Bill’s father left when Bill was a boy of one, his sister two, his mother about to give birth to another child.
What does a boy learn from a man who leaves his children and his pregnant wife? Who goes far away and comes back two weeks out of the year to take the children on a vacation to fulfill his fatherly duty?
There were hardly any pictures of Bill as a boy. None of him as a baby. Maybe because they were poor. Maybe because the year Bill was a baby was the year his father prepared to leave. No special moments for pictures, no need to recall this hard time.
The one picture I found of him as a little boy I put on a shelf in our living room. Maybe too often I picked up the brass rectangle I’d framed him in, held the cool weight in my hands. Looked at that boy looking at the camera.
It must’ve been taken a year or two after his father left. Bill and his brother stand side by side in a dusty yard. Their pants are faded, and Bill’s are too tight at the waist. He holds his brother’s hand.
I look for what’s missing, what a staying father could have given. What I see are the features of the man Bill will be. His serious brow, part of him already. His curly hair, part of him already. Maybe the tethers of no-father are part of him already, too, the threads weaving tight, obscuring the lessons another kind of father could have given.