Chapter 13

Bill

He heard her before he saw her.

It was just past five in the morning and the house was dark and he had come down for water and stopped in the hallway when he heard the sound coming from the kitchen. Not loud. The opposite of loud. The specific controlled quality of someone crying who did not want to be heard.

He stood in the hallway and listened and knew whose cry it was.

He stepped into the kitchen doorway.

Connie was sitting at the table with both hands around her coffee cup, her shoulders moving in the slow heaves of a grief she was trying to contain and couldn’t quite manage. She hadn’t heard him. She was somewhere inside it, somewhere past the point where you monitor your surroundings.

He watched his older daughter for a moment.

Then he walked up behind her and put his hands on her shoulders and began to massage them gently.

She startled. Then went still. Then the startled quality passed into something else — surprise, he thought. Surprised that he had come toward her instead of away. He couldn’t blame her for the surprise.

He moved to the cabinet and retrieved a cup and poured himself coffee and sat down beside her. He laid his hand over her wrist where she still held her mug.

“You’re in love with her, aren’t you?” he said.

Connie looked up at him with liquid eyes and nodded. “She’s my wife, Daddy. She’s my heart, my mind — my soul.” Her voice was wrecked and steady simultaneously. “What am I going to do?”

“Love her,” he said. “Give her everything you have. God will give it back to you.”

He took a sip of his coffee and sat with it for a moment.

“Sitting here,” he said quietly, “I feel like a failure. As a man. As a husband. As a father.” He looked at his cup. “A real flaw of Asian men is that we love tacitly. We’re not like other cultures that freely hug and kiss and dispense I love yous like asking for a glass of water. I grew up learning to be a man from my father, and his father before him. We studied hard. Got good educations and good jobs. We showed our love by silently doing — providing a nice home, good food, nice clothes, a good education. Our families need for nothing.” He paused. “Like idiots we think our families should simply know we love them.”

Connie said nothing. She was listening the way Serena listened — with her whole body.

“I’m not making excuses,” he said. “But perhaps you girls think I don’t know you. I do. I know both of you better than you realize.” He looked at Connie directly. “I knew this would happen. I knew I would find you here this morning crying about something you never expected to feel.”

“How?” Connie said.

“Because I know your heart as well as I know Serena’s and your mother’s. My feelings for my women run so deep that I close my office door and cry like a baby where no one can see.” He stopped. “You were always the little mother to her. When you were five-years-old you would watch your mother nurse Serena and when they let you hold her you would lift your shirt and try to get her to suckle you.” He looked at his older daughter’s face. “Your love for her has always been unconditional. It was never going to be any other way.”