I looked at Mom.
She lowered herself into one of our kitchen chairs.
Not the blue one.
“What is this?”
She said nothing.
I lifted the chair from the box and set it on the floor.
It wobbled.
Then I noticed scratches beneath the seat.
I tipped it sideways.
One word had been carved deeply into the wood in uneven letters.
GILBERT.
I covered my mouth.
Dad’s name.
It wasn’t recent. The grooves had darkened with age.
“Dad,” I whispered, staring at the chair, “what are we supposed to do with this?”
Mom began to cry.
She pressed her fingertips to her eyes while I waited.
Finally, she said, “That was his chair.”
“Where?”
“In Hawaii.”
“I figured that part out.”
She looked at me.
“Your father didn’t grow up the way you think he did.”
Dad’s childhood home had become unstable when he was a teenager.
