Intro
Verse 1
He wore a polo that said WORLD'S #1 DAD ironically and unironically too
He pronounced library lie-berry, he wore Crocs in the sun and the snow
He told her the worst jokes in the entire United States of America
Every morning at the kitchen table she rolled her eyes like a hurricane
Verse 2
I'm reading a book about anti-gravity, it's impossible to put down
Did you hear about the man who lost his left hand, he's all right now
Maya screamed DAAAD the way only a twelve-year-old daughter can scream
Then she walked to the bus and her father held her hand to the seam
Pre-Chorus
Two squeezes
Two squeezes
He had been doing it since she was four
Two squeezes
She had stopped asking when she was nine
Chorus
The bad jokes were the inheritance
The embarrassments were the love
The squeezing was the language he could not speak out loud
Two squeezes, I love you, in the language of his hand
He had been telling her every single day for twenty-three years
And on a Tuesday in October in a hospice bed he could not speak
She told him the worst joke he had ever told to her in his life
And he squeezed her hand twice for one last week
Verse 3
She walked out of the hospice and into a hospital elevator
A stranger in a navy work jacket holding a brown paper bag waited
She turned and she said in a perfectly steady voice, I'm reading a book
The stranger laughed, and Maya laughed, and Maya cried at the look
Chorus
The bad jokes were the inheritance
The embarrassments were the love
The squeezing was the language he could not speak out loud
Two squeezes, I love you, in the language of his hand
Bridge
She drove home alone from the hospital that afternoon in October
Practicing the joke for her own daughter in a room she had not entered
She would tell it at her birthday party someday in the suburb she came from
She would wear his polo and she would draw a smiley face on a glass
The bad jokes were the inheritance
The embarrassments were the love
And the chocolate-syrup smiley face was the small kindness of a father
And the smiley face would float still on the milk above
Final Chorus
The bad jokes were the inheritance
The embarrassments were the love
The squeezing was the language of a single father
Who could not say I love you out loud
Two squeezes, I love you, in the language of his hand
On the morning her bus was late, on the front porch in the rain
On the night he could not speak anymore, in the hospice in the lamplight
On the day she will be a mother, and her child will scream her name
Outro
Two squeezes
Two squeezes
The next chapter is worth it
The next chapter is worth it