Chapter Three: What Your Father Won't Say
Daniel Callahan's hands were shaking when he set the coffee mugs down on the kitchen table, which was how Wren knew she had finally gotten to him, three days after her visit to the hospital, after she had spent every dinner since bringing up her grandfather's name like a stone dropped deliberately into still water, waiting to see how wide the ripples would spread.
That was the Thursday night. First, there was the whole week leading up to it.
Monday, she had mentioned, casually, over spaghetti, that Grandpa Walter had asked about him. Daniel had said nothing and passed the parmesan.
Tuesday, she had left the hospital's visiting hours schedule on the refrigerator, held up with the magnet shaped like a lighthouse that her mother had bought at a craft fair the summer before she died. Daniel had looked at it once, jaw tight, and said nothing, though the magnet had migrated, by Wednesday morning, to a drawer.
Wednesday, Wren had come home to find her father sitting at the kitchen table with an old photograph in his hands, one she recognized from the box in the hall closet that nobody opened anymore, a picture of himself at maybe twenty-five, laughing, an arm slung around a woman with dark hair and paint on her hands, the two of them standing in front of the shop with the Callahan and Sons sign visible over their heads. He'd put it away fast when he heard her key in the lock, but not fast enough.
And now it was Thursday, and Daniel Callahan sat across the kitchen table from his daughter with two mugs of coffee neither of them had asked for, and said, in a voice Wren had not heard him use in three years, "You went to see him."
It wasn't a question. She didn't treat it like one.
"Yes."
"Ruth told you where he was."
"Ruth's known my number for years, Dad. She's kept it just in case, and I'm glad she did, because otherwise I'd have found out you had a father in the hospital from a text a month later, if I found out at all."
Something flickered across Daniel's face, guilt maybe, or something closer to shame, gone as fast as it came. "It's complicated, Wren."
"It's not, actually. It's really not. He's your father and he's sick and you won't even drive eleven minutes to see if he's okay."
"You don't know what he said to your mother." His voice cracked on the word mother, the way it still did sometimes, three years on, at the worst and most unexpected moments, in the cereal aisle, at a stoplight, once memorably at Wren's own middle school graduation when a teacher had said the word family in her speech and Daniel Callahan had needed to step outside for air.
"He told me," Wren said quietly. "He told me what he said, at Christmas. About her being a distraction. He told me everything, Dad. I know."
Her father's hands, wrapped around the coffee mug, went white at the knuckles. "Then you know why I haven't gone back."
"I know why you were hurt. I don't know why you've stayed hurt for three years while he's had a heart attack alone in a hospital bed with nobody but Ruth Okafor to sit with him."
"He's not alone, he's got the whole town, he built that shop into half the reason anybody comes to Port Ivy at all, people love him."
"I don't care about the whole town. I care that his son won't visit him. I care that I have exactly one memory of Iris that doesn't make me want to cry and it's from when I was four years old, and I don't even really understand what happened to break us all apart because everybody's too proud or too hurt to just say it out loud."
Daniel was quiet for a long moment. Outside, the last of the daylight was going grey-gold over the harbor, the way it always did in early autumn, the light that Wren's mother used to call the good hour, the hour to paint in, the hour that meant something was ending gently instead of all at once.
"I loved your mother more than I have ever loved anything in my life," Daniel said finally, "and my father called her a distraction in front of my own daughter, at Christmas, at the table where we were supposed to be celebrating her joining this family. And your sister sat there and heard it. Fifteen years old, and she heard the man she trusted most in the world call her new stepmother a distraction, in the same breath, more or less, that he'd spent years telling Iris she'd always have a place with him no matter what happened between her and her own mother. I watched something break in that girl's face that night, Wren, and I have never forgiven myself for not going to her right then, for taking your mother's hand and walking straight out that door instead of turning around and telling my own daughter that whatever her grandfather thought, she was loved, she was chosen, she was not going anywhere."
"Then why didn't you?"
"Because I was thirty years old and furious and grieving my own father in a way that made no sense, since he was standing right there, alive, and I thought there'd be time. I thought I'd go back for her. And then months turned into a year, and Iris stopped answering when I called, and every time I thought about driving up to see her I thought about having to see him too, because for a long time that's where she was staying, and I could not, could not sit across a table from that man and pretend he hadn't said what he said."
"So you lost both of them. Because you couldn't stand to be in a room with him."
It landed harder than Wren meant it to, and she watched it land, watched her father's face go through something complicated and terrible, and almost took it back, except that some deeper, more stubborn part of her, the part that was, apparently, entirely too much like her mother, made her hold still and let it stay said.
"Yes," Daniel said at last, very quietly. "That is exactly what happened. And your mother, God rest her, told me the same thing, more gently, more times than I can count, before she died. She used to say, Danny, pride is a house with only one room, and you cannot fit your whole family in it with you."
"Then why are you still living in it?"
Daniel Callahan looked at his daughter, sixteen years old, sharp-eyed, stubborn as the tide, and something in his face cracked open just slightly, like the first hairline fracture in a dam.
"I don't know how to go back," he admitted. "I don't know how to walk into that hospital room after eight years of silence and know what to say to a man who hurt the two people I loved most and never once, not in eight years, picked up a phone to apologize."
"Maybe he doesn't know how either," Wren said. "Maybe that's the whole problem. Maybe everybody in this family is sitting in their own room, waiting for somebody else to knock first."
Her father didn't answer that. He got up, rinsed his untouched coffee down the sink, and stood at the window with his back to her for a long moment, and Wren thought, with a small sinking feeling, that she had lost him again, that he'd retreat the way he always retreated, into silence and porch railings and grease stains three years old.
"I need to think," he said finally, without turning around. "Give me some time, Wrenny. I'm not saying no."
It wasn't yes. But it wasn't the flat, wounded silence of every conversation about Walter Callahan that had come before it, either, and Wren decided, watching her father's shoulders in the darkening kitchen, that she would take it, for now, as the first small crack of light under a door that had been shut for eight long years.
That night, lying in bed, she opened her phone and saw that her message to Iris, sent from the hospital lounge nearly a week ago, still showed no reply. But it showed, for the first time, that it had been read.
Somebody, somewhere in Ashford, had opened it and not yet found the words to answer.
Wren decided she was done waiting for anyone else in this family to find their words on their own timeline. On Saturday, she was going to Ashford, whether her father liked it or not, and she was going to find her sister herself.