\u201cThe rain was warm. And you could smell the ocean before you could see it.\u201d<\/p>\n
He had been born in Hawaii and lived there until he was twenty. Then he moved to Oregon for work, met my mother, Darlene, and built an entirely different life.<\/p>\n
He talked about Hawaii often when I was little. He remembered roadside fruit stands, storms that disappeared as quickly as they arrived, and waking before sunrise to birds I had never heard anywhere else.<\/p>\n
Then, somewhere along the way, I noticed that whenever Dad mentioned home, Mom became uncomfortable.<\/p>\n
Sometimes she would change the subject. Other times she would leave the room altogether. Once, Dad mentioned that he wished he could see the ocean there one more time, and Mom pushed her plate into the sink so hard I thought it might break.<\/p>\n
Later, I confronted him.<\/p>\n
\u201cWhy does Mom get upset every time you talk about Hawaii?\u201d<\/p>\n
Dad folded a dish towel slowly before answering.<\/p>\n
\u201cShe has her reasons.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cWhat reasons?\u201d<\/p>\n
He looked tired.<\/p>\n
\u201cTry to understand your mother, Corinne. If you knew the whole story, you wouldn\u2019t be angry with her.\u201d<\/p>\n
I should have asked more questions.<\/p>\n
Instead, I assumed I had plenty of time.<\/p>\n
Two weeks ago, Dad was driving home from the hardware store when another car crossed into his lane.<\/p>\n
He never made it back.<\/p>\n
There are losses your mind refuses to accept even while your body begins arranging life around them. His shoes were still beside the garage door. His coffee mug was still in the cabinet, and the half-finished crossword he had been working on remained beside his chair.<\/p>\n
Mom and I were still sorting sympathy cards when a delivery truck stopped in front of the house.<\/p>\n
The package was enormous.<\/p>\n
For a moment, I thought the driver had the wrong address. Then I saw our last name printed across the shipping label and, beneath it, my father\u2019s name.<\/p>\n
The package had come from Honolulu.<\/p>\n
More strangely, it had been shipped three days before Dad\u2019s accident.<\/p>\n
There was no return name I recognized.<\/p>\n
I dragged it into the kitchen.<\/p>\n
\u201cMom, something came for Dad.\u201d<\/p>\n
She walked in holding a stack of condolence cards.<\/p>\n
The moment she saw the box, her face lost all color.<\/p>\n
\u201cWhere did that come from?\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cHawaii.\u201d<\/p>\n
Her eyes moved immediately to the label.<\/p>\n
\u201cLeave it alone, Corinne.\u201d<\/p>\n
I frowned.<\/p>\n
\u201cWhat?\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cJust leave it.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cIt was sent to Dad before he died. Whoever mailed it probably expects to hear from him.\u201d<\/p>\n
Mom put the cards down.<\/p>\n
\u201cThrow it away.\u201d<\/p>\n
I stared at her.<\/p>\n
\u201cYou can\u2019t be serious.\u201d<\/p>\n
She crossed the kitchen and grabbed my wrist.<\/p>\n
\u201cPlease. Throw it away. Let\u2019s pretend it never arrived.\u201d<\/p>\n
The fear in her voice frightened me more than the box itself.<\/p>\n
\u201cWhat do you know about this?\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cNothing that matters anymore.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cIt mattered to Dad.\u201d<\/p>\n
She closed her eyes.<\/p>\n
That was enough for me.<\/p>\n
I found a pair of scissors.<\/p>\n
\u201cCorinne, don\u2019t.\u201d<\/p>\n
But I had already cut through the tape.<\/p>\n
Packing paper covered something large and heavy. I pulled the first layer away and saw blue paint beneath it.<\/p>\n
Then wood.<\/p>\n
I removed the rest of the paper and stepped back.<\/p>\n
It was a chair.<\/p>\n
An old wooden kitchen chair painted blue.<\/p>\n
The paint had chipped away along the edges, and one leg had clearly been repaired years earlier with a darker piece of wood. There was even a black burn mark along one of the lower rungs.<\/p>\n
For several seconds, I just stared at it.<\/p>\n
Then I looked at Mom.<\/p>\n
\u201cWhat is this?\u201d<\/p>\n
She had already sat down.<\/p>\n
Not in the blue chair.<\/p>\n
In one of ours.<\/p>\n
I pulled it fully from the box and set it on the kitchen floor. It wobbled slightly.<\/p>\n
When I tipped it to inspect the damaged leg, I noticed scratches beneath the seat.<\/p>\n
I turned it farther.<\/p>\n
There, carved unevenly into the wood, was one word.<\/p>\n
WARREN.<\/p>\n
My father\u2019s name.<\/p>\n
The grooves were dark with age.<\/p>\n
I covered my mouth.<\/p>\n
\u201cOh God.\u201d<\/p>\n
Mom started crying.<\/p>\n
\u201cWhat are we supposed to do with this?\u201d<\/p>\n
She pressed both hands against her face.<\/p>\n
For a while, she couldn\u2019t answer.<\/p>\n
Finally, she whispered, \u201cThat was your father\u2019s chair.\u201d<\/p>\n
I lowered myself onto the floor beside it.<\/p>\n
\u201cIn Hawaii?\u201d<\/p>\n
She nodded.<\/p>\n
Then she told me something Dad had never told me.<\/p>\n
His childhood had not been the simple island childhood I had imagined.<\/p>\n
When Dad was a teenager, things in his biological home became unstable. Mom didn\u2019t know every detail because Dad had never shared all of them, but eventually he was removed and placed with a foster family.<\/p>\n
Their house was crowded.<\/p>\n
Children came and went. There were too many shoes by the front door, too many towels hanging in the bathroom, and never enough matching chairs around the kitchen table.<\/p>\n
Dad somehow ended up with the blue one.<\/p>\n
\u201cWhy was it his?\u201d I asked.<\/p>\n
Mom looked at the chair.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt just became his.\u201d<\/p>\n
Nobody formally assigned it to him. Nobody put his name on it at first.<\/p>\n
But night after night, dinner was served, and there was a place where Warren sat.<\/p>\n
In the morning, breakfast appeared, and that same place was waiting for him.<\/p>\n
Eventually, as a teenager, he carved his name underneath the seat.<\/p>\n
\u201cWhy did he care so much about a chair?\u201d<\/p>\n
Mom\u2019s face crumpled slightly.<\/p>\n
\u201cBecause it meant they expected him to come back to the table.\u201d<\/p>\n
That sentence stayed with me.<\/p>\n
I thought suddenly of Dad\u2019s old photograph.<\/p>\n
I went straight to the junk drawer and found it beneath old batteries and takeout menus.<\/p>\n
For years, I had looked at that photograph and seen a beach.<\/p>\n
This time, I looked at the people.<\/p>\n
Several teenagers stood near a cooler. An older woman was beside them, while someone else crouched in the sand.<\/p>\n
There was one section of the picture where the paper had been rubbed almost smooth.<\/p>\n
Dad\u2019s thumb had worn it away.<\/p>\n
Not the ocean.<\/p>\n
Not the palm trees.<\/p>\n
The people.<\/p>\n
\u201cHe wasn\u2019t staring at the beach all those years.\u201d<\/p>\n
Mom shook her head.<\/p>\n
\u201cNo.\u201d<\/p>\n
Dad left Hawaii at twenty because he was offered work on the mainland. His foster family encouraged him to take the chance because they believed he deserved something stable.<\/p>\n
He planned to return.<\/p>\n
At first, money kept him away.<\/p>\n
Then work.<\/p>\n
Then he met Mom.<\/p>\n
Then I came along.<\/p>\n
Years passed.<\/p>\n
\u201cSo why didn\u2019t he ever go back?\u201d<\/p>\n
Mom looked toward the blue chair.<\/p>\n
\u201cBecause eventually he became embarrassed.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cEmbarrassed about what?\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cAbout how long he\u2019d been gone.\u201d<\/p>\n
That sounded absurd at first.<\/p>\n
Then I thought about my father.<\/p>\n
It sounded exactly like him.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe longer he waited, the harder returning became,\u201d Mom explained. \u201cHe started believing that eventually people would ask why he hadn\u2019t bothered coming sooner.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cThey were his family.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cHe didn\u2019t use that word easily.\u201d<\/p>\n
I studied her.<\/p>\n
\u201cDad told me once that if I knew the whole story, I\u2019d understand you. What did he mean?\u201d<\/p>\n
Mom looked away.<\/p>\n
When they were first married, Dad compared everything in Oregon to Hawaii.<\/p>\n
The coffee wasn\u2019t as good. The rain was colder. The fish tasted different. The sunsets never looked quite right.<\/p>\n
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