My father taught me that responsibility was not a choice but a weight each person must shoulder. Yet as the years passed and each new generation came along, that weight seemed to slip further from his grasp. What he carried with strength and pride did not diffuse into the minds, hands, and hearts of some of his children, stepchildren, and grandchildren. It seems as if I was the only one who listened.
I stood at the center of memory and peeled through the rings, the onion of time opening into earlier lives. His head was bare now, his deep hazelnut-brown skin freckled with small specks. One early August summer day I pulled into the driveway, parked, and exited my silver 3 Series BMW. Cream-cheese-white smoke released from his eyes, slowly like an evenly burning cigar. The tension stored in his body and mind escaped. He held all three states at once—solid, liquid, and gas. The grinding on his back teeth stopped. He ordered me to tell my mother that Deasia must go. I was between two parents: my father, his world marked by a pending transition, who summoned me to be his voice; and my mother, moving quietly like an undetectable gas. When I hesitated, he replied, “That’s what I want you to do for me.” I felt the weight of his words pressing against me—not just an order, but a burden he handed down. My father was a messenger in a home where no one wanted to hear the message. His attention and ability to perform shifted. He was in the balance of death, his present medical condition, and his past life. I became the courier.
He murmured to me that Deasia sells that shit and thinks she’s slick. There was no need to explain. His eyes seasoned with the flavors of time, he said they had told the Rev—everything. The gravity and magnetism of the street life had greater pull on Deasia than my father facing a lifetime pivotal shift. My mother retreated to her bedroom, phone pressed to her ear, whispering gossip that did nothing to mend the cracks in our home. The bones that had provided sound family structure had become arthritic. I had to figure out a way to manage between delay and decay. My father declared the message urgent, however my mother, long-winded, loved to talk, received more gossip than she could store. She was a slow moving cloud, soft and gentle with a mixture of grey that paused time.
A few days later, my father sat in his wheelchair in the kitchen. I was taken back to when I had been confined to a wheelchair myself in the same kitchen. The oven of my father’s mind opened up, the heat traveled just above his head and lingered, a cloud thick and heavy as if the room breathed down on him. He grabbed his walking stick and beat it against the kitchen floor, each thud louder than the next. The force behind each vibration caused the dust of the floor to rise, separate, and spread. The dust particles caused a great stillness. His eyes squinted tightly as he fixed them on me, holding my gaze.
“Did you do what I told you?” he asked.
“Yeah,” I answered.
He nodded slowly, repeating under his breath, “Uh huh… uh huh… okay.”
During his health decline, disrespect and disregard for my father increased. I was sharp like a Garrison hat in the crease. I stood at attention and help was a ghost. I no longer felt caught between his authority and my mother’s—now I knew my father always had the last say. It was already etched in their hearts that I would never cross my father for my mother, especially when she chose to tolerate her granddaughter’s deafening disrespect.
Deasia resisted the demand to relocate around the corner with her lifelong absent parent. She suffered from amputated ambition, no real direction, and lack of clarity and maturity. Her drive was latent and l-a-g-g-e-d, pants s-a-g-g-y and s-a-g-g-e-d. Her mind raced, her body spoke before her brain, to get away from the rapid mental fire she smoked, minute after minute, hour after hour. To combat against her daily spikes, highs, and extreme lows, she s-p-a-r-k-e-d a tobacco brown blunt with green, sticky, fluffy, marijuana. It was a way of creating sacred space for her fatigued and fractured mind. Over time an invisible umbilical cord developed between her, her grandmother, and the house. His eyes slid side to side, sluggish yet precise, like windshield wipers clearing a foggy windshield.
Deasia stood in the kitchen beside me, and I delivered my father’s demand in his presence. She was resistant, not resilient. Her mouth ran off course like the car she couldn’t control, sharp and off-key, until she turned to him and said, “Grandpa, you have something you want to say to me?”—as if she had lost her wits. I cut in, my voice steady: “Why don’t you just leave.”
The words hung like smoke in the room, but it wasn’t really me speaking—it was my father’s authority moving through me. He didn’t need to raise his voice. His presence alone settled the matter. Deasia stepped, stomped, and stampeded across the kitchen floor like a wild boar, each movement loud enough to shake the walls. Impulsive, reactive, and fractured. She was in the same state that caused her to crash a car into a pole. Her behavior rippled, expanded, and stretched like a soft echo that hooked, circled, and threaded itself through every second, minute, and hour of her life. It looped and lingered, unseen and repeating a full circle. Her mind collapsed and her body lived out the violence.
As I attempted to restrain her, she picked up a silver sharp object and struck me fast, just above the eye. Blood trickled. I didn’t get to see what object she assaulted me with. I saw only that she picked it up from the tray that holds the silverware. An electrical current surged through my body. The spirit of my father’s voice and his softer side emerged at once, his voice coiled, curled, and echoing the pomegranate-colored canyon of my mind.
The words stretched like plastic. “No Robert, no don’t do that.’’ I stopped, paused, and surrendered, decompressing the flood of emotions that roared in my chest. A complete reversal of what could have become.
He provided me with his heart and both lungs. My state liquified, and I walked out the kitchen, turned the corner, and dashed into the bathroom. I pulled my cell phone from my back pocket and snapped photos of my face. Skin unsettled, eyebrows spiked up: still, stuck, and silent.
