Dad's Potato Salad

The recipe is wrong.

I know it's wrong because I'm the one who wrote it down, eleven years ago, standing in the kitchen of the house on Maple Street. The one with the cracked linoleum and the window over the sink that stuck in summer. The one before the apartment, before the complex, before the running, before all of it.

I was twenty-eight. He was forty-four. He stood at the counter with his back to me, a cigarette burning in the ashtray by the stove, and I asked him to teach me because I thought we had time. I thought I'd watch closer someday, measure properly, ask the right questions.

I didn't.

The notebook is open on my counter now—the same notebook, pages yellowed, my handwriting from a decade ago looking like a stranger's. I run my finger over the ink.

Dad's Potato Salad

5 lbs russet potatoes (he said Yukon but I think he was wrong)

1 cup mayo (or more?)

Mustard - yellow, not Dijon (how much? I didn't write it down)

Celery (some)

Onion (some)

Salt and pepper (to taste)

6 eggs, hard boiled

Paprika on top (for color, he said, like that explained anything)

Some.

I wrote some for the celery.

I wrote some for the onion.

Like those words mean anything. Like I could reconstruct a man from some.

The potatoes are boiling.

Steam rises from the pot, fogs the window above the stove, and for a moment—just a moment—I can almost see him in the glass. The shape of his shoulders. The way he held a cigarette between his first two fingers, ash growing long before he remembered to tap it off.

I blink and he's gone.

Just me, reflected. Forty-year-old eyes in a face that looks more like his every year.

The water rolls and spits. I'm in my kitchen in Arizona—four hundred and twelve miles from Durango, from the complex, from the borrowed grill, from the last BBQ that nobody celebrated—and I'm watching the bubbles break the surface and thinking about how he'd tell me I cut them too small.

He'd say it with his back to me. Wouldn't even turn around.

You want chunks, not mush. How many times I gotta tell you?

He never told me. Not really. I just watched and guessed and wrote down some like that was enough.

My phone is on the counter. Face down. I put it that way three hours ago and I haven't touched it since.

I could call my brother. He might remember the recipe better. He lived with Dad at the end—stayed in Durango, kept his job at the complex, slept in the room next to our father's while I packed boxes four hundred miles away and pretended that distance was the same as safety.

But my brother and I haven't talked since the funeral.

The funeral I didn't go to.

The knife feels heavy in my hand.

Onion. I'm cutting onion. The smell rises sharp and chemical, and my eyes start to water, and I let them because it's easier to blame the vegetable than to name the thing that's actually wrong.

I didn't go to the funeral because I couldn't.

That's what I told myself. What I told my wife. What I'll probably tell a therapist someday, if I ever get desperate enough to sit in a room and say these things out loud.

I couldn't.

But that's not true, is it?

I didn't go because I'd already run once. Because if I went back—if I stood at the grave in Durango with my brother and my aunts and the cousins I haven't seen in six years—I'd have to look at the hole in the ground and admit that the last time I saw my father alive was a paper-plate afternoon in August where nobody said what needed saying.

I loaded boxes into a U-Haul. He stood by the grill, beer in hand, watching.

He didn't help.

He didn't stop me.

He didn't say stay.

He should have said stay.

I bring the knife down too hard. The cutting board jumps. A piece of onion skitters across the counter and falls behind the stove, into the gap I've never cleaned, and I stand there staring at the space where it disappeared like it matters. Like anything matters.

My wife had a miscarriage three days before that BBQ.

The bathroom light was yellow. Cheap apartment bulb, the kind that buzzes. She was sitting on the edge of the tub in the oversized t-shirt she slept in—mine, originally, before it became hers—and there was blood on the white tile between her feet. Not a lot. Enough.

She looked up at me and her face was dry and her voice was flat and she said: I can't stay here.

She didn't mean the bathroom.

I should have said no. I should have said let's wait, let's not make decisions while we're bleeding.

But I've never been good at staying. Staying feels like the walls pressing in, like the air getting thinner, like if I don't move I'll die in place and no one will notice until the smell gives me away.

So I said yes.

I said okay.

I started packing boxes while my father stood at a borrowed grill and flipped burgers and didn't say goodbye because neither of us knew that's what it was.

The mayo is wrong.

I can tell before I mix it in. The color—too white, too clean, like something sterile. Hospital walls. Blank paper. The sheets they pulled over his face before my brother took a picture and texted it to me because I asked.

Because I wasn't there.

Because I needed proof.

I stared at that picture for forty-five minutes. Zoomed in on his hands—the ones folded on his chest, the ones that used to grip a spatula, a beer bottle, my shoulder when I was small and afraid of the dark. His fingernails were clean. Someone had cleaned them. I don't know why that detail broke me, but it did.

His always had a yellowness to it. The potato salad, I mean. The mustard bled through everything, stained even the pale parts, made it look lived-in. Real.

I add more mustard. Then more. The color shifts—cream to butter to something closer, almost right.

Then more.

The bowl is the color of jaundice now. The color of bruises healing. The color of the walls in the hospice room where my grandmother died when I was nineteen, and I remember Dad standing by the window, not crying, just still, like something inside him had stopped.

I scrape the whole thing into the trash.

The sound of it hitting the bag—wet, heavy, final—makes my stomach turn.

This is the fourth time this week.

The thing about running is that it feels like the right choice when you're doing it. Forward momentum. Wind in your face. The rearview mirror shrinking everything behind you until it fits in the palm of your hand, until you can close your fingers around it and pretend it's not there.

You don't know you're hollowing yourself out until you stop.

Then you turn around and there's nothing but distance. Miles and miles of empty road. People you left standing at the edges, getting smaller, waving or not waving—you can't tell anymore. You're too far away to see their hands.

He called me three weeks before the stroke.

I didn't answer.

I was cycling down—that's what I call it now, what the doctor calls it, a clinical word for the weeks when getting out of bed feels like drowning in reverse. When the light through the curtains hurts. When my wife's voice sounds like it's coming from the bottom of a well and I can't find the rope to pull her up.

I saw his name on the screen—Dad—and my thumb hovered over the green button and I thought: tomorrow.

I thought: when I'm better.

I thought: he'll understand, he always understands, we have time.

He left a voicemail.

Seven seconds.

I know because I've looked at it six hundred times. Opened the screen, stared at the timestamp, the duration, the little play button that would let me hear his voice one more time.

I haven't pressed it.

Sixty-three days. The voicemail is still there, unplayed, waiting.

If I listen to it, it becomes the last thing. His voice, captured, final. A period at the end of a sentence I wasn't ready to finish.

If I don't listen to it, there's still something left. Still a door I haven't opened. Still a version of him that exists in potential, in maybe, in the space between pressing play and hearing what he had to say.

My wife says I should delete it.

She says it gently—she says everything gently now, like I'm made of glass, like the wrong word will shatter me—but I see it in her eyes. She thinks the voicemail is a wound I keep reopening. A scab I won't let heal.

Maybe she's right.

But I can't.

I can't let go of seven seconds.

The eggs are wrong.

I can tell before I even peel them. The shells stick, tear the whites into craters, leave them pockmarked and ugly. When I finally get them open, the yolks are ringed with gray-green—overcooked, sulfurous, the smell of something rotting.

He would have thrown them out.

He had standards about eggs. One of the few things he had standards about. Everything else was soft, yielding—fine, whatever you need, I'm easy—but the eggs had to be right. Bright yellow yolks, firm whites, no gray, no smell. He'd crack them on the edge of the bowl with one hand, a trick I never learned, and the shells would fall away clean.

Mine fall in pieces. I pick fragments out of the whites with my fingernails, and I think about his hands in the photograph, how clean they were, how someone had taken the time to wash them before they folded them on his chest.

I dice the eggs anyway.

I mix them in.

I don't taste it.

My wife comes to the doorway around nine.

The kitchen is a mess—potato peels in the sink, mustard smeared on the counter, the trash can overflowing with failed attempts. I've been standing here for three hours. Maybe four. The light has changed outside the window, gone from gold to gray to the deep purple that comes before full dark.

She doesn't say anything.

She used to. The first time, she asked what I was making. The second time, she asked if I wanted help. The third time—her voice cracking, her hands twisting the hem of her shirt—she asked if I was okay.

I didn't answer.

Now she just stands in the doorway, arms crossed, watching me the way you watch a car accident. Unable to look away. Unable to help.

The potato salad is in a bowl, covered in plastic wrap. The paprika on top is uneven—too heavy on one side, sparse on the other, like a rash spreading. Like something diseased.

"It's not right," I tell her.

She nods.

"It'll never be right."

She nods again. Her eyes are wet. I should comfort her. I should cross the kitchen and put my arms around her and tell her I'm sorry, I'm sorry I'm like this, I'm sorry I can't stop, I'm sorry I'm sorry I'm sorry.

I don't move.

"I can't remember how much celery."

"I know."

"He would have told me." My voice catches, snags on something sharp in my throat. "If I'd asked. If I'd called him back. If I'd—"

I stop.

She waits.

The silence fills the kitchen like water, rising, pressing against my chest.

"I didn't go to the funeral."

It's the first time I've said it out loud since it happened. The words taste like copper, like blood, like the inside of my cheek that I've been chewing raw for sixty-three days.

"I didn't go. And I didn't call him back. And the last time I saw him I was loading boxes into a truck and he was standing there with a beer and he didn't say anything and I didn't say anything and now he's dead and I have a voicemail I can't listen to and I keep making this fucking potato salad and it's never right, it's never right, and I don't know how much celery, I don't know, I wrote some and that doesn't mean anything—"

I'm not crying.

I don't cry.

But something is running down my face, and my wife is crossing the kitchen, and her arms are around me, and I'm shaking, I'm shaking so hard my teeth hurt, and she's saying I know, I know, I know into my shoulder like a prayer, like a promise, like something that might be true if we say it enough times.

Later.

After she's gone to bed. After the house has gone quiet. After the dark settles in the way it does in Arizona—absolute, depthless, a black so thick it feels like a presence, like something watching.

I sit at the kitchen table.

The potato salad is in front of me. I've taken off the plastic wrap. The smell rises up—potatoes, mustard, eggs, something faintly sour underneath, something that might be wrong or might just be grief wearing a different mask.

It's close.

It's probably close.

It might even taste like something, might even fill the hole in my stomach that hasn't closed since August, since the BBQ, since the last time I saw my father alive and didn't know it.

I pick up a fork.

I hold it over the bowl.

The paprika shifts in the overhead light, and for a moment—just a moment—I swear I can see his face in the surface. The way the red dust settles into patterns, like fingerprints, like something he touched and left behind.

I put the fork down.

I don't eat it.

I never do.

The plate in front of me is empty.

It's been empty the whole time. I set it there hours ago, a place setting for one, like I was expecting someone. Like I was waiting.

I put the potato salad back in the fridge.

I'll throw it out tomorrow. Like I threw out the others. Like I'll throw out the next one, and the one after that, and the one after that, until I run out of potatoes or patience or whatever's keeping me upright.

The kitchen is quiet.

The house is quiet.

The whole world is quiet, and I am alone in it, four hundred miles from the place where my father died, and the silence is so loud I can hear my own heartbeat, can hear the blood moving through my veins, can hear the seconds ticking by—one, two, three, four, five, six, seven.

Seven seconds.

I take out my phone.

The screen lights up. His name is there, in my voicemail, right where I left it. Right where it's been for sixty-three days.

Dad.

7 seconds.

Unplayed.

My thumb hovers over the button.

I could do it. Right now. I could press play and hear his voice and know what he wanted to say, what words he chose for me in the last weeks of his life, before the stroke, before the silence, before everything ended.

I could find out if he was angry.

I could find out if he forgave me.

I could find out if he said I love you or call me back or why did you leave or nothing, just breathing, just seven seconds of his breath in my ear, proof that he was alive, that he existed, that I didn't imagine the whole thing.

My thumb shakes.

The screen blurs.

I don't press play.

But I don't delete it either.

I just hold it there, in my hand, in the dark, seven seconds of something I'm not ready for. Seven seconds of his voice, waiting. Patient. Still.

The same way he waited for me to call back.

The same way I waited too long.

Tomorrow, I'll make it again.

The potatoes. The mayo. The mustard. The celery. The eggs. The paprika on top, for color, like that explains anything.

Some.

Some.

To taste.

I'll get it wrong.

I know I'll get it wrong.

But I'll stand at the stove and peel the potatoes and boil the water and mix the ingredients and I'll try, I'll keep trying, because the trying is all I have left. Because every failed batch is a conversation I'm still having with a man who can't answer. Because if I stop making it, I have to admit that he's gone—really gone, not just four hundred miles away, not just waiting by a borrowed grill, but gone, in the ground, in the dark, in the silence that I can't fill no matter how many potatoes I peel.

The plate in front of me is empty.

It's always empty.

But I'll set it again tomorrow.

THE END