I sent one more text before I put the phone down. I'm not burning anything down. I stopped holding it up. Those are different things.
She came to the shop on a Friday afternoon at 3:00, still in her catering apron. She was crying before the door finished closing behind her. I brought out the good chair from the back office and a box of tissues from the bathroom. And I sat on my work stool and let her talk for 12 minutes without saying one word. She talked about Nadine, about how Nadine runs every holiday and every Sunday dinner and controls the family group text and decides where everyone goes and who sits next to whom and which family photo ends up on the church Christmas card.
About how Kirk handles their finances and how she has to ask before she spends more than $200 on anything. About how tired she is all the time. About the years of asking permission to do things in her own life. Some of it was true. I could hear which parts.
When she was done, I handed her another tissue. "I've got one question," I said. "Then I'll do whatever you think is right." She looked at me. "Who taught Khloe to call me Jerome?"
Her face did something I hadn't seen since she was 16, the day I found cigarettes in her coat pocket. "That doesn't matter now, Dad." "It's the only thing that matters to me right now." I put my phone on the workbench between us. "Tell me who decided that, and I'll turn all three transfers back on tonight from this phone."
"I'm not bluffing. You know I don't bluff." The compressor in the back kicked on. It runs about 80 seconds. She looked at the phone the whole time it ran.
She didn't say Nadine. She could have. It would have been easy and I'd have believed at least part of it. She just didn't say anything at all. And that's how I found out.
Not from what she said, but from what she wouldn't. "Okay," I said. "You had a real chance just now."
She stood up at the door. She stopped with her hand on the frame. "You never tried either, Dad. You know that." She wasn't crying anymore.
That's how I knew we were getting close to the real conversation. "You never once asked why you weren't on a list. Not for Thanksgiving. Not for Tucker's birthday party in the spring. Not one single time."
"Do you know what that looks like from the outside? Like you didn't want to be there." Then the door closed and the bell above it did its thing and I stood in an empty shop at 4:15 on a Friday. I spent a long time standing there because she wasn't entirely wrong. 5 years since Ellen died.
Every skipped event, every dinner that got moved to a day I wasn't told about until after. Every photo I wasn't in. I never asked about a single one. Not once. Every time I decided that asking would make me a burden, and being a burden was the one thing I refused to be.
Ellen used to do the asking, she'd say, "Jerome wants to know about Thanksgiving plans." And everyone would answer her, and I'd stay quiet and still end up at the table. She was my voice for 28 years, 5 years without her, and I'd been talking to no one.
I took out the work order pad I keep on the counter and I started writing down what I would say if I ever got to say it in a room where people couldn't hang up on me. I wrote a paragraph and crossed it out. Wrote another and crossed it out too. 4 days later I had it down to four sentences. Four is what I could say without my voice going somewhere I didn't want it to go.
I've spent 57 years learning exactly where my limits are. I wasn't going to that dinner to humiliate anyone. I was going because it was the only room where they couldn't end the call.
Two nights before the kickoff, Perry Barlo called my cell phone. We'd talked about sports across dinner tables, maybe a dozen times over 10 years. Never about anything real. "Jerome, got a minute?" "Sure."
"I want to ask you something, and I'd like a straight answer." "All right." "Thanksgiving. Why weren't you there?" I looked at the ceiling.
"I wasn't invited." Silence then. "That's not what I was told." "What were you told?" "That you don't like big gatherings."
"That you'd mentioned having other plans. Kirk said something about it in the car on the way over. Said you'd been stepping back for a while." I pulled up my text with Stephanie. Thanksgiving last year.
One message from me asking what time dinner was. No reply. The year before, same thing, same silence. I told Perry to check his email and I forwarded him the screenshots. About 40 seconds of quiet.
"That apron Tucker was wearing," he said finally. "Nadine ordered it online. I didn't know it was coming. She put it on him right before the first photo." I didn't say anything.
"I've got other grandkids," he said. "From my son's side. I have never once in my life tried to be anybody's only grandpa."
Another pause. "Come to the dinner. I'll handle where you sit."
I got there 10 minutes early on the 15th. Harrove Hall downtown, the kind of venue that does fundraisers and retirement parties and civic events. Round tables, 60 chairs, a small riser at the front with a podium and a standing microphone. Framed campaign posters along the near wall. Kirk in a quarter-zip fleece looking trustworthy, the word integrity printed below his name.
Perry was near the entrance. He came across the room when he saw me, shook my hand, held it a beat longer than a handshake requires. "Glad you made it. You're up at the main table with me." He walked me the full length of the room.
I could feel the recalculation happening in real time around us. 60 people doing math and coming up with different answers. Nadine was already at the main table. She had a printed seating arrangement in her hand, laminated on card stock, the way people do when they've spent real time thinking about who goes where. I watched her look down at it, then up at me, then across at Perry.