Part 6

PART 4: The Waffle House My mother's handwriting was small and neat, the way it was on every grocery list I ever saw on our refrigerator. "Vaughn," I read. "If Erin is reading this to you, then you finally asked about our boy. Good. Now you listen to me one more time, the way you never did when I was alive." My father didn't move. "In 1977, you married a waitress from the Waffle House outside Fort Chaffee. Your father, the general, didn't come to our wedding. He didn't speak to you for fifteen years. He didn't hold Erin until she was six years old." I stopped reading. I looked up at my father. I never knew that. Not one word of it. The story in our family was always that Grandpa was stationed overseas when I was little. That he was busy. That's all. "Keep going," Dad whispered behind his hands. Somewhere in the house, a clock chimed the half hour. "When he died, you sat in the car outside the funeral home for an hour and cried, because he had wasted all those years he could have had with his grandchildren. And in that car, you made me a promise. You said you would never do that to one of ours. Never." My voice was shaking now. I made myself finish. "Our son married a waitress, Vaughn. Don't you dare end up crying in a car. I loved you every day. Even the hard ones. Go get our boy. Debbie." I folded the letter and set it on the desk. My father lowered his hands. His face was wet. I had never seen him cry. Not at her bedside. Not at her funeral. Not once in my whole life. "She was a waitress," he said. "Your mother. I was a twenty-two-year-old second lieutenant, and I ate breakfast at that Waffle House every single morning just so she would pour my coffee." He laughed, a broken, terrible little laugh. "Every single morning," he said again. "Just like Matt and that diner." "Just like Matt," I said. "My father called your mother 'that girl from the Waffle House' for fifteen years," he said. "I hated him for every one of them. And then I turned around and did the exact same thing to my own son. Word for word." He looked at the newspaper photo still glowing on the television through the open door. Me, in the mud. Lily, in my arms. "I called you an embarrassment," he said quietly. "And you were wearing your brother's blood." "Yes, Dad. I was." He stood up so fast his chair rolled back into the bookshelf. One of the framed photographs fell over. He didn't even look at it. "Take me to the hospital," he said. "Right now. Tonight." I hadn't slept in two days. I couldn't have driven him safely around the block. So Rachel drove. She went out to her car in the rain without saying a word, and she didn't even stop to wipe off her makeup. It was the first time in nine years that my sister showed up. I watched her through the windshield, standing in the rain waiting for us, and I loved her for it. Nobody talked in the car. The wipers went back and forth. Rachel kept both hands on the wheel at ten and two, like a student driver. My father sat in the front seat holding my mother's letter in both hands, folded in half, like he was afraid it might blow away. The children's hospital was quiet at eleven o'clock at night. The fourth floor smelled like hand sanitizer and microwave popcorn. A janitor was mopping the hall in slow circles. Matt was sitting in a plastic chair in the hallway outside Lily's room, with his arm wrapped in white gauze from wrist to elbow. He was still wearing the same muddy jeans from Friday. On the chair beside him sat a half-eaten bag of vending machine pretzels and a stuffed purple bunny with a hospital bracelet around its ear. He heard footsteps and looked up. He saw me. He saw Rachel. Then he saw our father. Matt stood up slowly. He walked over and planted himself right in front of his daughter's door, with his feet apart and his bandaged arm hanging at his side. "No," my brother said. "You don't get to do this, Dad." His voice was very quiet. That made it worse. "You don't get to walk into her room just because she was on television."