He grunts, which is Dad for ‘Good morning,I love you, the news is idiotic.’
I move to the counter and start pulling ingredients without needing to think about it. Sunday brunch has been this way since I was eleven years old, since the kitchen stopped being Mom’sdomain and became mine by necessity, then by habit, and then, eventually, by something that felt like love. Eggs, butter, the sourdough I baked yesterday, which is sitting on the board still swaddled in its cloth. I start with the bread, slicing it thick. The knife draws through the crust with that satisfying crunch that means the crumb is exactly right.
“The Clark County Commissioner for District Seven has made another statement,” Dad announces from behind his paper.
“Mmm…”
“He has used the phrase‘Going forward…’four times in two paragraphs.”
“A personal best.”
“A personal worst,” he corrects, and the crisp snap of a page turning, sharp and decisive, from someone who doesn’t believe in half measures. “This mancannotbe trusted to run a city block, let alone a district.”
“You say that every week, Dad.”
“And every week I am proven right.”
I hide my smile in the butter dish.
This is the thing about Dad that most people don’t understand when they see him in a business context—all handshakes, measured silences, and a gravitas that could fill a room. Here, at this kitchen table on a Sunday, he is simply himself. Dry as the Nevada desert and twice as stubborn, with opinions about local politics that he reserves exclusively for Sunday mornings and a laugh, when it comes, that fills the room from the floor up.
I crack the eggs into the pan and listen to the butter hiss.
“The Henderson bypass,” he continues. “They’ve approved the funding.”
“Is that good or bad?”
“Depends entirely on who you ask and whether you have any financial interest in the land adjacent to it. Which, interestingly, one of the Henderson councilmen appears to.”
“So that’s bad.”
“Catastrophically.” He folds the paper back on itself. “Pass me the toast when it’s ready.”
I do.
We eat the way we always do, at a measured pace, with conversation woven between bites rather than interrupting them, because Dad believes mealtime deserves its own respect. He tells me about the first inspection he ever ran at the mine, the year I was born, when a section of the eastern tunnel had a drainage problem that nobody had anticipated. They spent three days knee-deep in standing water with makeshift pumps borrowed from a neighbor’s irrigation system. He tells the story with a kind of affection, as if it’s something he once hated and chose to love anyway.
Stories I have heard a dozen times—probably more.
“You couldn’t see anything down there,” he says, reaching for his coffee. “Not properly. The lights we had were inadequate. Terrible equipment for what we were trying to do.”
“I remember the good lights,” I say, because I do. “The big ones they put in when I was about seven.”
“Eight,” he corrects immediately, because Dad always corrects dates.
“Eight,” I concede. “I used to love going into the tunnels.”
His expression shifts, softens at the edges in the way it does when he’s remembering something he likes to keep somewhere private. “You were too small to see anything unless I carried you.”
“You used to put me on your shoulders.”
“Your hard hat kept coming off.” He shakes his head, but there’s something warm buried under the exasperation. “You’dlose it in the dark, and I’d spend ten minutes trying to find it while you sat up there telling me I was looking in the entirely incorrect direction.”
“I was usually right.”
“You wereoccasionallyright,” he says, with a gravity that suggests he still considers this a debatable point. “There’s a distinction.”
I laugh, and I catch the way Dad locks the sound away somewhere in his head. He does that sometimes. Holds onto little things most people would miss because somewhere along the line, he figured out the ordinary moments are the ones that actually matter. I’ve been aware of it for months. The way he holds certain conversations for a beat longer than he needs to. The way he watches me cross a room sometimes, as though he’s memorizing the way I move.
