CHAPTER FIFTY-SIX
Alex
Now
Arthur noticed before I said anything, because Arthur noticed everything.
“Grandpa Robert hasn’t called,” he said, the second Sunday it didn’t happen. Not upset. Just accurate, the way he reported most things.
“He’s busy,” I said. “The hospital thing.”
“He’s always busy,” Arthur said. “He calls anyway.”
I didn’t have an answer that wasn’t a lie, so I didn’t give him one.
I told him I wasn’t sure, which was true, and he accepted it the way he accepted most things he suspected were bigger than what he was being told, which was to let it sit without pressing, and to watch me more carefully for a while after.
The third Sunday, he didn’t mention it at all. That was worse.
I didn’t tell Della and Riley’s family the specifics. I told Riley everything, every week, in the late-evening quiet where we’d taken to saying the hard things out loud because neither of us wanted to build a marriage on the kind of silence I’d built the last one on.
“He’ll come around,” Riley said, more than once. He didn’t sound certain. He sounded like a man saying a thing because his wife-to-be needed to hear it and because he’d decided, for her sake, to believe it until proven otherwise.
“You don’t know that.”
“No,” he agreed. “I don’t.”
“Then why say it?”
“Because the alternative is you sitting on this porch every night assuming the worst,” he said, “and I’d rather you borrow a little of my hope than none at all. You can give it back if it turns out I was wrong.”
I loved him so much in that moment that it was almost inconvenient, given that I was also furious at an old man in California and frightened for my son and generally unfit for tenderness. I took the hope anyway. It was the only currency either of us had.
Arthur, for his part, handled the silence with more grace than either of the adults around him managed.
He didn’t ask about it again after that first Sunday, but I noticed him take a photograph down from his dresser one evening, Robert at the christening, holding Arthur as an infant with the stiff formality of a man unused to babies, and set it face-down in the top drawer instead.
Not thrown away. Just put somewhere he didn’t have to look at it every morning.
I found it there weeks later while putting away laundry and didn’t say anything, and I understood, holding it, that he’d found his own quiet way of protecting himself from a loss he hadn’t chosen and didn’t yet have language for.
I put the photograph back exactly where I’d found it and closed the drawer.
Six weeks and one day after the restaurant, a car I didn’t recognize turned into the driveway.
I was at the kitchen sink. I saw it through the window before I heard it. A rental sedan, moving at the careful speed of someone checking a mailbox number against a piece of paper on the passenger seat. It stopped. The driver’s door opened.
Robert MacAfee got out of it in a suit that looked like it had spent five hours on a plane and hadn’t recovered, older somehow than he’d looked across that restaurant table six weeks earlier, though nothing about him had changed except everything.
Riley was beside me at the window before I’d said a word.
“That the grandfather?”
“That’s the grandfather.”
“You want me out there for this?”
I thought about it. About the porch, about my father standing in a doorway a lifetime ago, about how many of the hardest conversations in my life had happened with someone I loved standing just behind my shoulder. “Yeah,” I said. “This time I do.”
We met him on the porch steps. He stood at the bottom of them for a moment, looking up at the house, at the mountains behind it, at the two of us, with the particular hesitation of a man who had rehearsed something on a five-hour flight and was no longer certain it would survive contact with actually saying it.
“I should have called first,” he said. “I got as far as the airport and decided a phone call was a coward’s way to do this, and then I was on a plane, and now I’m standing in your driveway without having thought past that part.”
“You’re here,” I said. “That’s the part that matters. Come sit down.”
We sat on the porch steps, the three of us, in a row, the way you sit when nobody’s quite ready to be inside four walls together yet.
“I have spent six weeks being angry at a dead man,” Robert said finally, looking out at the yard rather than at either of us, “which is a singularly useless way to spend six weeks, since he isn’t available to receive it.
” He was quiet a moment. “I have also spent six weeks being angry at you, Alex, which I flew here to apologize for in person, because a letter felt like exactly the kind of managed, handled thing Della would have told you I hate to be given, and because you deserved better than an apology that cost me nothing to send.”
“You don’t have to apologize.”
“I do,” he said, and turned to look at me directly for the first time.
“I was cruel to you at that table. You came a very long way to be honest with me, and I made you sit there while I decided whether to punish you for it. That was ungenerous of me, and I’ve had six weeks to sit with exactly how ungenerous, which is its own kind of penance. ”
I hadn’t expected that, delivered to my face on my own porch steps, and I felt my throat tighten around whatever I’d been about to say back.
“I have also,” he went on, “spent a great deal of those six weeks looking at a photograph of my son at seven years old, on my desk, trying to work out what, exactly, I thought I’d lost.” He folded his hands, spotted with age, and looked at them rather than at us.
“I called Arthur every other Sunday for years because I loved him, not because a lab confirmed I was obligated to. A lab result doesn’t undo years of Sunday phone calls.
It doesn’t undo the fact that he is, in every way that has ever mattered to me, my grandson.
” He looked up at me. “I was a fool for six weeks. I flew here to stop being one in person.”
I was crying by then, quietly, the way you cry when relief and grief arrive in the same breath and you can’t fully separate them.
“He’s missed you,” I said. “He noticed right away. He’s too polite to say so, but he noticed. He took your photograph off his dresser and put it in a drawer so he wouldn’t have to look at it every morning.”
Something moved across Robert’s face. A wince, quick and unguarded, the first crack in probably forty years of boardroom composure. Definitely the first I’d personally witnessed.
“Then I have a great deal of making up to do,” he said. “Starting today, if he’s home from school soon, rather than waiting for a wedding invitation to do it properly.”
“There’s a wedding, too,” I said. “I hope you know you’re invited to it. I recognize I’m inviting you to watch the woman your son failed for ten years marry a considerably better man than he managed to be. I’d understand if that felt like too much.”
“It is not too much,” he said, with something almost fierce in it. “It is, in fact, precisely the kind of ending I would like to see, having spent forty years watching families end considerably worse. I would be honored.”
Riley, beside me, said nothing, but I felt his hand find mine on the step between us, and hold on.
We were still sitting there when the school bus came around the corner twenty minutes later, and Arthur got off it, and stopped dead at the end of the driveway at the sight of a strange car and a familiar old man rising slowly from our porch steps to meet him.
“Grandpa Robert?”
“Hello, Arthur.” Robert’s voice had gone thick, and he did not try to hide it, which told me more about how far he’d come in six weeks than anything he’d said on the porch.
“I owe you an explanation for a great deal of silence you didn’t deserve.
I thought I’d rather give it to you in person than over the phone. ”
Arthur crossed the driveway at something just short of a run, and Robert MacAfee, a man who had built four hospitals and sat on more boards than I could name, opened his arms and held on exactly as long as the boy needed him to.
“And Alex,” Robert said, over Arthur’s shoulder, once they’d finally let go of each other.
“The trust stands. Exactly as drafted. I’ll not have my attorneys anywhere near the idea of amending it.
Some men in my position would tell you blood clarifies these things.
” His voice steadied, found something like its old certainty.
“I’ve found the opposite is true. It only ever confuses what was already simple. ”
We sat on the porch until the light went orange and then purple over the mountains, the four of us, and nobody was in any hurry to be the one who suggested going inside.