The One I Think of Now

At the end of my stepfather’s life when his anger was gone, and the saplings of his failed nursery had grown into trees, my newly feminist mother had him in the kitchen to pay for all those years he only did the carving. “You know where that is,” she would say as he looked for a knife to cut the cheese and a tray to serve it with, his apron wide as a dress above his workboots, confused as a girl. He is the one I think of now, lifting the tray for my family, the guests, until at last he comes to me. And I, no less confused, look down from his hurt eyes as if there were nothing between us except an arrangement of cheese, and not this bafflement, these almost tender hands that once swung hammers and drove machines and insisted that I learn to be a man.