I ate at a diner that my father used to like, by myself, and had the eggs he always ordered. The waitress didn’t know him and had no reason to. I was just a person having eggs.
I thought about the text message. I thought about the fern photograph, and all the photographs before it, and the late-night calls, and the Sunday check-ins. I thought about Christmas and the comment that stung and the eleven-day gap between that comment and the text that followed it.
He had been trying. In his way, in his timing, in the specific inarticulate manner of a man who processed things by putting them in writing and making them official — he had been trying.
I thought about Vanessa. I thought about her sitting in Dad’s armchair at the reading, holding those papers, the rehearsed smoothness of her voice. I thought about the waiver. I thought about the February call and what she’d admitted and what she’d stopped short of admitting.
I thought about the fact that she had done his grocery shopping for three years. That she had driven him to the cardiologist. That she had answered the calls I didn’t get because I was in Portland. That she had arranged the funeral.
These things were true. What she had done on Tuesday night was also true. Both things existed in the same person, which is generally how it works with people.
I wasn’t ready to see her. But I thought that someday I might be.