he said. “Out of the whole thing, that’s the one I got to keep. He got to not know.”
“He knew.”
It came out of me flat and fast and I did not decide to say it.
My brother stood in my garage with a coffee can of drill bits in both hands.
“Mom told him in the spring of 2016,” I said. “Before my wedding. She told him everything, where you were, that you were safe, all of it. He asked two questions and then he said he wasn’t going to do it twice. He never came. She asked him at Christmas, she asked him in the hospital, she asked him nine days before he died. Patty told me two years ago and I have not known how to say it since.”
The furnace vent ticked.
Danny set the coffee can down on the workbench and lined it up square with the edge, and I watched my mother do it through my brother’s hands.
“Okay,” he said.
“Danny.”
“No, I mean it.” He was very still. “That’s, hang on.”
He stood there for a long time. Two and a half minutes, maybe. I have never in my life let a silence go on that long without filling it, and I let that one go, and it is the single best thing I have ever done for another person.
“He hung up on me at Christmas,” Danny said finally.
“I know.”
“I’ve always told myself he didn’t know it was me.”
“That was 2014. He didn’t know yet.”
“Sure.” He nodded. “Sure. But he thought about it after. After she told him, he’d have gone back and thought about that phone call.” He rubbed his thumb along the lip of the workbench. “He’d have had two and a half years to think about that phone call.”
And then my brother said, “Good.”
I did not know what to do with my face.
“I’m not proud of that,” he said. “I’m saying it because it’s true and I’d rather say the true one to you. Part of me is glad he had to carry it, and part of me would give anything to have been able to tell him it was fine, and both of those are in there at the same time and I’ve stopped trying to make them get along.”
He picked the coffee can back up.
“Thank you for telling me,” he said.
“It took me two years.”
“Yeah, well.” He almost smiled. “You’re from this family.”