"He had an inexplicable hatred for Johnny Cash," my dad said as he took a long swig from his bottle.
"There has to be other things you can tell me," I said between bites of pretzels. It felt odd to be at my grandfather's place. I hadn't been there since I was a kid and I was almost thirty now. Yet it hadn't changed much. Things were still out of time, just more so now. His TV with a bulging screen, his shag carpet, his wood paneling, faded photos strewn about as an excuse for decoration, plants that I swear were dying the last time I saw them but are still somehow dying now. The green of the room also stood out. Not in brightness or vibrancy but in mundanity. It had been a happy green when I was a child, I was sure of it, but years of dust and neglect had faded it to a sad backdrop.
"He really hated Johnny Cash."
"Thanks, Dad." I knew that my dad and my grandpa had had a falling out when I was a kid, but I never knew why. It didn't seem to be a loud explosion that had driven them apart but a quiet festering thing that neither of them acknowledged. I never got a good look at the rotting thing thing though, but I knew well enough to avoid it. Evidently, so did my grandfather.
"He looked like me when he was younger."
I raised my eyebrows at this. My dad had finally acquiesced to telling me something I didn't know. We didn't have many photos of my grandpa as a younger man. My dad said that they didn't take many photos of him as a kid and when they did, it was with other kids. I could only remember one photo of my young father with my grandpa.
My grandpa was probably around his mid-thirties because my dad had been born, but not my aunt. My dad was dressed up for Halloween in a clearly homemade elephant costume with uneven hems stitched with love. The cardboard ears fell on his head crookedly, but in the charming way that anything a little kid wears is charming. In the photo, you can see my grandpa holding up the ears to make them even. His calloused hands gingerly touching the roughly cut cardboard edges. It made me think of the time I'd cut my fingers on cardboard making my own Halloween costume (a block of Swiss cheese). My grandpa is hard to see in the photo because the flash greatly overtakes my father, blanching away even his freckles. But if you squint, and I had squinted at this photo before, you could see my grandfather smiling in it and the flash reflecting off of his reading glasses in his pocket.
I hadn't thought about it much in years and my grandpa was younger in that photo than I had ever known my father to be, but I could see it. The bright blue eyes, the freckles, the hairs poking over large knuckles. Their face shapes were similar too, both heart shaped but my grandfather's heart was narrower.
"I can see that," I said as I crunched another pretzel.
"Weird to see yourself in someone else."
"Tell me about it," I started to laugh. I had always been told that I looked like my father to the point of it being embarrassing. I had run from this compliment as a kid because as a girl, I didn't want to be told that I looked like some stupid boy, even if he was my father. As an adult, I could see the kindness in the comparison and, moreover, the accuracy.
My laugh was cut short though when my dad set down his bottle loudly. We turned to look at each other and his eyes were someone else's. They held a fiery anger that I couldn't have imagined before in his blue eyes but, moreover, they held a fear that I couldn't articulate.
I didn't know what to say to him. I wanted to break the tension, but I was afraid he had something he wanted to say to me. To tell me how he and his father weren't alike. That he and I would never go so long speaking that we missed birthdays and Christmases and hell even just bad days when you need to hear your dad's voice.
But nothing came.
Instead, the moment just dragged on, the salt of the pretzels and the stale air drying my mouth.
"But do you like Johnny Cash?" I finally managed.
"Yeah, I love him," my dad said as he broke eye contact and took another swig.
"Then you're not so alike after all."
"Suppose not."
(Prompt by me)
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