A Lesson Never Learned

Sensitive content warning: references to racism.

A Lesson Never Learned

12:46. 

Victor tried off his phone screen, trying to avoid watching as the seconds ticked by. The accompanying click told him he’d accidentally taken a screenshot. 

With an irritated grunt, he deleted it. What a moment to memorialize. His chronically-late daughter, tardy again to a meeting with her father. If she decided to show at all. It had been at least two years since Becca had even spoken to him. 

He’d stood by the bathrooms at first, not fancying being the single old man around children, not a grandson or nephew in sight.  It was a Monday afternoon, and the playground was busy enough for most of the benches to be occupied, but an old set of swings, metal and weathered were not. Victor’s leg pained him if he stood too long, so after 12:50 had come and gone, he made for those at a heavy gait, leaving heavily on his cane. This would be relatively private too, good, he figured, for whatever kind of conversation she wanted to have. 

The black plastic creaked beneath him as he sat, and he found himself swaying gently, back and forth, as he had when he was a little boy. There was red gravel here, where the older parts of the playground now sat mostly unused. The newer stuff was all plastic and rubber, the “ground” thick to cushion a fall. Soft and flimsy toys for soft and flimsy people. He almost spat thinking about it, but a group of teenage girls nearby kept him in check. Setting an example for the youth and all. 

This was much better, though, he thought with satisfaction, rolling a few hard red rocks beneath the sole of his left trainer. This stuff here reminded him of high jumps and skinned knees. Something none of these nancies knew anything about, he was sure. 

He tried not to allow his mind to wander to the texts she’d sent him, or what she could possibly want to “talk” about so cryptically. Though his favorite past-time (hating the youth and their screaming brats) kept him somewhat amused, he was not wholly successful. 

They’d had a fight the last thing they’d spoken; he remembered, though he couldn’t recall what it had been about. Probably something stupid she’d  decided to spend her money on or a particularly vile man she was seeing. Something that was a silly reason to cut your own father off for years, surely. 

He’d called her on her birthday and Christmas and sent numerous texts, but all had gone unanswered until last week. She’d told him she wanted to meet. But in a public place, as though he were some dangerous scorned lover that might go off. 

Victor grumbled to himself as he waited. 12:53 now. 

He was just going through his speech. The one had spent a decade crafting and refining whenever anybody asked about her, when the seat next to him depressed with an ancient groan. Victor started, having been gazing purposefully and intently the other way, disapproving pointedly at a young mother being too ginger for his liking to her little boy who had fallen. 

“Dad.”

Her voice always surprised him. He hadn’t seen her much in her adult life, so the default for her in his imagination was much higher and softer, the voice of her childhood and early teens. The first glance was a surprise as well. They had not spoken in two years, but it had been much longer than that since they’d met in person. She’d seemingly grown taller and thinner. She looked strong and clear-eyed. She looked good. For some reason the fact needled him. He’d told himself -time and time again- that all of those people, the ones that abandoned him, were missing him. Surely they needed him. Surely the fact that he wasn’t around had been detrimental to their lives in some way?

“Becca.” 

“Rebecca, dad. We do this every time.”

Victor almost snapped at her. He had called her Becca since she was a baby. Sure, she’d told him a few times what she’d like to be called now, but he hardly ever saw her. “Maybe I’d remember your dang preferences if you’d call more often,” was what he wanted to say, but he managed to temper himself for now, knowing it wouldn’t be taken well. 

As irritated as he was with her, he did want to see her. Truthfully, he’d fantasized about her coming over to his house that afternoon and maybe making one of those pasta dishes she’d gotten so good at when she was 12,  before he’d left. Since the woman he’d run away for, and two more after her, had all eventually left him, he’d been all alone. His two other biological children, from his second marriage, had gone a decade ago when she did and had never contacted him at all. They’d both been in early childhood when she’d found out about his mistress, and the two boys had attached more to the man she eventually married. Victor had tried to reach out a few times, but had given up when he’d found out the older boy’s wedding had come and gone without so much as a salutation. 

The truth was that the few sentences that he got from her per year were slowly becoming the only contact he had with anyone that loved him at all. And he wasn’t even wholly sure of that for her. So, though it felt like swallowing a lemon, he moved on.

“Rebecca, I’m- sorry. How are you?

She looked at him with his own eyes- green, darker at the edges. He thought he saw a flicker of gratification at the apology. 

“Thank you dad. That’s really nice. I’m ok. How are you?”

When she spoke she rubbed the pads of her thumb and forefinger, another trait he’d recognized. When his third wife had made him go to therapy, the woman he had gone to see at her stuffy office on the north side had noted the same “compulsion” as she called it, in  him. 

“It’s an anxious response,” she’d told him, “something we do to calm ourselves when we’re nervous or afraid.”

What a load of hooey- Victor remembered thinking to himself. He wasn’t afraid of the matronly therapist. He was irritated at this whole charade. He didn’t need any help. He’d never needed any help in his whole life. His wife just needed to learn to temper her expectations, that was all. She’d come around eventually. 

With her, as with all of his wives, he had been soundly incorrect.

He had to admit that Becca did look nervous, though. He wondered if he should pass the old croc’s wisdom on. What did she have to be nervous about? He wondered. He was just her dad.

“Oh, not too bad,” he answered. She had sat down too quickly for him to go in for a hug, but he held out a hand for her to squeeze. She hesitated for a moment, but took it briefly. 

There was a moment of awkward silence while they studied each other, neither quite knowing what to say to bridge a years-long gap. Victor suddenly felt subconscious about his clean but somewhat faded jeans and the streaks of gray that had, in the last six months, finally threatened to fully overtake the black he had sported for 62 years. He had been an engineer before he retired, and had always prided himself on his appearance. His closets were full of more sports coats and ties and scarves than he could inventory. 

But lately it hadn’t seemed worth the bother. There was no one to see him. He had pulled out a polo for the occasion today, but when he’d gone to grab a pair of slacks he’d found most of them too musty to wear without a wash. 

He’d only had one beer before this morning, knowing how it had always irked her when he was drunk (just like her mother in almost every way), but suddenly he worried that she could see it in his eyes. 

She broke the silence first. 

“How’s Kendra?”

Victor sighed deeply, “Gone. Been- oh, 8 months now.”

“Oh.”

“Yeah. It’s for the best I suppose. She went on down to Texas to live with Marshall,” he paused for a second before adding, “her son.” Though he’d been married to his fourth wife for nearly a decade (a record for him) he couldn’t remember whether his adult daughter had ever met Kendra’s adult son. They had eloped so there had been no wedding, and, though he’d invited all of his kids to Thanksgiving and Christmas every year throughout the majority of his marriage, they at first arrived sporadically, then not at all. 

“How were your holidays?” he asked, seizing on a wayward thought to ward off the once-again encroaching uncomfortable silence. It was only the middle of January, though admittedly just shy of too late. 

She responded cheerfully, but warily, “Oh great. Just spent time with my fiance’s family in Florida. They have a vacation home in Key West.”

While her appearance had needled, this was a gut punch. A fiance. He didn’t even know she’d been seeing someone. 

Victor try not to show how it hurt, 

“Oh,” was all he said at first, but he hated how breathless it sounded. “Who’s the lucky guy?”

She hesitated again and Victor started to feel the anger bubble within him. Here again he was being treated like a dangerous stranger. Once again, however, she answered and for another moment he let his temper cool.

“His name is Raj. We met at school.”

It was out before he could stop himself.

“Raj?” Victor’s voice was indignant, “sounds foreign.”

Becca, who’s shoulders had begun to look not quite so burdened, immediately tensed. He was almost feeling guilty when the full weight of the second statement hit him. Becca had graduated some five years before. She had been dating someone for that long and he’d never met him. 

He opened his mouth in indignation, but nothing came out. It was probably for the best.

Victor’s daughter gave him a sharp look out of his own, blue-gray eyes.

“Yes, his parents are from India, dad, but he was born in Ohio. And that, right there, is why I didn’t introduce you to him.”

His mouth, which had been hanging open, snapped shut again. 

Victor couldn’t decide how to feel. His beautiful daughter was engaged to some Indian kid he had never met and now she was chastising him in the park on the swing set as though he were an actual child.

But he so wanted to not go home alone. If she would at least agree to have coffee with him. Though the anger was roiling within him, the anger that was a large part of the reason they hardly spoke, for now, he suppressed it. For once in his life, Victor said nothing at all.

For several moments, there was a tense silence. Then,with a deep sigh, her expression softened.

“I know how difficult this is for you.”

Another few beats of pregnant pause. Becca pushed herself back on her toes, extending her long legs. 

“There’s a reason I asked to meet. I know how you’ve been. You know how you’ve been, but,” she sucked in a breath with a whistle, “but all of that was a long time ago now, and you’re my dad, and, well, I’m living proof that people can change. For a long time I was pretty sure I was going to become you, or at least who you used to be.”

There was the anger again. He had his flaws certainly, but she made it sound like he’d ruined her life. Who was she to say that becoming him was a bad thing like that? 

Before he could make his feelings known, she continued. 

“And now, well, I’m pregnant, dad,” she gave him a soft smile, a gentle smile. 

He wanted to wipe it right off her face. This was the last straw. “And I wanted to meet with you to see if maybe you could be a part of the baby, your grandson’s, li..”

The rage that has been building within him exploded like a powder keg, “Pregnant!?! How dare you?” He saw her cringe and the part of him that desperately wanted her to grasp his hand faltered, but the anger was too much. “You don’t come to see me for half a decade and then you show up knocked up by some P**? And with the audacity-.”

But she had gotten up and was walking away. 

“You get back here young lady,” he demanded, but she paid him no mind. 

As she reached the edge of the gravel she looked back at him. Just one long, hard look. 

“I guess not.” 

Her voice was soft, and though Victor didn’t know it then, it was the last time he would ever hear it. 

That night, he would call one of the few friends that still tolerated him and subject him to the speech he had developed, over decades, about how he hadn’t been an awful dad. He would go through the good times and overlook the bad. He would never repeat the things that she said to him. 

And that night, and every night after, Victor would go home alone.