I crossed the street and headed up Beacon Hill.
As a kid, I always loved Acorn Street. True to my belief that buildings have personalities, those houses exuded love. Dad once commented the houses were “diminutive” because it was where the trade workers who serviced the larger houses on Chestnut Street, one block over, lived. I didn’t care who had once built or lived in them—I just knew they were special. I dreamt I lived on that tiny stone street, too narrow for cars, with its small houses tucked tight. Families within them must always bump into each other. Even a family of three, like my own the year I turned eight, would have to squeeze through narrow hallways, twist to pass each other in a tiny kitchen, and get tangled up on a single couch to share popcorn on movie night.
I grew up on Chestnut Street, with all the roominess, comfort, and coldness that implied. We had two stairwells. A sitting room that Dad never entered. A study Mom never stepped foot in. And a third floor all for me. I was the envy of my friends.
It was desperately lonely.
I turned left onto Acorn Street and paused as I always did. To Dad, moving houses last year was a way of sorting his life, perhaps closing a door. To me, he moved into my dream home—only years after the dream had died and we’d all left home.
I walked up the sloped hill and rang the doorbell at number 9. A chill made me shift within my thin cardigan. The sun, nowhere near setting on this June evening, was cut early from this narrow street.
“Caroline?” Dad stood on the step above me. He looked taller in the shadows, thinner. His salt-and-pepper hair was ready for a cut. “I didn’t expect to see you this weekend.”
He stepped back, inviting me inside. I bumped into him squeezing past. I couldn’t help but wonder—had we lived here before, would bumping into each other have forced us to relate and heal? Or would we have broken even faster?
As I continued down his short hallway toward the kitchen, I noted the subtle smell that followed me. Mint and the Acqua di Parma cologne I’d given him two Christmases past. It made me smile . . . and hope.
I called behind me, “I almost dropped by your office at lunch today, then remembered you’re working from home Mondays and Fridays. How do you like it?”
“I’m still getting used to it.” He sighed. “Ferdinand put out to pasture.”
I laughed as I stepped into his bright white-marble kitchen. Dad didn’t have a robust sense of humor, but he did have a deep well of literary allusions, and a surprising number came from my favorite children’s stories.
“Ah . . . That’s where Ferdinand wanted to be.”
“True.” Dad flipped the switch and the kitchen glowed from a series of pencil-sized lights. “It was a bad analogy.” He looked down at his hands as if calculating his life’s wear and tear within each knuckle. “I am not where I want to be.”
Rather than console or chide, as neither was wanted, I shifted my attention from his kitchen to the office space next to it. The previous family had probably used it as a breakfast area, but Dad had separated the space with a set of glass French doors to create an office overlooking his walled garden. “Why reserve the best view for a meal I never eat?” had been his reasoning.
“Dad, you’ve still got unopened boxes.”
He looked past my outstretched hand to his office. “I’m getting there.”
“It’s been a year. This is not ‘getting there.’” I toggled my fingers in air quotes.
“Did you come to harp at me?” If his voice held any emotion, it was curiosity. Mild curiosity. In fact, if the last year proved anything, it was that mild was Dad’s dominant characteristic.
“No.” I wilted. I had come to ask tough questions and didn’t know how to begin and that made me nervous. Dad and I only had one constant conversation topic—my inconstancy or, better termed, my failures. He never pushed at me—that wasn’t his style. He simply asked enough questions, in just the right tones, to let me know I wasn’t measuring up.
Dad lifted his chin. “How’s work? Are you still liking it? You’ve been there . . . almost a year now?”
And so we began.
I perched on one of his high stools and spread my hands across the marble island. I recognized the gesture from earlier that morning at the coffee shop and saw it for what it was—a reach for understanding, connection. At the very least, I found the marble refreshingly cool and slightly bracing.
“Eleven months.” I added a shade of perky to my tone. “All that patent work I’ve been doing? Well, the FDA approved Xyantrix and we’re going to market in December.”
“In six months? That’s fast.”
“It’s a good protocol, Dad.” I stretched my arms farther across the counter. There was no hiding the significance of the action, my reaching out for relationship. I pulled them back. “It will really help people. It’s a huge advance in immunotherapy. It gives support so the body can fight cancer rather than relying on a drug to kill it and, unfortunately, all the good cells with it.”
The word cancer hovered between us, a specter always in our periphery now. Dad fidgeted with several loose papers resting on his counter.
“I handled all the FDA filings.” My voice rose in a shameless beg for approval.
“You did?” He looked at me, hands still. “Shouldn’t the company’s lawyer have handled that? It’s complicated stuff.”
“She signed off on everything, but I did the legwork. I had the courses my second year. I’ve learned a ton, both about the law and about cancer. Did you know—”
He raised a hand. “You still have a chance to finish. If you’d get through your last year of law school, you could direct and manage that work yourself. It’s foolish to—”
“Stop.” I raised a hand in reply. “Leaving law school was the right decision and I don’t regret it . . . I came back. I came back to be here . . .” I pressed my lips together, unable to walk that road any farther. The with you hovered between us.
He wasn’t looking at me regardless.
“It’s good work. I’m helping people. At least, I hope I am.”
He smiled. It was small and fleeting, but it was there. “You have a good heart, Caroline. You always have.” Then, as quickly as the connection formed, it evaporated.
Dad straightened. Time to get to business. “Now, to what do I owe this pleasure? I’m sure you didn’t come to sign me up for Xyantrix or ask advice about your life.”
I looked around. I wasn’t ready for a serious conversation. We’d already skirted several in the five minutes I’d been there. I certainly wasn’t ready to ask if he’d lied to me my whole life. I wasn’t ready to ask what was true and what was fiction.
I pointed to the boxes in his office. “I’ve got nothing going on tonight. Why don’t we order a pizza and I’ll help unpack the rest of those.”
Dad dismissed the suggestion with a wave of his long fingers. “If I haven’t needed what’s in them by now, perhaps I’ll simply give them away.”