The big wooden front door opens before I get to the top of the porch steps, and Dad steps into the frame.
“Rhys, my boy!” Even though he has lived in the United States for thirty years, his accent sounds like he came from England yesterday. He holds his arms out and waits for me to walk across the porch. I got my height from him, he’s just an inch shy of my six foot three.
Dad is English through and through. When he met my mom, he was working at Cambridge University in the English Literature program. He was in his forties when they met and has always told me that when he heard my mom play in the symphony he took one of his many dates to, he never looked at another woman after.
My mom always used to laugh and say that was the night the sound of a collective of women crying themselves to sleep in their pillows could be heard across Cambridge. Some of the comments she would make about my dad’s sexual prowess had me running from the room blushing on many occasions.
She was from Spain and was loud, gregarious, and loved to laugh. She rarely held back her opinions and never apologized for having one. They couldn’t be any more different, but they fit together like two halves of a whole.
Even though his hair is gray, he still has plenty of it. I’ve heard people say how young he looks my entire life, if I didn’t know he was in his seventies, I would think he was in his fifties. I always used to tease him because he looks like an English professor, from his immaculately cut gray beard on his narrow features, to his patch-sleeve cardigans.
“Hey, Dad.” He slaps my back in a tight hug before stepping back and swinging his arm for me to come in.
The entryway table has a vase of fresh orchids, my mom’s favorite flower, next to a picture of the woman herself. It’s one of my dad’s favorites, it was taken during one of her solo concerts and she is sitting behind her cello on stage, the stage lights shining down on her, fingers on the strings, and eyes closed as she pushes her bow across the instrument.
She could easily get lost in her cello and play an entire piece without looking at any music.
“To what do I owe this very welcome surprise?” His deep English accent never fails to take me back to the days of listening to him reading classic literature to me as a child.
“Just my quarterly check-in on my old man.” I playfully quip and follow him into his little sitting room with a window next to more bird feeders.
He grimaces as he moves a pillow out of the chair across from the one he usually sits in. “I’ll never get used to hearing my only child speaking in American colloquialisms and slang.” He chuckles and waves toward the seat he just moved the pillow from. “Gin and tonic?”
“You know I don’t drink, Dad. I’ll take water.”
As he walks out of the room, he chuckles again and shakes his head. “Another thing my son didn’t get from me.”
My dad never turns down a drink.
I watch the birds fly from feeder to feeder as I listen to ice being put into glasses in the kitchen. When he sets a glass of ice water on the table across from me, he says, “So, why don’t you try again, and tell me the real reason for your visit.”
Ignoring the water, I lean forward to set my elbows on my knees and scrub my hands over my face. “I think I fucked up, Dad, and I don’t know what to do.”
The ice cubes tinkle in his glass as he takes a drink and then smiles at me. “I suspect this has something to do with a woman.”
“She’s not just a woman, Dad,” I pause and think about how I felt when she was just existing in the same house with me, “she’s sassy, beautiful, smart, artistic, with a gorgeous fucking body.” Scratching my fingers through my hair, I sigh. “And it’s driving me fucking crazy that she walked away.”
Crossing one leg over the other, he holds his hands out, palms up. “So? Go get her. What’s the problem?”
“She’s also a witness in a case I’ve been working.” I slouch back in my chair and rest my hands on the chair armrests. “She’s off-limits if I don’t want to fuck up everything I’ve built in the past two years.”
For the next ten minutes, I tell him about the last twoweeks since Kinley Harlow stormed into my life.
His light blue eyes sparkle. “Ah. The woman-work moral dilemma.” Linking his fingers in front of him, he smiles. “A very American issue.”
Having spent the first forty-something years of his life in England, Dad’s very relaxed view of the world often clashes with my world carefully constructed by rules and boundaries.
“You’re not helping.” I let my head fall back on the chair and stare at the ceiling.
His sigh makes me lift my head to look at him. “I sometimes forget how much like your mother you are. You have her eyes. She was a bloody beautiful woman, she had heart, brains, and looks. She was the epitome of perfection.” His eyes look past me to a place I’ll never go, somewhere in his memory.
I don’t interrupt his walk down memory lane. Her death was hard on him, and for a year or more, I watched him sink deeper and deeper into depression.
His eyes come back to me, and the sparkle returns. “Did I ever tell you I was on track for the appointment of Chair of the Faculty when I met your mother?”
With a tired grin, I shake my head.
He winks at me. “At the time, I was dating the postgraduate coordinator and the senior secretary of the department,” he looks at me teasingly when he says, “and I also had a student or two warming my bed. I was just waiting to get the Chair appointment to be on top of the bloody world.”
