My father called Thursday and asked me to meet him at his old shop, which a family friend now operated. He had retired reluctantly and still visited three mornings a week, mainly to repair things no customer had asked him to repair. I found him at the back workbench, fitting a new handle onto a tool with the calm concentration he brought to everything difficult. He asked me to sit on a paint-splattered stool. Then he held out two mugs of coffee, one black and one with the cream he knew I preferred.
"Your mother thinks you need support," he began. I prepared myself for a lecture. "She's right. But support isn't the same as telling you you've done nothing wrong." I asked if Nolan had spoken to him. My father nodded. Nolan had called to apologize for leaving the cookout before helping clean up. At that, something broke inside me. My husband had been publicly betrayed, and he was worried he'd left my father with extra work.
Dad asked whether Nolan had been cruel to me in private. I said no. Had he been unfaithful, he asked, or made me afraid of him? No. Had I told him how unhappy I had become, and had he refused to listen? I looked at the floor. Dad set down his coffee. "Then I can't explain this by making him the villain," he said. "You don't have to stay married because someone is decent. If you were unhappy, you could have told him. You could have left honestly. But you made him find out about your unhappiness in front of all of us."
I said I hadn't realized how far away Nolan and I had drifted. Dad considered that. "Maybe you didn't. But you knew enough to keep secrets." He turned the tool over in his hands. "When I met your mother, I thought the best marriages were the ones where nothing broke. That's nonsense. Things break all the time. The question is whether both people can admit what needs repair." He gave me a look that was gentle and unflinching. "Nolan can't repair what you're still pretending didn't happen."
On the drive home I passed the street where Nolan and I had first looked at our house. I remembered him standing on the porch with a flashlight, tracing a water stain near the ceiling while the realtor insisted it was nothing. We argued about the repairs, the budget, and whether we were taking on too much. Later, in the car, he said he trusted us to figure it out together. For five years, he had made good on that promise. I had mistaken his faith in us for permission to stop making good on mine.