Page 87 of Always Been His

“I know,” she smiles to herself. “But that’s the part that makes it hard for me to be selfish,” Iris says. “She loves me and she loves you, and…” she picks the last of the label off her bottle “…if that’s real, I can’t stand in the way. I wouldn’t want to.” She finally gives me the direct blue-eyed look that she uses when she is being completely serious. “How do you feel about her? Tell me honestly.”

I don’t look away. “I love her, Iris.”

“Okay… but if you hurt her,” she says, her voice dropping to a cold hiss, “I will castrate you.”

I gasp, pressing a hand to my chest. “You’ll ruin your chance of having a niece or nephew.”

She points her bottle at me. “Adoption is always an option.”

I chuckle, knocking my bottle against hers. Her mouth pulls into the smile she has been holding back since I got out here, the real one, the one that takes up her whole face and reaches her eyes, and she shakes her head and looks back at the tree line.

“I still think it’s fucked-up,” she says, lifting her bottle to me. “But I love you both.”

She looks back at me and I hear the words the way I have been hearing them since the night my father said them to me in the lamplight of his room, steady and clear and meant to stick.

The screen door opens behind us.

Denise steps onto the porch, her voice quiet and even in the way that nurses’ voices get when they’ve learned to deliver information without leading with the weight of it.

“Grayson.” She smiles, wrapping her sweater around her chest tighter.

“Yeah?”

“Your father is awake. He’s asking for you by name.”

Iris and I look at each other.

I put my beer on the railing and get up.

I follow Denise and stand outside the bedroom door for a moment with my hand flat on the wood. I’ve stood outside this door more times than I can count in the last two years. Each time, the nature of what’s on the other side has been slightly different, and each time I’ve had to recalibrate before entering, finding the version of myself that could handle whatever version of my father was waiting for me.

I push the door open.

He is propped against the headboard with the lamp on and his glasses on his nose, which means it is a lucid moment. It also means I owe Denise more than I will ever adequately express.

He looks at me when I come in. His eyes are mine. The crystal blue I see in the mirror every morning and have spent my whole life being told are his.

“Gray,” he coughs, shifting in his seat.

I cross the room and sit in the chair beside his bed, patient, because I don’t trust my voice for a moment.

“How are you doing, son?” he asks.

“Good, Dad,” I manage. “I’m good.”

He nods, looking at me with eyes that know me. His hands are in his lap, the same hands that taught me how to throw a baseball, how to shake hands with a board member, and how to hold my mother when she was too tired to hold herself. They’re smaller than I remember. Everything about him looks smaller than I remember.

“I want to talk to you about the company.” There’s an empty rasp in his voice that wasn’t there before. “I want you to have it,” he says matter-of-factly. “I want you to take it over and run it the way I ran it. Probably better, because you’re smarter than I was and you have less patience for nonsense, which is a quality I should’ve developed earlier.”

I press my back molars together.

“I know you’ve been running it for a year,” he continues. “From a distance. Maggie tells me things. Denise tells me things. Henry tells me things… and Henry doesn’t compliment easily.” He adjusts his glasses with one finger. “You pulled the Pratt contract. Henry said it was reckless. I said it was correct.”

I sit forward and rest my elbows on my knees. “Dad, I’m not ready yet, you still have⁠—”

“I am proud of you, son,” he says, and his voice is the steady voice, the one that doesn’t waver. The voice I’ve heard at every significant moment of my life, at graduations, at my mother’s memorial, and at the first board meeting I attended when I was twenty-one. “I’ve been proud of you since before you gave me a reason to be. That’s how it works with children. You’re proud of them before they do anything, and then they go and do things to make you even prouder.”

I can’t get the words out.