Page 35 of The Pakhan's Secret Babies
Not dramatically. Not in a way that would alarm a stranger. But I am not a stranger, and I can see it in his shoulders, lower than usual, carrying something they are not used to carrying, and in the skin beneath his eyes.
The way his hands sit in his lap, still in a way my father’s hands are almost never still, because my father has always been a man who does things with his hands, who fixes things and builds things and finds something to occupy them in every room he sits in.
His hands are just sitting there.
“You came on a Tuesday,” he says. “You never come on a Tuesday.”
“I wanted to see you.”
“You saw me four days ago.”
“I wanted to see you again.”
He looks at me with the eyes he has always used to see through me, warm and steady and not missing anything. “You look tired, myshka.”
“I’m fine.”
“You look like your mother used to look when she was carrying something she didn’t want to put down.”
The comparison lands somewhere I am not prepared for it to land, and I look at my hands for a moment and breathe. “I’m fine, Papa. How are you feeling?”
He makes a short, nasal exhale that signals the question is being redirected. “I’m sitting in my chair. I’m watching my program. I’m fine.”
“You don’t look fine.”
“Elena.”
“I’m your daughter. I’m allowed to say that.”
He looks at me for a moment and then he looks out the window at the street and the Tuesday evening doing its quiet thing outside, and I watch the side of his face and I think about two pink lines on a coffee shop bathroom floor and a torn resignation letter and a man who looked at me across an arrivals hall yesterday morning like he was trying to work something out.
“I had another appointment last week,” he says finally.
“I know. Carla told me.”
“She worries.”
“She’s not wrong to worry.”
He turns back to look at me. “It is what it is, myshka. These things take the time they take. I am not going anywhere.”
I reach out and put my hand over his, and he turns his hand over and holds mine the way he held it when I was seven years old, and the world was smaller, and the problems in it were things a father could fix by being present and steady and certain.
He cannot fix this one.
I cannot fix this one either, not yet, not without doing things I’m not ready to do, and the weight of that sits in my chest alongside everything else that has been sitting there for weeks, and I holdhis hand and look at the window, and I let the room be quiet for a while.
We watch half of his program together.
I make him tea, and he tells me about the neighbor’s son who has started a new job and the woman three doors down who has been parking in front of his house again. I listen and laugh in the right places, and by the time I stand up to leave, the light outside has shifted into the early dark of a November evening.
Carla appears from the kitchen as I put on my coat. She is holding a dish towel, and she has the look she always has when she has been waiting for the right moment, which, with Carla, is always the moment I’m about to leave.
“He’s not eating properly,” she says, low enough that it doesn’t carry to the front room. “He says he’s not hungry, and I can’t force him.”
“I’ll talk to him.”
“You just sat with him for an hour, and you didn’t talk to him.”
