My father cried exactly twice in my whole life before that summer.
The first time was the day his own father died. I was seven. I remember him standing in the backyard by the woodpile with his back to the house, and his shoulders moving in a way I’d never seen them move before. My mother put her hand on my head and said, “Leave him be, Lucas. Some things a man has to do by himself.”
The second time was the day I graduated from college. He was sitting in the bleachers of the football stadium at Oregon State in his one good jacket, the brown corduroy one with patches on the elbows, and when they called my name, I looked up and saw him wiping his face with a handkerchief. Afterward, he shook my hand. He didn’t hug me. Sinclair men didn’t hug back then. He just shook my hand very hard and said, “Good job, son,” and then he walked away fast toward the parking lot so I wouldn’t see his eyes.
The third time was in a driveway in Cannon Beach, Oregon, on a gray morning in June, when I put a set of keys in my mother’s hand.
My parents are Samuel and Irene Sinclair.
My father worked at the paper mill in Longview, Washington, for forty-three years. He started when he was nineteen, sweeping floors, and he retired at sixty-two as a shift supervisor. In forty-three years, he missed eleven days of work. Nine of them were for my mother’s surgery when I was twelve. The other two were the days my sister and I were born.
My mother worked the front desk at the Longview Public Library for thirty-one years. She knew every regular by name. She knew which old men came in every morning just to read the newspaper because they were lonely. She knew which kids came in after school because there was nobody at home. She kept a box of granola bars under the desk for those kids, and she paid for them out of her own pocket, and she never told anyone.
What happened next changed everything… FULL STORY on the next page.
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