I am seventy-one years old, and I have made excuses for my son for forty of them. I made my last one on Sunday, when his youngest stepboy called my house in a rush.
“Tell Tyler I tried, Grandma,” he said. He calls me Grandma too. They all do. “I took all the cards out of Dads poker set and threw them in the trash so there would be no game. He just went to play at his buddys house instead.”
“Oh, child,” I said.
“I was in the hall. I heard him on the phone.” The boy hesitated. “He said, that boy is doing better than I ever did, honor society and all, he does not need me showing up reminding him what he came from. He said it is easier on Tyler if I just stay gone.”
Easier on Tyler if I stay gone. My son said that about his own boy, and called it a kindness, when it was nothing but a coward hiding from a son who outgrew him.
A little boy dug poker cards out of the trash trying to give Tyler a father who had talked himself into believing his own child was better off abandoned.
I have spent years telling Tyler his daddy was busy, that his daddy loved him in his own way. I am done. That boy deserves the truth, which is that his father is a man too small for him, and that it is a failing in the father, never once in the son.
I told Tyler as much, plain, and then I told him the thing that matters more. That he has never been alone. That I have been in every seat his father left empty, and I will be in every one still to come.
He walked up for that honor society certificate and looked at the seat I was holding, and I nodded at him the way I always do, and he squared his shoulders and carried it like the man he is turning into, one his father will never be.
His daddy texted at nine. Proud of you son. Tyler read it, put it in his pocket, and asked if we could get a shake, and we did, and he never brought his father up.
But he hugged that little stepbrother so hard the next time he saw him that the boy squeaked, and he told him digging cards out of the trash was the bravest thing anybody had done for him in years.
My son thinks Tyler is better off without him. It is the one true thing that man has said in a long time, though not for any reason he would understand. That boy is better off. He has got a grandmother who will never leave that seat empty, and he knows it.