Parker RUN OF THE MILL

THE LAST TIME I HAD been this nervous about going to talk to George, I had asked him if I could marry Greer. I knew he liked me, but there’s a huge difference between liking someone and thinking they are a suitable husband for your baby girl.

George was a man much like the men I had grown up with. Large and imposing, he wore a suit and tie every day, chewed the end of a cigar, and used words like “acumen” and “acrimonious.” Men of his generation were raised not to let people know what they were thinking. And George’s parents had done a top-notch job, because I could never, ever tell what George McCann was thinking.

Greer would come home and tell me how over the moon her family was for me, and I would think, Really? Even your father?

George had had an incredibly difficult time with his wife’s death, and his pain was so palpable that you could almost smell it before you reached him. I knew that Greer’s wedding would bring up a whole flood of emotions for him. A part of me wished we had just gone ahead and gotten married three months in so that Karen could have seen the wedding. She would have loved that.

Six years earlier, George had said stoically, “I’m not losing a daughter. I’m gaining a son.” Then he slapped me on the back and poured me some scotch. But this talk was different. This wasn’t something as run-of-the-mill as a proposal. This wasn’t run-of-the-mill at all.

When I walked into his top-floor corner office that morning, George was, as always, behind his huge mahogany desk and the Wall Street Journal. I asked him one morning how he had time to read two newspapers every day. He had looked shocked. “Parker, how do you have time not to?”

Greer had taken his ritual to heart. She had read the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times every day, too, right up until the month she died.

He peeked over the top of the paper and folded it neatly when he saw me. He stood up and said, “What are you doing here, son? I thought you were in North Carolina.”

I nodded and swallowed. George gestured for me to sit in one of the small black leather wingback chairs that flanked his desk.

“Well, sir…” That was a dead giveaway that I was nervous; I always said “sir” a lot when I was. “I need to talk to you about something.”

He nodded knowingly. “Ah yes. I’ve been waiting for this. I’ve known it was coming for quite some time. And I want you to know that you have my blessing.”

Known it was coming? How? Even I hadn’t known it was coming. I studied his face as he said, “Parker, no father could have wished for a better man for his daughter. You stood by her faithfully in the worst of the worst, and I know firsthand what kind of fortitude that takes. So I wish you and your new gal well. I want you to find happiness.”

Ohhhh… I almost laughed, but I cleared my throat instead. “Well, actually, um, no, sir. That’s not what I’m talking about, exactly.”

“Oh. Well, then just keep that talk in your back pocket for when the time comes.”

I smiled. “I’m not sure that time will ever come, but I appreciate it. But this is about something… different.”

He raised his eyebrow at me. “Will I need scotch?”

It was barely nine a.m., but, even so, I nodded.

He nodded, too, but didn’t move.

“Greer and I had embryos frozen before her treatments,” I started. “We had planned on having children together once she got well, but then…” I paused, looking down at my hands, the freshness of my pain this morning catching me off guard. I took a deep breath, not bothering to finish the sentence, because if anyone knew that Greer hadn’t gotten better, it was her own father. “I have these pieces of her just sitting in a freezer, and I thought I might try to have one of them.”

He looked positively confounded. “You’ve lost me, son.”

“Well, I would get a surrogate. And then I’d raise the baby…”

He shook his head. “You mean to tell me that you are planning on having my late daughter’s child, your child, with a surrogate?”

This was not going as well as the proposal chat.

I shrugged. “Well, I’m thinking about it.” I nearly gulped. “Yes, sir.”

That big bear of a man got up from his side of the desk. I got up, too, reflexively, defensively. He lunged at me, hugging me so tightly I thought I was going to lose feeling in my middle. He pulled back and wiped tears from his eyes, which I had seen him do only twice before. He grabbed me by the shoulders and said, “A grandchild would be just the thing.”

I realized that mine wasn’t the only life that had all but ended when Greer went. George’s had, too. He needed me. I needed him. And he was right: a grandchild would be just the thing.