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  • A River of Light
  • Meredith Hall (bio)

I am sitting with my father in his car in the parking lot at McDonald’s, on a busy street in coastal Maine. It is a cold, sunny December afternoon. “I drive a black Acura SUV,” he had said on the phone. I have not seen him for ten years, although I periodically hear news of his health from my sister and brother, who see him often. I was 19 when his new wife, Dorothy, exploded on the phone and announced that I would never be allowed in their home again. I waited for more than three decades for my father to come to my defense and overturn the outcasting. He never did. I wrote to him a couple of weeks before this meeting, asking if he would like to meet with me, maybe for lunch. If he agreed to come, I knew it would be the last time I would ever see him.

My father is 84 years old. I have a need to unburden him of whatever guilt or regret he may carry, to say goodbye to him, to tell him I love him. I am afraid that he will die and I will be left with the unended conversation that has hung in the lost time between us all these years. There are many, many things I wish I could say to him, about grief and betrayal and injustice, about terrible longing. But he is an old man, and the time for all that has passed.

I do not know my father. My recollections of him are singular images. Once, as he sat at the kitchen table, my father fed toast to our dog, Sam, placing the pieces on the dog’s nose and telling him to wait until my father said, “Okay!” Once, my father took us camping at a mountain lake. I cried when I caught a little perch. He cooked it in a heavy black pan over the fire, and we pulled the delicate, pure white skeleton, spine and hair ribs, from the hot flesh. Once, my father hung and skinned a deer he had shot. We children helped scoop the lungs and liver onto newspapers on the garage floor. My father cut out and held up to us the large heart, [End Page 93] exclaiming on the beauty and wonder of the living organism. His maroon sweater had holes at the elbows. And once, my father whistled as he held my hand and we crossed a street in a town somewhere. The cars stopped and we walked from curb to curb as if it were a stage. Snapshots, a tiny album that defines my father, a stranger to me.

I have prepared myself for a meeting with a man I don’t know. He left our family when I was ten. As an adult, I have seen him very briefly perhaps six times. Yet I sit with him in his car in McDonald’s parking lot, knowing him. What is this sudden deep recognition of so much I cannot know? Here is my father’s voice—tenor, quick with sound. These are my father’s hands—large, capable, the long fingers knobbed with arthritis. These are his blue eyes, intelligent, hungry, clouded with an old man’s fading vigor. This is his large chest and belly, his jowly neck, his long legs crossed at the ankles in his car. His white hair, white mustache I have never seen. I sit next to my father, known to me, loved in every detail, carried through all these years to this moment.

I have also prepared myself for the worst, coaching myself to stick, no matter what, to my clear intent: I am here to say goodbye, to tell my father I love him. Whatever he says, I will not react.

“I’ll see you, Meredy,” he had said on the phone. His voice was cold, aggressive. “But no lunch. And there are ground rules. No talking about the past.” That’s fine with me, this agreement to forget. I’m not surprised he has chosen not to remember, to face me as if I have sprung from nowhere...

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