"That's it," he says. "You have something — you've always had something — and I watched it from the time you were small and I knew what it was worth and I knew what would happen to it if you weren't careful." He says this without drama. The way you say the sky is grey, the road is icy, the shoulder is dropping.
"The world you're trying to get into doesn't like those kind of men. I don’t like those kind of men. You know that. You'vealways known that. The men who run that world—" he stops, breathes, the breath catching somewhere in the middle between a cough, "— they don't make space for it and they don't have to."
"So you do whatever you need to do," he says, "and you push it down. That's all. It's not complicated." His eyes on me are flat and patient and completely without doubt. "Look at what you've built. You're already most of the way there. You just have to keep going. Jamie, no one will accept that. No one will love you like that. Be different."
The room is quiet. My mom's television down the hall. A car outside. Strong wind against the curtains.
"Just push it down, Jamie."
The same voice.
The same words.
Final.
He has been saying this to me my entire life and he is saying it now in a smaller body with yellow in his eyes and he means it exactly as much as he has always meant it. There is no version of this conversation where he says he was wrong. There is no version where he looks at me and sees what he did, the thing he built and what building it required.
There is no other version.
I knew that before I got on the interstate. I knew it sitting in the driveway looking at the front door.
I came anyway.
Because some part of me that I cannot seem to get rid of, that I have been pushing down alongside everything else for my entire life, still thought —
Still thought maybe.
I drink the rest of my cold coffee. I put the mug back on the nightstand.
He talks for another twenty minutes.
The Harlow coach. The shoulder. Whether I've been doing enough conditioning work in the off-season. His voice gets thinner toward the end, the breath catching more, and my mom comes back in and adjusts his pillows and he waves her off with a hand that doesn't have the power it used to.
I sit in the hard chair.
I wait some more.
Eventually his eyes go to the window. "You can go," he says.
Not thank you for coming. Not it was good to see you. Not anything that would indicate I am a person who drove two and a half hours because he is dying and I am his son. No last words. Nothing except, shove it down and be different.
You can go.
I stand up.
"I'll call next week," I say.
He's already looking at the window.
I take my mug.
I go.
My mom hugs me at the door.
I let her.
"He's glad you came," she says.
