He had a birthmark. Right there. On his right shoulder. Shaped like a crescent moon. I used to trace it when I was little.
Dad. Dad, is it you? Please. Look at me.”
The old man looked at me. And I watched twenty years crack open in his face.
“Gracie?” he whispered. The name only my father ever called me. A name I hadn’t heard in twenty years. “Little Gracie. You had a gap in your teeth. You were going to be a doctor.”
I collapsed against the side of that tub, sobbing, holding the hand of the filthy, forgotten, homeless man I had spoken to with such cruelty an hour earlier — my father. My father, alive. My father, whom I’d just called a mess for someone else to clean up.
He’d survived the accident. Head trauma, we’d later understand, had taken his memory and his identity, and he’d wandered out of a hospital before anyone connected him to the missing man, and for twenty years he’d lived on the streets of a city where his own daughter grew up, married a millionaire, and learned to look down on people exactly like the man he’d become.
For twenty years, my father had been out there. And I’d been in here, in my climate-controlled house, scoffing that some people just prefer to live that way.
