Mom began crying.
“I figured that part out.”
She looked at me.
“Your father didn’t grow up the way you think he did.”
***
Life in Dad’s childhood home had become unstable when he was a teenager.
Mom didn’t give me every detail.
“Your father didn’t grow up the way you think he did.”
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Dad hadn’t given them to her either.
But for several years, he lived with a foster family.
A crowded house.
Kids coming and going.
Too many shoes by the door.
Too many plates drying beside the sink.
Dad hadn’t given them to her either.
“And that chair?” I asked.
“Kitchen table.” Mom looked at it. “There weren’t enough matching chairs. Gilbert got that blue one.”
“Why keep it?”
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“Because it was his.”
Something about the simplicity of that answer stopped me.
Mom told me Dad used to joke that the chair leaned as much as he did.
“Why keep it?”
Nobody formally assigned it to him.
They simply began expecting him to sit there.
Dinner came, and there was a place for Dad.
Breakfast came, and there was a place for Dad.
I thought about the photograph.
I went to the drawer and found it.
