“I don’t know that either.”
He stared at me.
Then he looked around the room again — differently this time.
Not cataloguing.
Something closer to searching.
“He kept that house for fifty-four years,” Daniel said quietly.
“I used to ask him why he never sold it.
He always said it wasn’t the right time.” A beat.
“I thought he was just sentimental about the neighborhood.”
He finally sat down.
On the edge of the armchair, coat still on, hands on his knees.
“Tell me about him,” he said.
“The man you knew when you were seventeen.”
I talked for nearly two hours.
I told Daniel about the boy his father had been — seventeen years old, steady and quiet, the kind of person who listened more than he spoke.
How Thomas used to wait by the school gate on cold mornings so I wouldn’t have to walk in alone.
How he’d saved up for three months to buy me a small silver bracelet for my birthday, and how he’d been so nervous handing it over that he’d dropped it twice.
Daniel sat very still and listened.
“He sounds like him,” he said at one point.
Quietly, almost to himself.
“What was he like?” I asked.
“As a father.”
Something shifted in Daniel’s face.
The guardedness didn’t disappear, but it moved aside slightly, the way a curtain moves in a breeze.
“Steady,” he said.
“He came to everything.
Every school play, every football match, even the ones where I sat on the bench the whole time.
He never made a big production of it.
He was just always there.” A pause.
“After my mother passed, it was just the two of us for eleven years.
We had dinner together every Sunday.
Never missed one.”
“He sounds like the same person,” I said.
Daniel looked at his hands.
