Hank, one spot ahead in the microwave line, asked the obvious question. “Your little girl. How does she react to…?”
“Yeah, I was worried about that myself,” Josh admitted. “Turns out, Lydia doesn’t mind it at all.”
An understatement, really, but he didn’t feel the need to share everything with his coworkers.
He lifted one corner of the plastic film over his frozen entrée, collected a napkin and fork from the countertop. Performance over, head down, just getting through lunch again and then back to work. On impulse, and without looking up, he deadpan monotoned the start to a lullaby.
The lunchroom echoed with rare, uncontrollable laughter.
Truth was, Josh didn’t much like his father-in-law and had initially fought with Cheryl over the decision to allow his visits.
It should have been easy to talk her out of the idea. By Cheryl’s own account, he’d been an indifferent father at best. At worst, he had the personality of a mean drunk—without needing any alcohol or Hyde’s potion to prompt the meanness. He’d slipped into rages at his wife and daughters when they failed to meet his impossible, old-fashioned expectations, and sometimes young Cheryl had hidden from him until the latest arbitrary tantrum subsided. He never apologized afterward. “I speak what I feel. Not good to keep things bottled up.”
Some of his tirades insisted that his family was “bringing him down”—trapping him in a drab home and in a small-town job with no prospect of promotion. “I wish I could be rid of you,” he sometimes said, adding an unfortunate, colorful turn of phrase: “Weren’t for you worthless ladies, I’d be farting through silk.”
And yet, when Cheryl attracted boyfriends, he deemed none of them worthy. As her relationship with Josh grew serious, her father bristled at the idea. “Get her back here in an hour,” he’d say, if they were headed to a movie. “She has house chores to finish.” After a flawlessly prepared holiday meal, Mr. Hampton pulled Josh aside for a private discussion. It was like a moment from the fifties, a father-to-suitor exchange on the family porch. Mr. Hampton lit a cigar, puffed, then exhaled a slow series of smoke rings. “Cheryl gets bored easily,” he said. “She’s ready to break up with you.”
To Josh, the spiteful phrasings were well aimed. The words would never leave him. But what bothered him more was the man’s dismissive treatment of his own family, particularly (of course) Cheryl. He couldn’t go back in time and comfort the girl who’d hid beneath the bed while her father raged; he wasn’t the neighboring schoolmate who sometimes offered shelter to a frightened teenager. Instead, he could be there for her now, moving forward. He promised he’d stand up to her father, make him treat her properly. But no, Cheryl had begged, that will only make him worse, and Josh had said (getting on one knee), Then let me take you away from him.
Surprised by news of their engagement, Mr. Hampton responded in a flat monotone that presaged the mechanical voice he’d use late in life. “That’s not going to happen.”
Josh found himself repeating those same words years later, when Cheryl first mentioned her father might visit. Not going to happen. There was no point in discussing it. Cheryl didn’t need reminders of her unhappy childhood and who was responsible. She knew why her mother passed early from their lives and why her sister moved to the opposite coast and never contacted anyone.
“Hear me out,” Cheryl said. She stood in the doorway; Josh sat in the den, the television muted, some client folders balanced on the arm of the couch. “The guest room’s all fixed up,” his wife continued, “but we never have company. It’s going to waste.”
His wife stood separate from him, like a punished child in the corner offering illogical excuses. Her request was dishonest, Josh thought at the time: An empty room doesn’t necessarily cry out for a visitor, especially a troublesome relative.
And then he recalled how distant she’d seemed of late. Secretive.
“I’ve been speaking to Dad,” she said.
Josh didn’t respond.
She stepped closer to him now, the secret out. “He’s apologized to me. For everything.”
“He hasn’t apologized to me.” Even as he spoke, Josh realized the discussion shouldn’t be about his own feelings; it should be about Cheryl, what she suffered in the past, what her husband rescued her from—and how he wouldn’t expose her to that threat again.
“Oh, he does apologize to you, Josh. He’s already said as much.”
He wondered how often his wife had spoken to her father. Wondered if she’d already offered their guest room to him.
“Think about what this would mean to me,” she said. “To be reconciled to my father after all these years. At peace with my past.”
“People like him don’t change.”
“He’s different now,” she said. “He really is.”
“I’m glad you believe that.” Such a dismissive, condescending thing to say, but Josh still couldn’t think his wife was serious. He’d experienced Lewis Hampton’s cruelty firsthand, heard countless unforgivable stories from the same woman who now posed as her father’s advocate. “I can’t talk with you about this now.” Out of guilt, Josh added, “Maybe some other time.”
“We don’t have time,” she said. “He doesn’t, at least. Dad’s ill.”
Throat cancer. The man’s archaic ritual of an after-dinner cigar had finally taken its toll. Or karma finally caught him, Josh was tempted to say.
And then his wife’s hand dropped to her stomach, her palm curved slightly instead of flat.
She’d been secretive, yes. But not only about phone calls with her father.
Josh nearly jumped from his seat, so clumsy that he brushed the stack of folders on the couch arm and they went flying, papers spreading out, and he didn’t care as he rushed to his wife, almost afraid to hug her, the idea of it so fresh and fragile, because she was glowing, really glowing, as she smiled and said: “A child should have a grandfather, don’t you think?”
“Call me Lewis.”
Josh barely recognized the man Cheryl led through the front door of their home. Seven years since he’d laid eyes on his father-in-law, yet now he looked decades older. The weight loss made an immediate impression, but more striking was the stoop to his shoulders, the frail uncertainty of his gait as if he’d lost all confidence in his body.
The biggest alteration was in his voice.
Lewis Hampton released the speaker device he’d pressed against his throat, and it dangled at the end of a plastic lanyard. The old man held out an unsteady hand.
Josh hesitated a moment, then accepted it. A handshake is a gentleman’s gesture, easy to perform without considering the implications. Mechanical, like his father-in-law’s new voice.
That evening, their guest sat at the kitchen table while Josh chopped vegetables for a stir-fry. Lewis wore an odd smile, his outdated prejudices no doubt dumbfounded to see a man of the house preparing dinner.
They spoke infrequently during the meal. The device swung loose on its lanyard as Lewis chewed his food. A flesh-colored bandage over his throat incision flapped open on one side as occasional gusts sputtered through the opening. Josh mentioned a few projects at work—the same job his father-in-law previously complained hadn’t been good enough to support a family. Cheryl explained how far along she was in her pregnancy and admitted she hadn’t yet learned the child’s sex.