The Phone Call I Kept Rehearsing
My father and I didn't speak for almost four years. Not because of one explosive fight — there wasn't a single moment you could point to and say, that's where it broke. It was quieter than that. A slow drift, the kind that happens when two stubborn men both decide the other one should call first. I thought about calling him more times than I can count. I'd get as far as pulling up his number, thumb hovering, and then I'd think of something he said at my mother's funeral — something small, something he probably doesn't even remember saying — and I'd put the phone down again. I held onto that one sentence like it proved something. Like it gave me permission to keep waiting him out. Here's what I didn't understand at thirty-one that I understand now at closer to fifty: grief makes people say strange things. It doesn't excuse unkindness, but it explains a lot of it. My father buried his wife of thirty-eight years and I buried my mother, and ...