I sat across from my father in the corner booth of the diner that stood across from my old elementary school in the town that I grew up in. It was an old diner that had changed hands repeatedly, and the current owners had seen fit to festoon the walls with pictures of lighthouses. I sat and stared at a picture of an old and decrepit lighthouse on some windswept shore and tried to avoid my fathers expectant eyes. I felt them though, staring out over his bent bifocals extraordinarily bright amidst a cracked and aging canvas. He skin was pulled tight and the wrinkles of his troubles that he always made sure to hide from me had become permanent features of his face. My father, the aging auto mechanic, had harbored dreams of being a great geologist. How wonderful then, that now his own visage was a landscape and the frown lines and crows feet of his many years were features on that landscape; a geologist would go crazy in such a place!
My father frowned a lot in secret, but was always smiling when I saw him. His hands were busy folding the paper wrapper from his straw, his fingers covered in skin the color and texture of old leather. He had lost his fingerprints a long time ago. His wrists were strong, protruding from the fraying cuffs of his plaid button-down shirt, which showed the signs of being washed to excess. He was expectant and he looked at me with hopeful eyes. “So it looks like things are going well for you and, what's her name, April?” He pretended to momentarily forget her name. I closed my eyes and my lips widened for a smile. “Yeah Dad. Things are going well.” I hated him at that moment, but the moment quickly passed; how dare he correctly appraise the quality of my relationship? His own lack of success was concentrated like a sweat, pouring from his words. His true question lay buried underneath: When can I expect some grandchildren?
You'll always have Rachel, Dad. You'll always have your daughter. I laughed at the idea of saying that. How easy it would be to end the emotional connection; the entire purpose of this lunch could be voided into space like atmosphere through an opened airlock. Nothing would be left but sweating Coca-Colas and greasy fries and old lighthouses hanging precariously overhead. I almost said it, I swear I did. My sister was married, my sister was beautiful and had married a great guy and they had a lot of money and they visited four times a year and she had bought my father a pair of extremely expensive kevlar motorcycle gloves for his birthday last month. It was very likely that she was going to be a mother within the next year or so. He would be a grandfather, I would be an uncle, everyone would be very pleased and happy.
Of course that wasn't the case. I had known it for a long time, but the most recent evidence (besides that which he was presenting to me right now) had happened last summer during Rachel's wedding. My dad had gotten up to make a toast in his rented suit, my mother looked at her professional friends from work and smiled her biggest smile as if she couldn't have been happier to have her ex-husband speak at her daughter's wedding. My sister sat with Richard and stared at him and back at Dad and back at him, overwhelmed with joy. I sat with a unique perspective, in the front corner across the family table from my father and looking over at an acute angle from the bench of the grand piano that the staff had reserved for the reception. My hands sat folded in my lap, my mind was elsewhere; how much money had we saved by having a concert pianist in the family? My father started his toast with a mild joke that ran for one line too long. I bolstered the polite applause with a jazzy jumble of notes, my hands working separately from my body. My father then stared directly at me as he explained that he couldn't be happier on this day.
I knew it then, as I know it know: My father's only brother died when he was twenty seven. At the time, my dad was a fifteen year old kid who had never had time to study for tests because his dad, my grandfather, was always making him help out in his boat shop. From that point on, he was a brother to five younger sisters. Our family name had not died when my late Uncle fell from the rooftop. It lived on, in a twisted and concentrated form, in my own body. It lived on in the hungry, expectant, fervently hopeful eyes of my father who sat down after delivering his toast giving me a huge smile and lifting his glass in my direction. I started up a short rag-time number that I knew was my Dad's favorite; he had always listened to it on cassette in his car, or at home when he would read books about geology.
Now I sat across from my father in this old diner and I told him that I would be playing as a guest feature for the Philharmonic in the city and that yes, April and I were doing fine in fact she's in her final year of residency at the hospital and yes she would love to see you sometime this month. And I watched his hands finish folding the straw and his eyes glowed very warm and he opened up his menu, the tendons in his wrist rubbing gently against the fraying cuffs.
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