Dad was work.
I believe he loved us.
But work was the only language of love he really understood.
He provided.
He built.
He made sure we never needed anything material.
But he missed dinners.
Recitals.
Parent-teacher meetings.
School plays.
Even the afternoon I broke my wrist in third grade.
“Your father is building something for us,” Mom would always say.
“He’ll be here when he can.”
He was always somewhere else.
When I was fourteen, Mom discovered a lump.
She died two years later.
I was sixteen.
My father wasn’t there.
He was in Chicago negotiating the biggest deal of his career.
The doctors had believed Mom had a few more weeks.
Dad thought he had time.
She died on a Thursday afternoon in March at Emory hospice.
I was holding one of her hands.
Our housekeeper, Marisol, held the other.
Raymond waited outside.
Raymond Ellis had been my father’s driver since I was thirteen.
