He smiled tenderly. “Is that really how you see it?”
“Yes. It is. I’m not bitter about the decision you made to send me there. Or keep me there.”
Dad took a drink of his coffee to let those words of affirmation settle in on him. “I’m glad, of course. But I wish…I wish I had come back for you when I said I would.”
And there it was, the perfect opening to pose the question I’d been wanting to ask for days—for weeks. For years. “So why didn’t you? Come back sooner, I mean.”
Dad shook his head. “The truth?”
I nodded, my heart suddenly pounding in my chest.
“I was afraid of messing up what she had done in you.”
I stared at him, not understanding, remaining silent until he continued.
“Your mom was so…she was such a good mother. She knew how to calm you when you were afraid and discipline you when you were ornery and talk to you and teach you things. You weren’t like our friends’ kids at all. They were always having tantrums and meltdowns and screaming at their playmates when they didn’t get their way. But not you. Your mother had this way of dealing with you that was unlike any kind of parenting I had ever seen. Like super firm but super gentle, all at the same time. It’s hard to explain, but I have to think it was how she was brought up. Even though she had left her Amish upbringing, her Amish upbringing never truly left her. I couldn’t begin to measure up to her parenting skills. I still can’t.”
“You’re not a bad father, Dad. You’ve always made it clear that you loved me, which is huge, especially to a kid.”
He smiled. “Okay, so I’m not a complete failure. But I’ve never been very confident about it. Like I said, I was afraid of destroying what she had done. That’s why I went on a second remote tour after that first one, because I knew your grandparents were doing a far better job raising you than I ever could. At least that’s what I told myself. When I met Liz, I had another excuse for not coming for you. And then she got pregnant and I had another, and then we had a new baby and an upcoming move back to the States and I had another. I didn’t come back for you until I had run out of excuses. By that point, I knew it was high time for me to take over from your grandparents, whether I was going to botch everything up for you as a father or not.”
I took a sip of my coffee and swallowed it down. Once again, he’d given me the perfect opening for a question.
“So why didn’t you just take me that day? You asked me if I wanted to come. Why didn’t you just tell me to come?”
Dad fooled with the handle on his coffee mug as he considered his answer. “I wanted you to be where you wanted to be. You were turning into just the kind of boy you would have been had your mother lived. She would have been so happy to see you that way and in that environment. Before she died, I think she was torn between the life she had and the one she’d left. I don’t know. I guess it felt like I was honoring her by giving you the choice—a choice she gave up the day she married me.”
I sighed and looked out the window. “I thought it was because you had Brady and Liz and you didn’t really need me to be a part of your new family. I wanted you to want me to come with you.”
“And I wanted you to want to come.”
I turned back to my father. “We didn’t communicate very well, did we?”
“We were both making it up as we went along, I suppose. When I married your mother I thought it was for life. I didn’t think I’d ever have to make the kinds of decisions I made in the years that followed. I made them on the fly.”
“I’m sure you did the best you could.”
He shrugged. “Yeah, that’s what Liz tells me. I do know that my intentions were good. I really did want the kind of life for you that your mother could have given you. And Tyler, when I look at you now, I think you have it.”
A cloak of peace seemed to fall across my shoulders when he said that, as warm as a down blanket. “I think I do too.”
“You know, when you first told me on the phone that you would be able to stay with Brady while I was gone, I made a list of all the reasons why I was going to try to convince you to stay after I got back. Even to the day I left for the Middle East, I was hoping you would fall in love with the life you could have out here. But the longer I was gone and the more I agonized over it, the more I realized you are right where you belong. I’m not saying I don’t want you close by because I do. But you’ve always seemed like an Amish man to me. And before that, an Amish boy. Even before your mother died, you were an Amish boy. You just didn’t have the straw hat or the suspenders.”