I got up. My knees aren’t what they were and I felt every year of it crossing that room. Linda didn’t help me. She just watched, and I think she needed to watch, after all the times I made her carry this thing alone. I got down on the floor next to the chair, this old man on his knees in his own living room, and I tipped it back so I could see the underside of the seat.
He’d carved it deep, so it would last. The letters were clean and careful, the work of somebody who knew exactly what he was doing and took his time doing it. I stared at it for a long time before I could even read the words right, because my eyes had gone blurry and I kept having to blink them clear.
It said: “You said no son of yours would build with his hands. So I built you a place to sit. I left a seat for you, Dad. You just never showed up.”
I’m not going to tell you I called him and we fixed it and cried and everything’s good now. I want to tell you that. But that’s the movie version and this isn’t a movie. I haven’t called him yet. I’ve started to maybe thirty times. I get his name up on the phone and I sit there and I don’t know what a man says after seven years of being wrong out loud. Sorry feels like a word that’s way too small for the size of what I broke.
Linda says I should just go. Drive to the shop. Stand there and let him decide what he wants to do with me. Maybe she’s right. She usually was, and I spent two decades not listening to that either. Some nights I think I’ll do it. I’ll get in the car in the morning and I’ll go and I’ll take whatever he gives me. Other nights I sit in that chair, the one he made, and I run my thumb over the smooth arm of it and I think about a twenty-year-old kid standing in my kitchen telling me what he loved, and me telling him it wasn’t enough.
I don’t know. I really don’t. The chair’s still there. The seat he left me is still empty. And I’m the only one who can fix that, and I’m sitting here writing this instead, which probably tells you everything about the kind of father I’ve been.
