The bottle of dinosaur green lives in the cup holder of our Honda, because Ishaan likes to touch up his pinkies on long drives and I gave up fighting the smell two summers ago. It was rolling around in there on November 2nd when we pulled into my parents’ driveway in Joliet for Sunday dinner, same as every Sunday of my life.
Seven of us at the table I grew up at. Dad at the head, Mom beside him, my sister Carrie and her girl Keira, Sanjay, me, and my son.
Ishaan is six. He wears tutus to watch cartoons and Keira’s hand-me-down dresses to the grocery store. He is going to marry a boy from first grade and adopt two babies and a dog. Sanjay and I love every inch of him, and I honestly thought that was armor.
He reached for the rolls. My father saw the green and stopped chewing.
“Take that off before somebody takes it off for you.”
Then, to me: “You’re setting him up, and you know it.”
Ishaan held his hand higher so Grandpa could admire it. “It’s the green one, Grandpa. It’s for ninjas.”
Nobody said a word. Mom studied her plate like it owed her money. I passed the corn. I will be ashamed of that corn until I die.
In the car he asked if Grandpa was scared of his nails. The next night I stood over the sink with a cotton ball soaked in remover, picturing him at nineteen, out late, somebody else deciding. I got as far as his doorway. Then I threw it away.
So on Saturday I spent forty-nine dollars cash on three bottles of polish and two tutus, and on Sunday the 9th we walked in wearing them. Pink for me. Silver for him. My green hands went flat on the tablecloth.
Dad asked me what he’d told me. I told him to say it again.
Mom put down her coffee. “Leroy,” she said. “Tell him what happened to Bertram.”
My father went the color of the mashed potatoes.
The Earring
Nobody touched the rolls.
Ishaan looked from Grandma to Grandpa like he was watching tennis, and he said, “Who’s Bertram?”
That’s the thing about a kid who remembers everything. He’d heard the name once, ten seconds ago, and it was already filed.
“Nobody,” Dad said.
“Your brother,” Mom said.
I knew he had a brother the way I knew Joliet had a sewage plant. Somewhere out there. Not discussed at dinner. I’d seen one photo, a skinny boy in a Bears cap on the hood of a car, and when I asked about it at maybe twelve, Dad took it out of my hand and put it in his desk.
“Myra.” Dad’s voice was the one he used on telemarketers. “Not here.”
“Here,” she said. “You said it here. Last Sunday. To a baby.”
“I’m not a baby,” Ishaan said. “I’m six.”
Carrie made a sound into her napkin that was half laugh and half something else. Keira put her hand on Ishaan’s tutu and patted it flat, like she was keeping him from floating off.
Dad pushed his chair back. He was going to stand up and walk to the garage. I’d watched him do it my entire childhood, every time the room got hot. The garage was where Dad’s feelings went to sit next to the lawnmower.
Mom said, “If you walk out that door, Leroy, I’ll tell it myself. And I’ll tell it worse.”
He sat back down.
I’d never in my life heard my mother threaten anybody. She once apologized to a mailbox she backed into.
Dad looked at his hands on the table. Big hands. Forty years at the rail yard. And then he started talking, and he didn’t look up once.
“Summer of ’81. Bert was nineteen. I was twenty-three. He’d started wearing this earring. A little gold hoop, left ear. And he had a pink shirt he bought in Chicago that he thought was the greatest thing anybody ever made.”
He stopped. Mom didn’t help him.
“We went to Duffy’s on Collins Street. Friday. I told him on the way, take the earring out. Take it out, Bert. He laughed at me. Said I sounded like Dad.”
Dad’s jaw moved but nothing came out for a second.
“Some guys from the plant were in there. Three of them. They started in on him. The shirt. The ear. Bert just kept smiling at them, which made it worse. And when we went out to the lot they followed us.”
Sanjay reached under the table and found my knee.
“They got him down by the dumpster.” Dad’s voice went thin. “And one of them looked at me. Grabbed Bert’s ear, looked right at me, said, ‘He with you?'”
The furnace kicked on. That’s how quiet it was. I could hear the furnace.
“And I said no,” my father said. “I said no and I got in my car and I drove home.”
Carrie said, “Dad.”
“They tore the earring out. Broke his cheekbone. Two ribs. Somebody from the bar called an ambulance. Not me. I was home in bed.”
He finally looked up, and he looked at Ishaan, and his face was wet. I had never once seen my father cry. Not at his own mother’s funeral. Not when the Cubs won.
“They took it off for him,” he said. “You understand? Somebody took it off for him. And I let them.”
Ishaan’s purple hand was hovering over his milk. He put it down very slowly.
“Is Bertram okay?” he said.
And my father, who had an answer for everything, who corrected the weatherman out loud, had none.
Mom answered. “He lives in Peoria. He’s sixty-four. He hasn’t heard from your grandpa since 2009.”
“Since Grandma Ruth’s funeral,” Dad said. “He came up to me at the cemetery and I shook his hand like he was the guy who sold her the casket.”
My mouth was open. I closed it. I opened it again because something had to come out.
“So last Sunday,” I said, “that wasn’t a warning.”
“It was a warning.”
“No, Dad. It was a confession you gave to a six-year-old instead of the person who’s owed it.”
He flinched. I had not planned that sentence, and I would like to be the kind of person who always talks like that, but mostly I’m the kind who passes the corn. That night I wasn’t.
Duffy’s Parking Lot
You’d think that would be the end of it. Big secret out, everybody cries, somebody brings out pie.
No. My father is my father.
He wiped his face with the heel of his hand, cleared his throat like a lawnmower starting, and said, “And that’s why. That’s exactly why. You think the world changed? It didn’t change, Tonia. You put that boy in a skirt and you send him out there, that’s Duffy’s parking lot. I’m the only one at this table who’s seen it.”
“It’s a tutu,” Ishaan said. “Not a skirt.”
“Ishaan, honey,” Carrie said.
“Grandma Myra said Grandpa’s not allowed to walk away,” Ishaan said, to nobody in particular. He was just keeping track.
Dad pointed at me across the table. “I’m trying to keep him alive.”
And that’s when Sanjay stood up.
My husband is the gentlest man I know. He apologizes to the Roomba. He stood up so fast his chair rocked, and he said, in this very level voice that scared me more than shouting, “Leroy. Who hurt your brother?”
“I told you who. Three guys from the—”
“No. Who hurt him? Who took his side away?”
Dad stared at him.
“Those men broke his face,” Sanjay said. “You’re the one he’s still waiting on. Forty-five years. And last Sunday you sat at this table and you did it again. You looked at my son, and you told him nobody here was with him.”
Nobody moved. Keira was holding her breath. I could see her cheeks puffed.
Dad said, “That’s not—”
“He asked me in the car if you were scared of his nails,” I said. “Scared, Dad. Not mad. He’s six and he figured you out in one ride down I-80.”
My father’s chin went. Just went. Like a kid’s.
Mom stood up then too, and walked around the table, and for one second I thought she was going to put her arms around him. She didn’t. She picked up his plate. Pot roast, half eaten. She carried it to the kitchen and set it in the sink, and came back and stood behind her own chair.
“I married you in 1982,” she said. “Bert was at the wedding with a scar under his eye, and you made him sit in the back. I didn’t know why. I found out the year Tonia was born, because he told me. Not you. Him. At a gas station in Morris.”
“Myra—”
“I kept your secret forty years because I thought it was eating you, and a person shouldn’t be kicked while they’re getting eaten.” She folded her napkin into a square. “But you fed it to my grandson. So I’m done keeping it. And I’m done with Sundays, Leroy, unless something here changes.”
“You’d stop Sundays?” he said. Like she’d said she’d stop the sun.
“I’ll go to Tonia’s. Carrie, you come too.” Carrie nodded so fast her earrings swung. “You can eat here by yourself. You’re good at being by yourself. You’ve practiced.”
That was it. That was the blow. Not the story, not the crying. The picture of him at the head of an empty table on a Sunday with the rolls going cold.
Dad put both his hands over his face.
And then he broke. Not tears down the cheek this time. The whole man folded at the table, shoulders going, a noise coming out of him I’d only heard once before, from a dog we hit on Route 30 when I was nine.
“I was twenty-three,” he said through his fingers. “I was scared. I’ve been scared every day since. I see that boy’s hand and I see Bert’s ear and I—”
Nobody rescued him. I wanted to. Forty-two years of being his daughter wanted to get up and say it’s okay, Dad. I kept my green hands flat on that tablecloth and I let him sit in it.
Ishaan slid down off his chair.
“Ishaan,” I said.
He walked around Keira, around Carrie, around his grandmother, silver tutu swishing, and he stood next to my father’s chair. Then he went out of the room.
We all just looked at each other.
He came back from the living room dragging the afghan off the back of Grandma’s couch, the orange one she crocheted in 1990, and he climbed up on the rung of Dad’s chair and put it across his lap.
He didn’t ask. He never asks.
My father took his hands off his face and looked down at that blanket like it was on fire.
“When you’re sad,” Ishaan said, “you get a blanket.”
Dad looked at the little purple fingers smoothing out the yarn. He reached out, slowly, like you’d reach for a bird, and he took one of Ishaan’s hands, and he turned it over under the dining room light.
“Purple,” he said. His voice was wrecked.
“Ninjas can have two colors,” Ishaan said.
Dad laughed, which became a sob, which became him holding that small hand against his cheek.
Then he looked at me over Ishaan’s head. “Tonia. I’m sorry. I’m so sorry. I said a terrible thing to him.”
“Say it to him.”
He looked at my son. “Ishaan. I said a terrible thing. Nobody’s taking anything off you. Not while I’m—” His chin went again. “I’m with you. You hear me? I’m with you.”
Ishaan considered this very seriously, the way he considered tides.
“Okay,” he said. “Do you want me to do yours?”
Peoria
He said yes.
I want to be clear that I did not make him. Nobody made him. My sixty-eight-year-old father, retired railroad, NRA hat on the hook by the door, sat on my mother’s couch at seven-forty that Sunday night with his hands spread out on a TV tray and let a first grader paint every one of his fingernails dinosaur green.
The bottle came out of my purse. It had been in the cup holder of the Honda an hour before. I’d grabbed it on the way in because I didn’t trust myself not to need backup.
Ishaan made him hold very still. “Don’t wiggle, Grandpa.” He did the thumbs twice. He got some on the cuticles and told Dad that was “the style.” Keira handed out paper towels like a surgical nurse. Carrie took pictures until Dad said, “If that goes on the Facebook I’m changing my will,” and Carrie said, “Worth it,” and took four more.
Mom sat in her recliner and didn’t say much. She just watched, and twice she pressed her fingers against her mouth.
When it was done, Ishaan leaned in and blew on every nail. Very carefully. One finger at a time, all ten, the way he’d done mine on the bathroom floor the night before.
Dad watched him do it with his face doing that thing again, the thing I’d never seen till that week.
“Bert used to blow on my knuckles when I skinned them,” he said. “I forgot that. He was four, I was eight. He’d blow on them like it fixed it.”
“Does it?” Ishaan said.
“I don’t know, buddy,” Dad said. “We’ll see.”
Sanjay drove us home. Halfway down I-80, from the back seat, Ishaan said, “Is Grandpa going to Peoria?”
Sanjay’s hands moved on the wheel, same as the week before. I didn’t answer, because I didn’t know, and I wasn’t going to lie to him twice in eight days.
By Wednesday I had my answer. Dad called me at six in the morning, which is his idea of a decent hour.
“You off Saturday?”
“Why?”
“Mom found Bert’s number. I called it.” Long breath. “He didn’t hang up.”
“What did he say?”
“He said he’d been waiting on me since 1981 and he could wait till Saturday.”
I sat on the edge of my bed and cried into a sock I’d been about to put on.
“Will you drive?” Dad said. “I don’t trust my hands. And bring the kid. Bert should meet the kid.”
So Saturday, November 15th, the four of us went to Peoria. Sanjay drove. Dad sat in front with his hands on his knees the whole way, and they were still green, a little chipped on the right index finger where he’d opened a can of soup. He hadn’t taken it off. Mom had offered him the remover Thursday and he’d said, “Leave it.”
Ishaan wore the silver tutu over his jeans. Nobody discussed it.
Bertram lived in a brick ranch with a ramp out front and a wind chime made of old spoons. He opened the door before we knocked. He was small, smaller than Dad by a head, white hair, and a scar under his left eye exactly where my mother said. In his left ear there was a little gold hoop.
He and my father looked at each other on that porch for so long the spoons rang twice.
Dad’s mouth opened. Nothing.
So he held up his hands.
Bert looked at the green nails. Then at Dad. Then down at the six-year-old in the silver tutu standing between them.
“I did them,” Ishaan said. “They’re for ninjas.”
Bert’s face went the way Dad’s had at the table. He laughed, and it cracked down the middle.
“Leroy,” he said. “Look at you.”
“I said no,” my father said. He was crying already, right there on the ramp. “That night. The guy asked if you were with me and I said no. I’ve been saying it every day since. I’m sorry, Bert. I’m so goddamn sorry.”
Bert didn’t hug him. Not yet. He looked a long time. Then he reached out and took one of Dad’s green hands and turned it over, like Dad had done with Ishaan’s, like checking for damage.
“You missed a spot,” he said.
“He’s six,” Dad said.
“I’m six,” Ishaan said.
And Bert, who had waited forty-five years, brought my father’s knuckles up and blew on them.
If this one got to you, send it to somebody who’s still deciding whether to throw the cotton ball away.
For more stories about people standing up to cruelty, read the hockey captain who broke a girl’s hearing aid. And for family betrayals closer to home, there’s the husband who left for “Doha” and the daughter paying to sleep on her parents’ porch.
