Eli laughed.
“He put them on our ketchup bottle.”
Emma covered her mouth as she smiled.
For several seconds, Daniel was there.
Not as a body beneath flowers.
Not as a name on paperwork.
Not as the empty chair at breakfast.
As an annoying boy with adhesive googly eyes.
Ray sat at the adjacent table.
“Your dad was stubborn too.”
Emma looked toward him.
Hank answered first.
“He learned from somebody.”
Ray nodded toward Hank.
“Exactly.”
Hank gave him a look.
Eli turned toward the toolbox.
“What are those pictures?”
Emma untied the rubber band.
The first photograph showed Daniel at a school art fair.
He wore a paper crown.
A huge cardboard sun hung behind him.
Paint covered one sleeve.
The second showed Emma asleep on a couch with newborn Eli against her chest.
The third had faded around the edges.
Hank saw it and turned away.
Eli placed it beside the drawing.
In the photograph, a younger Hank sat on an overturned bucket outside a small garage.
His hair was brown.
His beard barely existed.
Beside him sat a boy with a gap between his front teeth.
They held a wooden birdhouse between them.
Its roof was visibly crooked.
Eli pointed.
“That’s you.”
Hank nodded.
“And that’s Dad.”
Another nod.
“When he was little?”
“Eleven.”
“I asked him who made the birdhouse.”
Hank waited.
“He said he made it with his dad.”
Emma pressed her fingers against her lips.
Hank remembered the roof.
Daniel wanted to tear it apart and start again.
Hank told him the birds would not bring a level.
For years the birdhouse hung from a maple behind their old house.
No bird ever used it.
Daniel insisted it was because Hank had chosen a bad tree.
Hank insisted the birds were architectural critics after all.
Eli stared at the photograph.
Then at Hank.
Then at his mother.
“Are you my grandpa?”
Eight years of silence suddenly became a room with nowhere to hide.
Hank had rehearsed hundreds of difficult sentences in his lifetime.
Apologies.
Funeral condolences.
Goodbyes.
Warnings.
He had never rehearsed this one.
“Yes.”
Eli looked at his mother.
Emma nodded.
Barely.
He turned back.
“You’re Dad’s dad?”
Hank nodded again.
The child processed this.
Hank could almost see the family tree forming behind his eyes.
“Then how come I never met you?”
Hank closed his mouth.
No answer came.
Eli waited.
Children were merciless that way.
Not cruel.
Simply unwilling to cooperate with adult evasions.
Hank looked toward Emma.
She did not rescue him.
Good.
He had spent enough years being rescued by silence.
“Because your dad and I had a fight.”
Eli frowned.
“For eight years?”
“Yes.”
“That’s a long fight.”
“Yes.”
“What was it about?”
Hank rubbed his palms together.
“Something I said.”
“What?”
Emma spoke.
“Eli, you don’t have to ask every question right now.”
“It’s okay.”
Hank looked at the boy.
“I told him something he loved wasn’t important.”
“Art?”
Hank nodded.
Eli’s face tightened.
“He loved art.”
“I know.”
“He was good at it.”
“I know that now.”
“You didn’t know then?”
Hank stared at him.