“Your father smells like an old garage. My mother notices things like that, and I don’t want to spend Thanksgiving managing the situation.”
I stared at her.
“He’s not coming,” she added.
She said it calmly.
As though she had solved a logistical problem.
For several seconds, I didn’t respond.
I’m better with problems that have physical solutions.
A broken furnace.
A leaking line.
Something you can take apart, examine, and put back together correctly.
This wasn’t that kind of problem.
But eventually, I understood exactly what I was looking at.
This wasn’t really about a smell.
My father had smelled faintly of his work for as long as Karen had known him.
She had eaten at his table.
Accepted his help.
Let him drive forty minutes one February morning to repair our furnace when it stopped working.
Nobody had complained about his garage smell then.
