“You good?” Shelby asks for what feels like the fiftieth time since the service started. I want to tell her that I’m not her responsibility, that how I feel about our father’s funeral shouldn’t matter more than what she’s feeling, but instead I just turn my head, smile, and shoot her a look.
“I’m good,” I joke, “love wasting time.”
She rolls her eyes at me, but there’s a hint of something else there, something like frustration. For some reason, Shelby never lost that soft spot for our father, caring about him all the way to the end.
I’m pretty sure she was even paying for him. He certainly wasn’t doing any work to pull his own weight by the time he passed.
I’d always thought he’d get liver cancer, and I’d have to go through some period of torture, him pleading for my forgiveness and me refusing to give it. Or maybe I would have. Maybe, if we both knew that he was going to die, he could have told me why, exactly, he hated my guts, and why drinking himself to death was preferable to us being a real family. And I could have at least had the closure of understanding, even if we would never be warm and fuzzy with each other again.
Instead, he had a heart attack in the middle of the night. According to Shelby, she said it was so quick he didn’t even have time to make it to his phone. He died peacefully in his sleep, painlessly.
I’m pretty sure that’s a lie the EMTs tell you to make you feel better about what really happened.
Each time I imagine my dad alone and afraid in the middle of the night, unable to call for help, I get a strange feeling in my chest that I can’t and don’t want to name.
“Jake, comeon.”
I blink, realizing I’ve been so tied up in my own thoughts that I missed the rest of what the priest said. My father was never really a religious man, so it’s hilarious to see a man of God talking about his path to the afterlife.
But that’s done now, and we’re moving into the part I’ve been dreading.
For the next hour, Shelby and I stand at the front of the room and accept condolences from people I barely remember. Shelby knows all of them, clasps their hands, nods and smiles at them. I shake a few hands, accept a few baseless platitudes about my father.
I expected to be angrier about this whole thing. All these people here acting like he was a great guy now that he’s dead. But instead, I feel something vaguely empty, almost sad.
When it’s finished, I wash my hands twice and go to meet Shelby in the lobby of the funeral home. When she’s not there, I find her sitting on a step in the alley, her head in her hands.
“If I were the kind of person to smoke,” she muttered into her palms, “I’d be smoking right now.”
“There’s always time to develop an addiction,” I joke, dropping down next to her and rubbing a circle on her back.
Without moving, she says into her palms, “How bad is the house, Jake?”
“You haven’t been there?”
Shelby shakes her head, turns and looks at me, the first tears of the day shining in her eyes. “Not since I moved out. I think… I was afraid to see the damage he might have been doing to the place.”
I swallow through the lump in my throat, and the tears in her eyes seem to dry, her gaze turning assessing.
“You haven’t been, have you?”
Two years younger than me, and Shelby can look right through me. I’m supposed to be the older brother who can always tell what she’s thinking, not the other way around.
“Not yet…”
“Jake.” She stands, shakes her head and runs her hands through her hair. “You have to go to the house.”
And so, I do.
Pushingopen the front door to the house is like starring in the opening scene of a horror movie.
It swings open slowly, and it feels like the frame is in grayscale as I step inside, glancing around, certain something is going to appear out of the corner and get me.
When I thought about coming back to this house — if I ever did come back to this house — I’d imagined it long abandoned. But Dad passed unexpectedly in his sleep, not after suffering in a hospital bed for ages, and that means his coffee mug is still on the table, newspaper folded next to it.
A blanket is thrown over the recliner in the living room. Half a glass of water sits by the sink, little particles floating through it in the hazy afternoon light. The light from the microwave is on over the oven, casting the room into a strange orange glow.
“Okay,” I say out loud, which only makes me feel worse — concrete evidence that I’m the only person in this house.
