‘I never really knew my father.’

That one sentence had taken Evan over three years to write. Once he had done so, he sat back in his chair and stared blankly at the computer screen. Then suddenly without any warning he broke down and tears dripped down his face. Now he understood why it had taken him so long to write that one sentence. Until then, the sentence had floated around in his mind for years, but he never had to see it in writing. And now he did. The emotions though that welled up in him, were totally unexpected. He didn’t know what to do with them. He was faced with a decision. One he couldn’t make easily.

Evan’s first inclination was to it delete it and close the lid of his laptop, so that when he next opened it, that sentence wouldn’t be there and by extension, wiped out of his mind. It would take him another three years to write that sentence again. He leaned forward and put his fingers back on the keyboard. A tear dropped on the pad he wiped it off carefully. The longer he thought about it, the more he realised that deleting the sentence would not cure him. In fact, he now would have an additional emotion to deal with. He had no alternative. He had to finish the document he had begun.

He squeezed his eyelids tightly. He then opened them and blinked a few times. He looked out of the window at his garden and noticed the roses, the Mr Lincolns, the Peace, the Chryslers. They were all looking at him. They were his mother’s favourite roses. It was as if she was telling him he could do it. He took a deep breath and held it. His fingers came down on the computer keyboard lightly. He began to type. After a few seconds he looked at the words he had just written. ‘He was never home.’ He felt a curious sense of elation. A sense of accomplishment. Yes, they were only four words. But those four words contained almost an entire a childhood. He leaned forward again. His eyes had stopped dripping. He had stopped clenching his jaw, it had begun to ache. He glanced up at roses. They were smiling at him. ‘But I knew he loved me.’ Where did those words come from?

That’s not what he wanted to write. Evan wanted to write, ‘but I never knew if he loved me.’ He sat back and stared at those words. Maybe what he had felt for all those years wasn’t true. He did know his father loved him. He looked at the roses again. ‘You made me write those,’ he thought. There was no one else in the house. They smiled back at him. ‘I knew you did,’ he addressed his mother. ‘You told me that every night when you tucked me into bed as a child. But dad wasn’t there was he?’ The roses swayed in the light breeze.

‘Yes, you’re right. Your father wasn’t there at night, but he was there in the morning,’

he heard her say to him. ‘He always had breakfast with you and your sister before he left for work.’

Evan smiled, he had forgotten that. He looked down at the keyboard. His finger was on the delete button. He was about to get rid of those five words. Frightened, he raised his finger. He now wanted to keep those words because they were true. Yes, he knew his dad loved him. Evan closed his eyes again. It helped him think back to the days when he would come down before school and see his father sitting at the table in the kitchen with the newspaper in his hand. He put it down as soon as Evan came into the kitchen, “good morning son,” he heard him say.

“Good morning dad,” Evan replied. ‘Yes, he always called me his son,’ Evan remembered. ‘He never called me by my name. In all those years I resented him for calling me my son and not my name, and now it’s only now I realise that had he called me Evan I could’ve been anyone. The next-door neighbour, the person in his office. But I was his son. They couldn’t be his son. I was the only one who could be called his son. And Sally came downstairs usually much later but before he left. He called her Sally, not my daughter. He called her Sally.’

Evan smiled and glanced at the roses again. They were still swaying gently in the breeze. He realised he hadn’t been right about his father. ‘But wait a minute,’ he thought to himself. ‘The first sentence I wrote down still holds true, doesn’t it? I know my father loved me, but I didn’t know who he really was. He was always at work. He never played cricket with me like some of the fathers did. He never kicked a football around in our front garden like other fathers did.’

“Yes,” the roses replied when he looked up at them again. “But the most important thing was that he loved you. He told you that every morning after he had finished his breakfast and had to leave for work. Your mother was sitting there drinking her tea and he would fold the newspaper. Tap you on the head with it and then kiss your mother and then kiss your sister on the cheek and you, well you didn’t want to be kissed on the cheek, so you held your hand out for him to shake. Don’t you remember the first time you did? How amused he was and he thought it was because you were growing up. So he shook it and smiled. And once he had done that, he turned to you and your sister and said I love you.”

Evan looked down at the keyboard again. His hands were on his lap. He wasn’t sure how to continue. Maybe the feelings he had harboured for so many years were wrong. ‘It was that handshake, wasn’t it? It was you who wanted to be thought of as an older person. Your dad wanted to kiss your cheek as he had done every day before that.’

The roses had stopped swaying. They stood there in anticipation of his answer. Evan leaned forward and began to type again. To his amazement he typed for a longer period and when he looked up finally at the roses, they were smiling with him. He looked down at the document he had typed and began to read. As he did, little by little he could feel the tears in his eyes beginning to well up and then finally they began to drip onto the table. He had written over 1200 words. It had ended the only way it could’ve.

‘When I wake up each morning,’ he had written,’ and I come downstairs for breakfast, I expect to see you sitting there at the table with the newspaper in your hand and that unmistakable smile on your face. I expect to see you fold the paper and put down on the table next to you. I expect you to look at me and say good morning son, I hope you slept well. Dad,’ he finally wrote, ‘dad, I miss you and yes, I do know you and I do know you love me.’

The sun was beginning to set behind the roses, ‘good night son,’ they said to him, ‘goodnight.’