Brett Bohlinger’s visit to her father’s grave at Saint Boniface Cemetery is an attempt to follow her mother’s urging to face what frightens her, but it becomes something more difficult than reconciliation. A faded photograph, her father’s engraved name, and questions left unanswered bring her childhood hurt into the open. She leaves wishing him peace, not claiming that the relationship has been repaired.

The Letter and the Return

Brett enters the cemetery with a letter from her mother, Elizabeth Bohlinger, tucked in her pocket. Its instruction is direct: “Push yourself to do those things that scare you, darling.” The words make the visit part of the challenge Elizabeth has set for her daughter, but they do not tell Brett what she should feel when she gets there. At the gate, she wonders whether she is like her mother, unable to hate the man who left them. The question frames the visit as an encounter with two inheritances at once: her own history with her father and the example of Elizabeth’s continuing devotion to him.

The last time Brett had visited the grave was seven years earlier, with Elizabeth. They had detoured there on a cold afternoon while apparently on their way Christmas shopping. Wind drove the little snow into whirling eddies as mother and daughter fastened an evergreen wreath to the headstone. Brett then waited in the car, warmed her hands at the vents, and watched Elizabeth bow her head, dab her eyes, and make the sign of the cross. Embarrassed by her mother’s grief for the husband who had abandoned her, Brett pretended to adjust the radio. Returning alone, she carries that old scene with her—and sees her earlier embarrassment differently, now that she is the one standing beside the grave.

The Photograph and the Questions

The present visit unfolds on a clear autumn day, sharply unlike the winter memory. Brett is alone on the hillside among walnut trees, with squirrels searching beneath them. She brushes dried leaves from the base of the headstone and sits on its marble slab. From her purse she takes the only photograph of herself and her father that she has kept. Dog-eared and faded, it shows her at six years old on Christmas morning, dressed in red flannel pajamas and perched at the edge of his knee. One of his hands rests on her shoulder; the other hangs at his side. His uncertain smile and flat eyes offer little warmth in the image Brett has carried into adulthood.

The photograph gives her questions a specific focus. “What was it about me, Dad? Why couldn’t I make you smile? Why was it so hard to put your arms around me?” she asks. Looking for the peace she imagines Elizabeth intended the visit to bring, Brett instead feels an open wound. A tear lands on the pictured child’s face and magnifies her injured eyes; when Brett wipes it away with her sleeve, the image ripples. The small accident sharpens the scene’s central tension: the photograph preserves a moment, but it cannot answer the adult daughter’s questions or change what the child experienced.

Naming the Hurt

Brett then identifies what she has carried beneath those questions: “Do you know what hurts most, Dad? It’s feeling that I was never good enough for you.” She remembers herself as a little girl who wanted to hear that she was good, smart, or pretty, and says she tried hard to make him love her. This is not simply an account of missing her father. It is a direct naming of the judgment she had turned inward—the fear that his distance meant something deficient in her. Her tears and bitten lip make the confession costly, while the absent father remains unable to respond.

At last Brett tells him that the visit was her mother’s idea and that she had given up years ago on establishing a relationship with him. She touches the engraved name, CHARLES JACOB BOHLINGER, and says, “I wish you peace, Dad.” The wish is neither forgiveness explicitly claimed nor a reunion achieved. It is a small, deliberate parting gesture after she has spoken the pain she had brought to the grave.

Departure and Significance

Brett turns away and walks, then breaks into a run. The movement ends the encounter without suggesting that the visit has made her grief disappear: she reaches the station still shaken. What changes is that she has addressed her father directly, rather than leaving the questions confined to the old photograph or to the memory of her mother’s mourning. The scene lets her complete the assigned act while withholding a neat emotional reward. Her mother’s letter can bring her to the grave, but it cannot dictate what reconciliation should look like.

The visit also revises the meaning of the earlier winter scene. As a child, Brett protected herself from Elizabeth’s visible grief by pretending not to notice it; now she stands in the same cemetery and speaks her own sorrow aloud. She does not reproduce her mother’s ritual exactly, but the grave becomes a place where their separate attachments meet: Elizabeth’s devotion, which Brett once found embarrassing, and Brett’s own still-living wish that her father had been kinder. The closing run carries the hurt forward rather than resolving it, making the visit an act of confrontation and release without promising that one afternoon can repair a relationship that never had the chance to answer back.