He took the photographs from my hands. “That’s enough questions.”
But I couldn’t stop wondering. For weeks afterward I’d study his face across the dinner table, trying to find traces of that other man, the one with long hair and a crowd reaching toward him. I never found him there. By then Dad’s face had settled into something permanently tired, the kind of tired that doesn’t go away with a good night’s sleep because it isn’t really about sleep at all.
One evening, I asked whether he’d ever dreamed of becoming famous. Dad stared at his coffee for a long moment before answering.
“It was a dream once. But my time’s gone. Maybe you will inherit it.”
I never understood what he meant. At the time I thought he was being poetic in that awkward, clipped way he sometimes was, the way men of his generation occasionally let a real sentence slip out before immediately retreating behind something practical. I didn’t understand until years later that he’d meant it literally, that some part of him had already been watching me, already wondering, already hoping.
