In 2004, I was covering a story when my mother called me to say my father, who was 77 at the time, had had a heart attack. As I raced to the hospital, it occurred to me that if he died, I’d be left with many unanswered questions.
My parents divorced when I was about 8, and he was always involved in my sister’s and my life. But I knew so little about him.
He remarried and moved to the suburbs, and we would spend weekends and parts of the summer at his house. But he was never at home, and we got closer to our stepmother than to our father.
As teenagers, my sister and I spent some evenings at the cab company on South King Drive where he worked as a manager on the overnight shift. But my father was always busy in the dispatcher’s office or in the taxi’s garage overseeing the work of the mechanics.
My sister and I would sit amid the parked red and yellow taxis and eavesdrop on the crotchety old drivers, who did their best to watch their language around us. They knew that although my father never talked a lot, he was kind of mean and very protective of his daughters.
When I went to college, my father bought me my first car, a maroon Chevy Impala, which had been refurbished and painted to hide its past life as a taxi. Whenever I was in town, I could bring the car to the garage and he’d check the tires, look under the hood and then have me drive it to the on-site gas pump so he could fill the tank.
As we waited, he’d ask me about my life. I’d ask about his. And we’d watch the numbers on the pump spin ever so slowly until finally the tank was full and he’d say, “Now, call me when you get home.” And that would be that.
When my sister died in 1993, my husband and I drove to my father’s home in the middle of the night to deliver the news. His face, which everyone had always said was my face, was paralyzed with grief. Though he wasn’t working that night, he got dressed and drove to the cab company.
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So, when he recovered from his heart attack in 2004 and returned to work — he hated the thought of retirement — I decided to spend Friday nights with him. I wanted to get to know him. And because that was difficult to do as a daughter, I approached it as a reporter.
My father started work at 11 p.m. but always arrived an hour earlier. On that first night, March 19, 2004, I got there at 10 p.m. He was in his office, seated behind a desk when I sat down and began asking questions. He was surprised, but he never asked me why I was there or taking notes.
Among the many things I learned was that my paternal grandfather was a self-employed businessman who owned 160 acres of land in Utica, Miss. In the early 1930s, he hired sharecroppers to farm the land’s cotton and vegetables. My grandmother was a homemaker and hairdresser.
My father was especially close to his father, and when my grandfather died in a head-on collision with a truck in 1939, my father, who was 12, was brokenhearted.
He said that because my grandfather had always promised that he would return home, my grandmother made the hearse drive by the house on the way to the graveyard so that he could keep his word.
Beyond the stories my father told me, I learned more from what was not said. For example, he had created a little refuge in his office for the stray cat that wandered into the taxi garage and had kittens.
I visited my father from March until July that year, filling four reporter’s notebooks. Every time I left, he would walk me to my car — one that I had purchased — and tell me to call him when I got home.
I would be lying if I said my father and I had a perfect relationship going forward.
But last September, a month before he died, I visited him at his home. He looked thinner, grayer, older. For the first time, he told me he had read my columns and seen me on television. He didn’t add much more than that, still it was his way of expressing pride. When it was time for me to leave, he walked me to my car for the last time. I hugged him and kissed him on the cheek.
My father wasn’t much on sentimentality, and he didn’t care for most holidays, especially Father’s Day. But I have been thinking about him a lot this year. I am glad we had that time together in 2004. I’m glad I got a chance to ask some difficult questions. Not all of the answers were totally satisfactory, but that’s life.
Over the years, I always knew where to find my father. But that year, I believe, I got just a bit closer to understanding how to reach him.