Yellow

Sitting across from him at the dinner table, her head tilted to the side with feigned interest, she listened to the same words he had spoken earlier that day. His voice was still intoxicating, soothing and warm; his hands moving with animation and enthusiasm as he told the story of his recent encounter with a vegan waitress. She knew the punch line; she had already cringed internally knowing how the waitress would have looked down upon him with both disgust and pity. He wouldn’t have noticed, oblivious to the reactions of others. That was how he was, how he always had been. Someone once described the feeling to her as ‘yellow’; the way your heart breaks for someone when they cannot see that others are laughing at them, not with them. That once they walk away from a crowd, whom they thought they had been entertaining, the crowd would roll their eyes at them behind their back and giggle, while they go about their day with blissful ignorance. He was a good man, but so often for him she felt yellow.

“And you said you only eat grass-fed beef” she interrupted before he could finish.

He stopped. How did she know? Had she been following him? It was just him and his wife at the restaurant, she had not been there.

“You’ve told this one before! And you know what? It was kind of rude.” She knew she was walking a slippery slope. She had walked it before, and knew exactly where it would lead, but she couldn’t help it; he needed to be told. Someone needed to be honest with him.

Their evening meals were always entertaining. Ever since she was a little girl they would talk about their days, what she learnt, what the best thing that happened to her was. As she got older, the conversations would expand to politics and religion, mental health, science, anything that spurred either of their interests. Some nights the conversations would get so intense her mother would collect the plates quietly and walk away to the kitchen so she would not interrupt the debate. Most of the time they were balanced and respectful, sometimes he would listen with a smug look on his face knowing that she would eventually talk herself around the logic and see a different perspective without him even needing to utter a word. That look infuriated her; a look of contempt or quiet patience, she never knew, but it may her angry all the same.

Now, as she sat across the table from this great man she once bantered and debated with at length, she felt the pang of the inevitable. His face was now weathered, his eyes streamed with general fatigue from being open longer than they should have. Even though his voice still oozed the charisma and warmth is always had, his body was deteriorating, his hair now thin and white. He was old. He still gave her those looks sometimes, but they weren’t quite the same. It was then she saw it fade: the sparkle that he once had when talking with her, the passion he exuded when telling his stories. For a moment, he looked down. Confused. Lost.

After a beat, his eyes rose again. The sparkle was there, and he smiled.

“Did I tell you about the vegan waitress that served us the other night, love?”

She took a breath, looked at the man she had adored and looked up to for so many years. He was still there, she just had to keep listening. She reached across the table, took his hand, and smiled back at him. “No, Dad. Tell me.”