At my mother’s funeral, his entire eulogy lasted less than two minutes.
I typed:
Yes. We’re both healthy.
The typing dots appeared.
Disappeared.
Then appeared again.
Almost five minutes passed.
Finally:
Good.
Nothing else.
I put the phone down and looked at my daughter.
And I thought about the last time my father and I had been together in a hospital.
Then I forced myself to stop.
My name is Simone.
I was born Simone Caldwell.
If you’ve ever driven through Atlanta, you may have seen that last name before.
On trucks.
Warehouses near the airport.
A wing of a children’s hospital.
A forty-story building downtown with a white marble lobby.
My father is Malcolm Caldwell.
In 1981, he started Caldwell Freight with one rented truck.
Over the decades, it became one of the largest logistics companies in the Southeast.
Thousands of trucks.
Dozens of warehouses.
I have no idea exactly how wealthy my father is.
I’ve never asked.
Beyond a certain point, numbers stop meaning much.
I grew up in a large brick house off Peachtree Road.
Ancient oak trees shaded the front yard.
An iron gate stood at the end of the driveway.
My bedroom had a window seat overlooking my mother’s rose garden.
Her name was Celeste.
Before marrying my father, she had been a high school English teacher.
In many ways, she never stopped being one.
She read to me every night until I was twelve.
Corrected my grammar at dinner.
Planted her rose garden herself while the professional gardeners stood nearby wondering what they were supposed to do.
Mom was warmth.
Dad was work.
I believe he loved us.
But work was the only language of love he really understood.
He provided.
He built.
He made sure we never needed anything material.
But he missed dinners.
Recitals.
Parent-teacher meetings.
School plays.
Even the afternoon I broke my wrist in third grade.
“Your father is building something for us,” Mom would always say.
“He’ll be here when he can.”
He was always somewhere else.
When I was fourteen, Mom discovered a lump.
She died two years later.
I was sixteen.
My father wasn’t there.
He was in Chicago negotiating the biggest deal of his career.
The doctors had believed Mom had a few more weeks.
Dad thought he had time.
She died on a Thursday afternoon in March at Emory hospice.
I was holding one of her hands.
Our housekeeper, Marisol, held the other.
Raymond waited outside.
Raymond Ellis had been my father’s driver since I was thirteen.
Tall.
Quiet.
Gray beginning at his temples.
A calm voice and gentle hands.
He drove me to school.
Picked me up after practice.
Remembered my friends’ names.
