Friday, Donuts For Dad day at the elementary school. Sheila volunteered me to bring in a dozen to our daughter’s first grade classroom, and I drove over to the donut shop, last minute, last minute, always the last fucking minute with me, what is it with me? I certainly don’t get it from my father. He was punctual, always got it done ahead of time. You’d think I’d have learned, watching him. It’s almost like I watched and decided to do the opposite, just because.
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Nowhere to park, godfuckingdamnit why do I always have to do everything at the last minute, why? The lot was full, the overflow lot was full, I wound up halfway down the hill, got out of the car, my Dad’s baby, oil changed every three thousand miles on the dot, an old Lexus, 222,000 miles on it, but he willed it to me and it still looks beautiful, wine red, looks less than half its age. He wanted me to have it, without ever saying a word between us about it, he knew, he knew I’d love, for once in my life, to drive around in a car I’d feel proud of. I finally got the title in my name, just this week.
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I hoofed it up that hill, then into the overflow lot, then through the normal lot, in through the front door of the school.
The woman guarding the entrance saw the box I carried.
“Here for Donuts For Dad?” she asked.
“Yup.”
“In through the main office, then down the hall, wait there, they’ll tell you when you can go in.”
I was supposed to be there fifteen minutes earlier. I could just see Sophie, looking around, wondering where Dad was with the donuts, worrying, would Dad show up?
I finally got in there, handed the donuts off to the teacher. I could see Sophie standing in the back of the room, looking around nervously. I waved to her. Her face lit up when she heard my voice.
“Dad! Where were you?”
“Well, there wasn’t anywhere to park, it took me awhile to get in.”
She laughed. She is something else, I think. An olive-skinned version of her mother. Or, as Sheila’s mother once clumsily put it, “oh, it’s wonderful, she got Sheila’s beauty and your skin.”
The dads and the grandads picked up folding chairs from outside the classroom door and we set them up opposite our sons and daughters and grandchildren.
The teacher signaled for quiet.
On Sophie’s right sat a little bitty thing of a boy, half her size. He had a t-shirt on that read something like, Mom, You’re Awesome!
I looked to my left and noticed no dad or granddad there.
The teacher and the students read aloud, together, from a book about Dad wanting a donut but getting distracted by one thing or another.
The kid on Sophie’s right kept looking toward the classroom door.
The teacher came by once they’d finished the story. Told him his grandad would probably be there soon.
“There was a lot of traffic,” I told him cheerfully. “It might take him a while to get in.”
On each desk sat a paper cup filled with slips of paper with questions on them. We were to take turns picking out questions and asking them of each other.
The kid to Sophie’s right kept looking toward the door. His eyes welled up, and my heart broke as they did.
Maybe they shouldn’t do this stuff at school, I thought. Perhaps it’s unrealistic, or unfair, to expect everyone to have a father, or a grandfather, willing and able to show up for this. I can still remember how I dreaded Mother’s Day the first few years after Lauren died. And, as my Dad would say, “it’s just a Hallmark holiday anyway.”
Sophie pulled a slip out of the cup and said, “guess my favorite sweet treat.”
“Oh that’s not easy,” I laughed. “You have quite a sweet tooth. I’ll guess...ice cream?”
“Well,” she said, “I love ice cream, but I think I love donuts best of all.”
I asked the boy next to Sophie what his favorite sweet treat was. He paused, paused again, and then shot his sad eyes back to the classroom door once again.
He said something, I couldn’t quite hear him.
Sophie and I pulled slips out of the paper cup, asked each other questions, and asked the boy next to her as well. He kept looking toward that door, and I noticed myself looking with him, praying someone showed up for him, feeling sick to my stomach as the minutes passed and the doorway never darkened.
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Eventually we all had our donuts, and eventually we all left.
We walked through the crowd, her hand in mine, through the parking lots, and halfway down to the hill to my father’s old car, my car now.
I opened the back door for Sophie, got her into the car seat, buckled her in. Got into the driver’s seat.
“Well, I had a great time at Donuts for Dad,” I said to her.
“Me too,” she said.
“I’m glad you came,” she said. “I know sometimes before you couldn’t come to things because of work but Papa would come. But he can’t come anymore now that he’s resting in peace.”
I didn’t know whether to laugh or cry. Or both. My Dad’s now resting in peace, as they say, and I guess that bothers me, especially now that’s it’s Father’s Day, even if it is just a Hallmark Holiday. It just sounded so funny, the way she said it.
I used to call my Dad when she said things like that, or just walk across the street into his living room and tell him, much to his amusement and joy.
And now I am on my porch in the middle of the night, looking out across the street at the house he shared with my mother for decades, at the light shining in the living room where he died not much more than four months ago.
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So I’m always late, and can never finish anything on time, and maybe that drove him nuts sometimes, left him wondering, where did this kid come from? The way I wonder the same thing when my own children do things that leave me shaking my head.
But yeah, there’s plenty of him in me, and in his grandchildren. He would have loved this song I’ve been listening to all night, if I had gotten the chance to play it for him in time.
And he’d have had a good laugh at Sophie looking up at me saying, “now that he’s resting in peace.”