Page 116 of Once Upon A Second Chance

“Thenwhy are you here?”

The coffee shop hum drops by half. I don’t care. Let them listen.

“I came because your brother asked me to,” he says, voice measured. “But I stayed because he was wrong.”

Jesse’s head snaps toward him. “What?”

Dad nods toward me. “Well, Jesse told me about your conversation. And I think you’re right, Penny. It’s not Jesse’s decision. You’re an adult. You’ve built a life. You’re going to be a mother. I don’t have the right to tell you what to do, and neither does he.”

For a second, I forget how to breathe.

Jesse looks stunned, like someone pulled the floor out from under him.

Dad clears his throat, then adds, “But I want to try to be here for you. If you’ll let me.”

My stomach turns, not with nausea this time but with something knotted and complicated. Angerand sadness and the hollow ache of years I can’t get back.

He wants to ‘be here’ for me? What exactly does that even mean?

He wasn’t there when I needed him most—when I was crying in the bathroom after Mom’s service, when I was driving to the clinic alone for my first day back, when Jesse and I couldn’t afford the furnace repair on the house and he wouldn’t even contribute to the upkeep of his own home.

But now there’s a baby, and suddenly he wants to be close again?

“I don’t know what you expect,” I say, my voice quieter now but no softer. “You can’t just show up and be Grandpa of the Year because Jesse decided to throw in the towel or something. You weren’t there when we really needed you; when we needed to pull together as a family—or what was left of one, anyway.”

“I’m not asking for forgiveness overnight,” he says. “I’m just asking for the chance to earn it.”

I don’t know how to respond to that. I don’t know whatI feel.

So I sit down slowly across from them, and when the waitress comes by, I ask for decaf, and I try to act like this is a conversation I wanted to have.

Because maybe I do and maybe I don’t. But either way—it’s already happening.

When the waitress comes by and sets down the mug, I stir the decaf with a flimsy wooden stick, watching it swirl but not drinking. My stomach’s too tight for that.

Dad’s watching me cautiously, hands folded like he’s not sure if this is a family meeting or a funeral. Jesse keeps glancing at both of us, waiting for someone to light the fuse.

“You missed my birthday last year,” I say, quietly but not without weight.

Dad’s eyebrows lift slightly. He opens his mouth, then closes it.

“You called,” I continue. “Three days late. Left a voicemail that said, ‘Hope it was good.’ I didn’t even play it until the next morning because I’d already gone to bed crying.”

He shifts like the booth’s gotten smaller. “I know,”he says. “I’m sorry.”

“You were only twenty minutes up the road in Nashville. But you skipped Thanksgiving and Christmas both. And every other holiday since Mom died.” I look at him squarely now. “You said the house in Nashville was hard to leave. That you needed time. But as close as you were to us geographically, you were worlds away from us emotionally. That really hurt, Dad. We’d already lost one parent and then we lost you, too.”

“It was hard,” he says after a long pause. “But that’s not why I stayed away. After a while, I told myself you two had each other. That if I showed up after failing you so badly, I’d just make things worse.”

“Youdidmake things worse,” I say, more tired than angry. “By not showing up at all.”

Jesse exhales hard beside him, arms crossed, eyes on the table. “We all did what we thought we had to.”

“No,” I say. “We did what waseasiest. You tried to control everything. He disappeared. And I... I just kept moving. Because someone had to.”

The silence after that is long and raw.

“I know I let you down,” Dad says, and this time there’s no evasion in his voice. Just grief. “I was so afraid of saying the wrong thing that I said nothing at all.”