Chapter 20: What Robert Actually Said

Robert came alone on a Saturday afternoon in March, no Diane in the car, no lawyer, no legal pad with talking points written out in his careful block handwriting the way he usually prepared for conversations he expected to be difficult. He just knocked on Evan’s door and stood there when Evan opened it, hands in his coat pockets, looking older than Evan remembered him looking, though it had only been seven months since the last time they’d stood this close to each other.

“Can I come in for a minute?”

Evan stepped back and let him in, but he didn’t offer coffee, didn’t offer a seat, just stood by the kitchen counter with his arms crossed and watched his father move through the small apartment slowly, almost cautiously, the way a man walks through a room he’s not sure he has permission to be in. Robert’s eyes went to the secondhand couch, the coffee table Evan had picked up at a garage sale for fifteen dollars, the bookshelf built out of cinder blocks and pine boards because a real one hadn’t fit the budget yet, and something in his face tightened — not disapproval, Evan realized, watching him. Something closer to arithmetic. Robert was doing math about what his son had lost and what he’d built back in its place, one cheap secondhand piece at a time, and the sum wasn’t coming out anywhere close to comfortable.

“Before you say whatever you drove over here to say,” Evan said, “I want to ask you something, and I want an honest answer, not the version you rehearsed on the way.”

Robert stopped near the window. “Okay.”

“If Mercer wasn’t losing accounts. If Tom hadn’t quit. If the bank wasn’t calling Grant every other week asking questions he can’t answer — would you be standing in my kitchen right now?” Evan let that sit a second. “Because it’s been seven months, Dad. Seven months of nothing. Not a call that wasn’t about the company somehow finding its way into the conversation. And now, all of a sudden, here you are. So before you say one more word, I need to know if you’re here as my father, or if you’re here because you need something from me and this seemed like the way in.”

Robert didn’t flinch from it, which Evan gave him credit for, quietly, even as he kept his arms crossed and his face closed.

“That’s a fair question,” Robert said. “And I won’t pretend it’s not connected. I don’t think I’d have found the courage to drive over here today if things at the company were still fine. I think I’d have kept telling myself there’d be a better time, the way I have every month since August. It took things falling apart out there for me to stop being a coward about this. I’m not going to lie to you and say otherwise, because you’d see through it in about ten seconds anyway.” He held Evan’s eyes. “But I’m not here about the company. I want to say that plainly so you’re not standing there waiting for the pitch. I’m not asking you to come back. I’m not asking you to talk to the bank, or smooth anything over with Grant, or lend the business your name for one afternoon so people stop asking questions. I don’t have anything to ask you for at all. I just finally ran out of ways to avoid saying something I should’ve said in July.”