Chapter 5
My father has not apologized. My sister has, in a long conversation I did not initially want to have but ultimately found worth having, admitted that her embarrassment that Thanksgiving had less to do with appearances and more to do with the fact that she had spent years believing the family narrative that I was the disappointing one, and that the article had forced her to confront how comfortable she'd been accepting that narrative without ever once checking it against the actual evidence of who I was.
My father remains, as far as I know, unchanged. I have not invited him to the beach house. Madison, who is now nine, asked me once, gently, whether Grandpa would ever say sorry. I told her the truth: that some people take a very long time to become capable of an apology, and some people never do, and that either way, her worth was never something that depended on him figuring it out.
She nodded the way she does — that same lifted chin from the front steps — and went back to building something elaborate out of Legos on the kitchen table, beneath windows full of ocean light, in a house her grandfather had never once been invited into and, until I decide otherwise, never will be.
