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“Pretty much,” he said. “I think it was better than being with my mother. Sometimes I’d spend Christmas with her and then go to his house after. They always met in the middle for a drop off.”
“A drop off,” she said.
“Yeah. It was too much to drive six hours in one day for one of them, so the courts said to meet in the middle. It was normally a gas station or fast food joint.”
Good lord that sounded horrible to her.
“When you got to your father’s how was your holiday?”
“Not horrible but not that memorable either,” he said. “Nothing like Thanksgiving was with your family. Or how I think the next few days are going to be.”
“I have such good memories with my family. I hope you get to share that.”
“I will,” he said. “For years it was hard with my father. We just didn’t talk much, but my grandmother was great. This is crazy, but when I knocked on your door and smelled the chocolate chip cookies, I thought of her immediately. She always had cookies made when I visited. She’d drop them off at my father’s.”
“That’s kind of sweet,” she said. “Always chocolate chip?”
“Nope,” he said. “She’d make different ones. Peanut butter or sugar cookies. Sometimes brownies. It was nice. My father and I would eat it all in two days and then we’d both have a gut ache. But he said it was the only time he got the sweets from her too. Normally he bought them from the store weekly.”
“That’s a great memory to have with him,” she said. And she was going to try to make more cookies for him too. She just realized she’d only done it that one time since they’d been dating.
“It is,” he said. “Things got better when I was older. I was living in Groton and he was in New Haven, but he’d come on the weekends. We’d hang out and talk. Cook meals. I know he was nervous about coming each weekend, but I told him it was his house. He shouldn’t feel that way. It’s like we tiptoed around each other rather than being father and son.”
“Sounded like he wanted you to have a place to call your own that maybe he couldn’t give you before.”
“I think so,” he said. “But little by little we spent more time together. Sometimes he’d come and just work and we were in the house together, but we still talked some. We’d eat together. I’d come and go and he would too, but I don’t know. I can’t explain it.”
“It’s like any adult living with a parent. You respect the other’s space and privacy but yet still have them there if you need them.”
“Yeah,” he said. “Then he was just gone. I was going to New Haven to meet him for dinner. That was the plan that night. I had a job not that far away and reached out to ask if he wanted to meet.”
“You said he had a seizure and hit his head. Did he have a history of them?” she asked.
“No,” he said. “I think he would have told me. But I had them do an autopsy. I just needed answers. It didn’t make sense to me he’d hit his head and died so suddenly.”
“Did you think there was foul play?” she asked.
“I did,” he said.
This was the first she’d heard of it. “Why though?”
“No clue,” he said. “But nothing made sense to me at all. If he’d been attacked I’d want to know. But they said he’d had a seizure. That is what most likely caused him to hit his head. Then they said his blood sugar was really high. I guess he might have had type two diabetes but didn’t know. He wasn’t overweight, but again...those sweets he’d indulge in. Maybe he ate them a lot, but I had no idea. He was a big guy. Not heavy, as I said, but he did eat a lot of pastas and carb-based foods. I’m not sure if he knew he had it or not. We didn’t talk about doctors' appointments or anything.”
“My mother watches my father like a hawk. Makes sure he goes to the doctor yearly and gets his blood pressure and cholesterol checked. He’s on some meds.”
“My father wasn’t on anything. I’d know living with him at times. I never saw anything. I don’t even know if he went to the doctor. I hate to say there was a simple explanation to what happened, but it doesn’t feel that way.”
Her hand landed on his resting on the seat. “No,” she said. “And I’m sorry if talking about this is making you sad.”
“It’s not,” he said. “Or I don’t think so. I’ve never talked about it before with anyone. I’m glad I’ve got you to do it with though.”
“Me too,” she said.
It was time to change the subject though.
They sat in silence for a few minutes.
“Is Kate going to be there?”
