I stayed at the kitchen table after Marcus finished speaking.<\/p>\n
The box was still open in front of me.<\/p>\n
The shoes sat beside it, and the envelope lay where I had placed it.<\/p>\n
Nothing had changed.<\/p>\n
But I no longer felt the same way about the things I could see.<\/p>\n
I had spent years believing that my father was easy to understand.<\/p>\n
He was a practical man.<\/p>\n
He worked, paid his bills, kept his belongings in order, and expected the people around him to do the same.<\/p>\n
When he was disappointed, he rarely explained why.<\/p>\n
When he was pleased, he rarely said so.<\/p>\n
I had learned to recognize his moods by the sound of his footsteps and the way he placed his keys on the counter.<\/p>\n
That had been enough to get through most days.<\/p>\n
It had not been enough to understand him.<\/p>\n
I looked at the black shoes again.<\/p>\n
They were still ordinary shoes.<\/p>\n
Their soles were clean, their laces were neatly arranged, and their size matched mine.<\/p>\n
I could describe them without difficulty.<\/p>\n
What I could not describe was the thought that had led my father to choose them.<\/p>\n
Perhaps he had simply noticed that I needed a pair.<\/p>\n
Perhaps he had bought them long before he decided what to do with the box.<\/p>\n
Perhaps there had been a reason I had not considered.<\/p>\n
I was learning that the number of possible explanations could grow quickly when the facts were few.<\/p>\n
That did not make any one explanation more likely.<\/p>\n
I pushed the shoes a little farther from the edge of the table.<\/p>\n
Marcus watched me do it.<\/p>\n
"You don't have to finish everything tonight," he said.<\/p>\n
"I know."<\/p>\n
I answered too quickly.<\/p>\n
He did not challenge me.<\/p>\n
That made me hear my own voice more clearly than I wanted to.<\/p>\n
I had always been impatient with uncertainty.<\/p>\n
If something went wrong, I wanted to know who had caused it.<\/p>\n
If someone gave me an unexpected answer, I wanted to know what they were leaving out.<\/p>\n
I had mistaken that impatience for good judgment.<\/p>\n
Sometimes it had helped me solve problems.<\/p>\n
Other times, it had made me decide what happened before I had enough information to know.<\/p>\n
My father and I had been alike in that way.<\/p>\n
Neither of us liked admitting that we did not know something.<\/p>\n
The difference was that he could remain silent for days.<\/p>\n
I usually kept asking questions until the other person became tired of answering them.<\/p>\n
I looked at Marcus.<\/p>\n
"Did he ever talk about me?"<\/p>\n
The question came out quietly.<\/p>\n
Marcus took a moment before responding.<\/p>\n
"Your father mentioned you sometimes."<\/p>\n
"About what?"<\/p>\n
"Different things."<\/p>\n
I waited.<\/p>\n
Marcus looked down at the table.<\/p>\n
"I don't want to make something up just because you want an answer."<\/p>\n
I felt the first sting of disappointment.<\/p>\n
Then I understood what he meant.<\/p>\n
A vague memory from someone else could become something much larger in my mind.<\/p>\n
I could take a passing remark and turn it into evidence that my father had been thinking about me all along.<\/p>\n
Or I could decide that the lack of detail meant he had never cared.<\/p>\n
Either conclusion would be easier than admitting that I did not know.<\/p>\n
"That's fair," I said.<\/p>\n
Marcus nodded.<\/p>\n
He did not try to comfort me.<\/p>\n
I was grateful for that, although I might not have admitted it at the time.<\/p>\n
Comfort could be another kind of explanation.<\/p>\n
Sometimes people told you what they thought you needed to hear because they could not stand watching you sit with a difficult feeling.<\/p>\n
I had done that myself.<\/p>\n
I had told people everything would work out when I had no idea whether it would.<\/p>\n
I had called that kindness.<\/p>\n
Now I wondered how often I had simply been trying to end an uncomfortable conversation.<\/p>\n
I reached into the box and moved a piece of packing paper aside.<\/p>\n
The paper folded beneath my fingers.<\/p>\n
I smoothed it against the table instead of throwing it away.<\/p>\n
It was an insignificant action, but I found myself paying attention to it.<\/p>\n
I wanted to be careful.<\/p>\n
I did not want to turn the things my father had left into a collection of symbols before I had finished looking at them.<\/p>\n
That did not mean I could stop having feelings about them.<\/p>\n
The shoes reminded me of the practical advice he used to give.<\/p>\n
The envelope reminded me of all the conversations we had never managed to finish.<\/p>\n
I could not separate those reactions from the objects.<\/p>\n
I could only try to distinguish what I remembered from what I imagined.<\/p>\n
That distinction had become important to me.<\/p>\n
For years, I had remembered my father through the moments that hurt.<\/p>\n
I remembered the conversations that ended too soon.<\/p>\n
I remembered questions he answered with instructions.<\/p>\n
I remembered the occasions when I wanted him to tell me that he understood and he told me what I should do instead.<\/p>\n
Those memories were real.<\/p>\n
They were not necessarily the whole story.<\/p>\n
I had no reason to erase them.<\/p>\n
I also had no reason to pretend that they were the only things that had happened between us.<\/p>\n
I glanced toward the clock.<\/p>\n
More time had passed than I realized.<\/p>\n
The kitchen light hummed faintly above us.<\/p>\n
Outside, the window reflected the room back at me, making the glass look almost black.<\/p>\n
Marcus shifted in his chair.<\/p>\n
"Do you want me to stay?" he asked.<\/p>\n
I considered telling him that I was fine.<\/p>\n
It was the answer I usually gave when I wanted a conversation to end.<\/p>\n
Instead, I looked at the box before answering.<\/p>\n
"Just a little longer."<\/p>\n
"All right."<\/p>\n
He settled back.<\/p>\n
I appreciated the simplicity of that response.<\/p>\n
He had not asked me to explain what I was feeling.<\/p>\n
He had not told me how I should interpret the letter.<\/p>\n
He had simply agreed to stay.<\/p>\n
For once, I did not need anything more complicated than that.<\/p>\n
I rested my hands on the table.<\/p>\n
The cardboard box had become the center of the evening, but it was still only a box.<\/p>\n
It could hold objects.<\/p>\n
It could preserve things someone did not want to throw away.<\/p>\n
It could carry something from one place to another.<\/p>\n
It could not tell me why my father had made his choices.<\/p>\n
That part would have to come from somewhere else, if it came at all.<\/p>\n
I had spent years waiting for certainty from a man who rarely offered explanations.<\/p>\n
I did not want to spend the rest of my life doing the same thing with his belongings.<\/p>\n
I looked down at the shoes.<\/p>\n
Then I looked at the envelope.<\/p>\n
I was still curious.<\/p>\n
I was still hurt.<\/p>\n
I was still hoping there was something in all of this that I had not understood.<\/p>\n
But I was beginning to see that hope did not have to become a conclusion.<\/p>\n
I could leave the questions unanswered for another hour.<\/p>\n
I could let the box remain open.<\/p>\n
And I could keep looking without pretending that every object had already told me its story.<\/p>\n
I stayed at the kitchen table after Marcus finished speaking. The box was still open in front of me. The shoes sat beside it, and the envelope lay where I … <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":39831,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-39848","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-insightdrama"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/insightdrama.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/39848","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/insightdrama.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/insightdrama.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/insightdrama.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/insightdrama.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=39848"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/insightdrama.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/39848\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":39868,"href":"https:\/\/insightdrama.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/39848\/revisions\/39868"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/insightdrama.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/39831"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/insightdrama.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=39848"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/insightdrama.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=39848"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/insightdrama.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=39848"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}