“Yes.”
He sat on the nursery floor beside my rocking chair.
For a while, neither of us spoke.
He simply watched Wren.
“She has your mother’s nose.”
“Raymond said that too.”
“Raymond is usually right.”
Then his voice changed.
“He was right about something else too.”
“What?”
“That I should have been there.”
He meant my mother’s final day.
He told me Raymond had called him from Atlanta.
Once.
Twice.
Then a third time.
Telling him to leave Chicago immediately.
Dad believed there was still time.
There wasn’t.
“I’ve thought about that every day for sixteen years,” he said.
He admitted that afterward, he couldn’t look at me without remembering the hospice hallway.
So instead of showing up, he sent Raymond.
To graduations.
College.
My wedding.
“I thought I hadn’t earned the right to be there.”
Then he looked around the nursery.
“The only thing I knew how to do was build things.”
