“Where are you? Are you okay? We’ve been worried.”
“I’m in Oregon.”
“Oregon?” she repeated.
“Bend, Oregon,” I said. “It’s beautiful here.”
“Dad, why didn’t you tell anyone you were moving? We didn’t know if you were…”
“If I was what?” I asked.
A pause.
“We didn’t know if something had happened.”
“Something did happen,” I said.
She went quiet.
“I had a birthday dinner in March. I cooked for seven people. Nobody came. Not you. Not Greg. Not your kids. Not Dennis. Not Karen. Nobody called to explain until eight-thirty that evening, when Dennis told me Karen’s book club had run late.”
Silence.
“Dad, that was… We should have called. I know that.”
“You should have come,” I said. “But that is not the point anymore.”
“What is the point?”
I thought about how to answer that honestly.
“The point,” I said, “is that for ten years, I drove to every birthday and every holiday and every graduation. I cooked every dish I brought to your house. I called first every time. And in ten years, not once did you drive to Broad Ripple to sit at my table.”
I let that land.
“I am not angry, Patrice. I was sad for a long time. Now I am just living somewhere else.”
She was quiet for a while.
“Where in Oregon?” she asked again, softer this time.
“Bend. Central Oregon. East of the Cascades.”
“Can I come visit?”
I looked around the workshop. At the piece I was sanding. At the curls of wood on the floor. At the new life I had built quietly, with no audience.
“Yes,” I said. “You can. But you would have to drive to me.”
She came in May.
She flew into Portland, rented a car, and drove the three hours over the mountains to Bend on a Friday afternoon. She arrived at my apartment on Franklin Avenue at five-thirty with a bottle of wine and the slightly overwhelmed expression of someone seeing her father’s new life for the first time and not knowing what to expect.
She had not told me she was bringing anyone because she was not bringing anyone.
No Greg.
No kids.
Just Patrice, a rental car, and a bottle of wine.
“You look good,” she said, standing in my doorway.
“I feel good,” I told her.
I showed her the apartment first. Simple. Well organized. The pieces of furniture I had made visible on shelves and beside chairs.
I showed her the workshop I had rented on Industrial Way, a small space I moved into after the commissions started coming regularly enough to justify it.
I showed her a photograph Tom had taken of my farmers market table one Saturday morning, the mountains visible in the background, my pieces arranged in the foreground.
She was quiet through most of it.
It was the quiet of someone absorbing something she had not fully imagined.
That evening, we had dinner at a restaurant on Bond Street.