Dad’s childhood home had become unstable when he was a teenager.

Mom didn’t know every detail.

Dad hadn’t told her everything either.

But for several years, he lived with a foster family.

It was a crowded house, with kids constantly coming and going, too many shoes by the door, and too many plates drying beside the sink.

“And that chair?” I asked.

“Kitchen table.” Mom looked at it. “There weren’t enough matching chairs. Gilbert got that blue one.”

“Why keep it?”

“Because it was his.”

The simplicity of her answer stopped me.

Mom said Dad used to joke that the chair leaned as much as he did.

Nobody officially assigned it to him.

They simply began expecting him to sit there.

Dinner came, and Dad had a place.

Breakfast came, and he had a place.

I thought about the photograph.

I went to the drawer and pulled it out.

“Is this them?”

Mom nodded.

For years, I’d seen only a beach.

Now I noticed the people gathered along the left edge.

Teenagers.

A woman beside the cooler.

Someone crouched in the sand.

Dad’s thumb had worn the photograph smooth around those tiny figures.

Not over the ocean.

Over them.

“He wasn’t looking at the beach,” I said.

Mom shook her head.

“Not usually.”

Dad left Hawaii at twenty when an opportunity opened on the mainland.

Nobody forced him out.

His foster family encouraged him to go.

He expected to return.

But one year became several.

Oregon became a job.

The job became a life.

Then Mom.

Then me.

“So why didn’t he go back?”

Mom looked toward the window.

“At first, money.”

That made sense.

“Then?”

“Work.”

“And after that?”

She went quiet.

“He thought he’d waited too long.”

“Too long for what?”

“To show his face.”

I frowned.

“They were his family.”

“He didn’t use that word easily.” Mom picked at the corner of a condolence card. “The longer he stayed away, the more embarrassed he became about staying away.”

It sounded ridiculous.

It also sounded exactly like Dad.

“Where do you fit into this?”

Mom looked at me.

“What?”

“The whole story. Dad told me I’d understand you if I knew it.”

She pushed her chair back.

“When we were first married, he compared everything to Hawaii.”

“Everything?”

“Rain. Fish. Coffee. Sunsets.”

Despite myself, I smiled.

“That sounds like Dad.”

“It was exhausting.”

My smile faded.

Mom stared at her hands.

“I thought every time he called Hawaii home, he was telling me this wasn’t.”

There it was.

“What did you do?”

“One night I told him if Hawaii was so perfect, maybe he should’ve stayed there. That’s when he told me about the foster home.”

Mom looked toward the blue chair.

“I’d thought I was competing with beaches and palm trees.”

Her voice softened.

“I found out I was competing with the first place he’d ever been sure dinner would include him.”

“Mom.”

“I apologized,” she said.

“Did he forgive you?”

“Immediately.”

“So you stopped him from going back?”

Her head snapped toward me.

“No.”

The answer came so quickly that I believed her.

“I spent years trying to get him to go.”

She suggested it when I was ten.

Dad said they couldn’t afford it.

She suggested it after his promotion.

He said work was too busy.

She suggested Hawaii for their twenty-fifth anniversary.