Bare Branches

“I hate orange juice,” my grandfather exclaimed from his seat at the kitchen table. I sighed inwardly and continued to squeeze the freshly-cut orange slices into the glass.

Years before, when the dementia hadn’t yet started to strip away my grandfather’s faculties, he used to read palms. He would start by unfurling your left hand like an old treasure map. Then, he would lightly trace the lines etched on your palm with his gnarled fingers, quietly reading something only he could see. His round glasses will slide down the precipice of his nose as he peered carefully between the patterned whorls of your skin. This undertaking was always done in complete silence and I would be on the receiving end of a stern look if I made even the slightest of noises.

“Dada will you read my palm today?” I asked. He had ignored my requests when I was small, citing that reading the palms of your own family members was taboo. But there was a solid chance that the fact had slipped from his mind like water through a fist. And anyways, I was curious about what secrets my palm might reveal.

“Only if you do me a favour first,” he said slyly. I raised one of my eyebrows inquisitively. “I want to eat some pears.” I smiled at his simple request.

“Oranges are better for your mind,” my dad interrupted as he entered the kitchen. That was his way of saying no to my grandfather. I winked at him while dad rummaged through the fridge, indicating that I’d indulge him so long as he keeps it a secret between the both of us.

My dad was the first son, the eldest of four siblings. My dad didn’t like to talk about his childhood, or anything about himself. I could not tell you his favourite colour or the food he most finds comfort in. But yesterday, in a rare burst of clarity through the fog of Alzheimer’s, my grandfather told me a story that has burrowed into my brain making it impossible to think of anything else.

My dad, a little boy at the time, was running around the ancestral home causing a raucous. This displeased my grandfather, whose bursts of anger I had been warned about the same way people are taught to prepare for impending natural disasters, practically and resigned. My grandfather had hit his own son, my dad, so hard that his head hit the edge of the coffee table and split clean open. My dad was seven and he would go on to get eleven stitches that would scar the space above his right eyebrow for the rest of his life. I’m not entirely sure that this is the only injury of its kind. And I’m not sure why my grandfather told me that story. But I can’t forget the look on his face, like he could finally breathe from the relief of surrendering over his sins. He probably doesn’t even remember telling me.

Earlier, when I tried to broach the subject of how he got his scar, my dad looked at me alarmed, like a deer caught in the headlights on an oncoming truck. And then, he smiled an unsteady smile that seemed to wobble like an unbalanced acrobat on a tightrope. “It was nothing,” he said after a beat.

My grandfather and my dad were very different people. And yet still, I could see glimpses of my grandfather in my dad’s anger, which rumbled like thunder throughout our home. The lightning never striked, his hand was never raised. But the presence of the thunder, that broiling temper, was always enough to shock my father back into himself. My dad prefers to distance himself from the version of fatherhood he experienced, and in doing so, has detached himself from me entirely. The word ‘father’ must taste like ash in my dad’s mouth. It tastes like the hollow absence of something in mine.

But no matter what was happening, my dad always smiled. The kind of superficial smile you can find in a catalogue, never reaching his eyes. And every time he did, he pushed me further and further away - like the waves of an ocean current pushing a boat out to sea. I was on the shore, my dad was on a boat I could not see, and there was an ocean of unswimmable water between us.

The duality of the human hand continued to unnerve me. My grandfather once sat beside me an entire whole night as a vicious fever devastated my body. Through the haze of fever-riddled delirium, I remember him laying his hand on my head and praying to the gods to take away all my pain and let him shoulder it instead. How could the hand that softly remained perched on my brow for hours be the same hand that left a lifetime scar on my father’s brow?

“How would you like it if we planted a pear tree in the garden instead?” I turned to my grandfather while trying to ignore dad’s rolling eyes.

“Pears?” he repeated, wide eyed. “How did you know I liked pears?”

My heart sank a little deeper into my chest. I looked at my dad, the man who always kept me too far, and then to my grandfather who always pulled me close. I thought right then, that maybe forgiveness was like a pear tree with bare branches where nothing ever blossoms.