It was hard for me to realize that this person at the end of the table was my father. I didn’t say anything to him, I let the crowd my sister had invited do all the chattering. I didn’t feel like talking if I didn’t have something important to say. My sister had invited her friends over. She seemed to think it a fete occassion, time for her Dad to meet her pals. I cursed her selfishness, her forgetfulness; he had never met this daughter. I said nothing while we ate, maybe contributed a sentence or two to the political dialogue . I love listening to people trying to sound intelligent. I forget what it was my father brought up, I just remember he sounded practical. The ideas he brought up were ideas that could actually be tried. Unlike so many that do not allow for people’s differences of opinion.
I don’t remember what we ate. I don’t remember fully who was there, though I know I knew them all. I don’t remember what I was wearing or what my father was wearing. I know we talked when everyone left, but I don’t remember what we talked about. I smoked out on the back porch. Somehow five hours passed. We were sitting in the living room chairs, I had taken the throne, my legs curled up underneath me. I tried to look at him as he spoke but I was looking at my hands, fingertips playing nervously, resting on my knees.
“Dale, I love you. I loved you then. I tried to see you, I thought about you everyday. Things just got so complicated. But that doesn’t mean I didn’t love you. Because I did. And I do.”
I wanted to be angry, I wanted to yell at him, I wanted to loose the speech I had been saving for so long. What an asshole he had been, he didn’t deserve me, he had no right to be proud of me, or of anything I had accomplished, I didn’t need him and he could stick that…. I didn’t want to believe him. It couldn’t be that easy after everything, after all this time, for him to waltz in and say a few magic words.
But all of a sudden, I disappeared. And she took over in my place. My hands felt too big for her, until I realized that she and I were the same person, that we had been all along. All the pain she had felt was my own. And really, while I had been so busy being angry and plotting my speech, she was only five years old, and all she had wanted, all she had been asking for this whole time was her father. All she wanted was what any five year old in her place would want. Her Daddy. And for the first time in my life, he was there.