My father didn’t know I was attracted to men. He asked me to play football and had me change the oil of our cars. He chased me once when I refused to eat broccoli; I’d run out of the house to avoid it. My shoe came off, and so he caught up to me, grabbing me by the waist, ready to push me over if I tried to run away again. I hated him at that moment.
Other moments, I waited for hours by the gate on our dirt road for him to come home from the city where he worked, so he didn’t have to get out of the car to open and close the gate. (He does not remember I did this now.) I waited, watching grasshoppers and ants. Those years, he was addicted to video games at the arcade in the mall; he stopped on the way home to play each night. Dinner went cold. The light drained out of the sky like it were a giant sink. The sky became beautiful and then the air grew cold.
I’d button up my shirt or coat and keep waiting, like a wife. I was good at it, at deprivation. The five of us lived in a little cabin on the side of a mountain. It had only cold running water and a small wood stove to keep us warm through the night. In winter, when the road was deep in snow, we carried our food in on a sled and broke ice in the creek to draw water. I learned that absence was a sign of strength. I knew then what I loved, but not why I loved it.
When the tires of my father’s car crunched the gravel and the beam of the headlights ran across the honeysuckle at the bend of the road, my heart jumped with excitement. After he passed the gate, I would lock it and get in the passenger’s side—the only time I rode in that seat. The car was warm and secret, my father in the last moments of his private life before re-entering the family. I don’t remember if I was happy then, if he thanked me, how that short ride felt. I only remember waiting for his car, the sound of its tires crushing the gravel.