1.
In the small kitchen, at an even smaller table that has seen meals, warm cans of beer, and long talks, my father negotiates the benefits of a life with him if my mother chooses to return. The gradual change in his voice suggests the odds are stacked against him. He insists he can change, and things will be different this time. But my mother has heard that pitch too many times. It no longer works. The damage is done. It's not just about how he hurt and disrespected her, but also how he did it in front of others. I still remember the night he called her names at Auntie Marie's birthday, or the time he slammed his fist on this very table and stormed out, leaving her crying in front of our guests. Twenty years of that was more than my mother could bear.
So, she left.
The old man quietly puts his phone in his pocket. He grabs his keys and wallet, then heads to the garage. I hear him rummage through his storage closet for a couple of minutes. After finding what he needs, his cowboy boots echo as he returns up the walkway. The creak of the screen door now sounds like a moan of pain from someone stabbed in the heart.
He's got his guitar in his hands. He doesn't look at me; instead, he makes a beeline for the kitchen table, where he sits for a couple of minutes with his guitar on his lap. "There were some good things that happened here, at this table, right?"
"You're asking me?" I returned.
"You're the only other person here," he replied.
"Can't YOU remember any good times, at that table?" I asked.
"We put all these curved rubber edges on the corners of the kitchen table so you wouldn't bump into it and hurt yourself," he began. "This is where you sat, once you learned how to use a fork and spoon. You blew out a lot of birthday candles on this table, too."
"That's all?" I knew there was much more than that in him. "What about your anniversaries, and mom's birthdays, and Mother's Day?"
He had no reply. He moved his guitar in front of him and took a long pause before he started playing.
"I hurt your Mom really bad this time. She's not coming back; I can't blame her."
I am an old man named after my father.
My old man is another child who's
grown old.
If dreams were lightning
and thunder were desire
This old house would have
burnt down,
a long time ago.
Make me an angel
that flies from Montgomery
make me a poster of an old
rodeo.
Just give me one thing
that I can hold on to
to believe in this living
It's just a hard way to go.
That's about all my father could sing before the tears came. His shoulders started to shake, and his voice broke as he put his head down. He left with his guitar in hand, each step outside heavy with grief. He was gone somewhere, anywhere but here, his pain driving him fast onto the main road and toward the freeway.
My phone rang just then. I braced myself for my Mom to call and vent, but when I answered, her voice sounded small and tired. Instead of anger, there were only apologies to me for not being able to keep everything together. She said softly, "There's a price to pay for being the glue all the time, especially when you're not appreciated."
"I know, ma," I told her. "I was there, I saw it all happen."
"You forgive me for leaving?" She asked.
"There's nothing to forgive, Ma," I assured her. "You live your life the way you need to. Don't let Dad guilt you into anything. I'm always here for you."
"That kitchen table needs to go," she said. "It's battered, worn, and beyond repair. It’s seen better days, but its time is up."
"Funny you say that," I told her. "I'm actually gonna toss it right now."
2.
I already had the Phillips screwdriver as I went to the kitchen. I flipped the table over and noticed the scribbles I had scratched underneath. My name, along with the date and time, stared back at me. My mother used a crochet table cover that reached the floor to make the kitchen look presentable for company. When my parents weren't paying attention, I'd crawl under the table to listen to their conversations. Most of it was grown-up talk I didn't understand. I knew the swearing; nothing else made sense. Once, I fell asleep there. My snoring must have confused everyone. My father eventually lifted the table cover and found me, waking me up with a stinging slap. Standing here now, looking at those childhood marks, I realized the table once felt like a secret shelter, a place where I thought I was safe, even in the middle of all the fighting. But as I got older, the table became less of a hiding spot and more of a witness to everything that broke our family apart. Maybe that's why letting it go hurts and frees me at the same time.
After thirty years, I expected the screws to be rusted. But they loosened quickly. Soon, I had separated the legs from the table top and tossed the whole thing in the trash. I ate my first bowl of poi at that table. It's where I did homework. It's also where I got the belt for refusing my vegetables. Food never went to waste because my parents said we never knew when the next meal would come. The memory brought tears—not from discipline, but from my stubborn disrespect toward my mother. I felt like such a stupid kid.
Mostly, that old table supported my mother as she sat worrying about my father when he didn’t come home from work. She also worried about how we'd pay bills. Most of our money came from Dad, but how could she pay bills if he wasted his whole check at the bar? Sometimes Mom and I drove to the bar to stop him from spending everything on drinks and women. That table became a repository of all that my mother put into it. Now, it filled most of the garbage bin and would finally find its way to the incinerator.
My father surfaced a couple of days later, his guitar in his hands and red, bleary eyes hidden under a pair of sunglasses he didn't own. He moved with slow, uncertain steps, the weight of something unspoken pressing down on him. As it had been his habit for years, he went directly to the fridge and grabbed a bottle of Sam Adams and plopped himself down on his regular chair at the kitchen table. But this time, his familiar ritual was interrupted by an unfamiliar reality: it wasn't his regular chair. It was a wooden one, new and unwelcoming.
His body jolted with shock when he realized there was a new table in the kitchen, along with new chairs.
"What the fuck?" He muttered to himself. "Clyde, what the muther-fuck!?"
Walking down the hallway, I found my father standing there red-faced and furious. "How do you like the new table?"
There was no reply from the old man. Not a verbal one anyway, but he did take a swing at me. Not with his fists, but his guitar. He swung that thing wide, so as I ducked from the blow, his momentum caused him to spin in place, and he hit the floor pretty hard. I waited for him to recover, and when he did, he charged straight at me. I side-stepped him, and he went crashing into the kitchen counter. "You had no right to get rid of that table," he said, trying to catch his breath. "There are memories in that table."
"There's more of mom's memories in that table than yours," I reminded him. "None of it was good. That thing had to go."
"I'm gonna fish that thing out of the trash and put it back together!" He screamed. "It stays here!"
"Why don't you take that table and go live somewhere else with it?" I took a step toward him.
"Right, so you can bring your mother back here once I'm gone, right?" He accused me.
"Whether you're here or not, Mom is never coming back here, and she's never coming back to you," I said.
The old man gathered himself and went straight to the garage, where he began packing everything up. Then, he moved on to his bedroom, where he put everything into suitcases and boxes. He made a call on his phone, and within an hour, a woman whom I had never seen before showed up in our driveway with a big Chevy truck. Old Dad began packing everything into it, and without even so much as a good-bye, he drove off with whoever that woman was. I went into the garage to take a look around, and for sure, everything that was his in the storage closet was gone. So too was the kitchen table from the trash bin.
3.
My mother eventually met a nice guy from the salsa club she belonged to. They never got married, but they did cohabitate until she passed one night in her sleep. Nothing dramatic, no sickness, no accident, just the end of life after knowing a few years of happiness that she long deserved. Her services were well attended. A lot of people cried; some just came for the food. My father never showed, but was I supposed to expect a modicum of decency from him? Right, who are we kidding here? But that's for the future tense, which means none of that has happened yet. Let's talk about what happened today. That some woman, driving that same truck, showed up in the driveway. A young man stepped out from the passenger side, and he approached me as I stood in front of the door.
"Uh, I'm here to pick up the rest of my father's stuff," he said matter-of-factly. He looked to be all of sixteen years old, with patches of peach fuzz on his chin and jawline. I stared at that kid long and hard. I should have been raging mad, and maybe I should have beaten the shit out of him, but why? The person at fault isn't the one standing in front of him; it's the one he just called his father.
"What's your name?" I asked him.
"Cross," he replied, "after my father."
I patted him on the shoulder and headed to the garage. "I'll give you a hand."
I was looking at a brother I never knew I had. As we stood there, an uneasy ache settled in my chest—resentment tangled with curiosity and this raw, aching sense of loss. Cross looked innocent enough, probably as confused as I was about the moment. I felt envy for how easily he slipped into that truck, as if he belonged to a world my own father never opened to my mother or me. In the truck sat the woman who had this kid with my father. Maybe that's why my mother is never coming back. There were only a few boxes of my father's old clothes, photo albums, record albums, and a few pieces of random jewelry. Once everything was loaded up, I shook Cross's hand and gave him a big hug.
"I'm Clyde," I introduced myself.
"How do you know my father?" He asked.
I was tempted to tell him that Cross Keawe Sr. was OUR father. His and mine. I said this instead.
"Your mother is the woman your father left me for," I said with a straight face. "I can't blame him, I mean, look at your mom, she's beautiful. She must have something that I don't. I guess cock wasn't enough for him. You see that man, you tell him I still love him."
Cross Jr. was all a fluster and didn't know what to say. He huffed back to the truck and got in. Even though I couldn't hear it, I saw him tell his mother what I'd just shared with him. She glared at me, shook her head, and flipped me the bird. She went roaring out of the driveway to the main road, giving me the second hardest middle finger the whole way. Poor woman and her kid have no idea what they've gotten themselves into.
Mother fucker. What a piece of shit.
I called my mother later that night and updated her as to what's been happening. I also asked her if she knew about that woman and her child. There was silence for a minute until she finally replied.
"He didn't tell me. I found out."
"How?" I asked.
"You know how I go to Foodland all the time, right? Well, pretty soon there's a new cashier, a kid, right?" She began. "I look at his name tag, and it says, 'Cross.' Then I get a good look at the kid, and at first I thought it couldn't be, but it was. He was the spitting image of your father."
"Ho man," I shook my head.
"I began hanging around the store, and then one day, there was your father sitting in a truck with some strange woman I've never seen before. That kid comes walking out of the store and hops into the back seat of that truck. Your father gives that kid the warmest hug ever, and the kid kisses his mom. The three of them looked so content together, the total opposite of our own family. The total opposite of him and me. There was no question about it, I left. I'm also sorry about the way I left, Clyde. Leaving you holding the bag, as they say."
"You did nothing wrong, Ma," I assured her. "You don't have to apologize for anything."
"Are you gonna sell the house?" She asked me. "I think you should."
"I agree," I said. "It's time."
"Also, your father called me, ranting and raving about something you said to his son," my mom shared. "I hung up. I'm just so tired of his voice at any volume."
4.
The future I talked about earlier, the one whose time period we were not yet in? This is it, we're here in the future I referred to. I used to wonder how grief might settle in, but nothing quite prepared me for this blend of hollow quiet and muted voices filling the house. I stand just inside the doorway, the scent of lilies and steaming trays of food mixing together, heavy in the space. For a moment, the memory of my mother's laughter echoes, and I have to blink twice before stepping into the gathering of faces, some familiar, some only here for the food because they're sitting close to the dining room. My mother's boyfriend, Daryl, is standing up front, shaking hands and accepting condolences. He and I lock eyes, and he waves me up front. I go up there to find out about what's happening.
"Your mom wanted you to play her favorite song, the one she taught you," Daryl whispered.
Daryl always dressed like the Pakē Mister Rogers, and his fingernails were meticulously manicured. His hair was always perfectly combed back and in place. The guy didn't have a single pockmark or blemish on his face. "She said the one your father sang to her was the one he said was her favorite song. He never bothered to ask her what her favorite song was; he just decided for her. You get it?"
"Yeah, I know which one," I nodded.
Daryl got on the mic and quieted everyone down. He even told the people who were waiting for the food to come up front. "Listen up, everyone, Clyde is going to share his mother's favorite song with all of us. Please give him your attention. I know Rayleen would love it if she were here."
I stood behind the microphone with a guitar in my hands. "This is for my mom, Rayleen."
“There’s a world where I can go and tell my secrets to
in my room
in my room.
In this world, I lock out all my worries and my fears.
in my room
in my room.
Do my dreaming and my scheming.
lie awake and pray
Do my crying and my sighing.
laugh at yesterday
Now it's dark, and I’m alone.
But I won’t be afraid.
in my room,
in my room…”
