We, the children, left our long shadows of childhood behind like rain-faded chalk on the sidewalk. The cement became root-buckled and uneven as we aged into what we hoped would be our middle years.
For the first time in a long time, the semi-tropical weather turned into a frozen-ground winter. The afternoon sun, rapping its knuckles against the cold glass of the front door, tried to get someone’s attention. The dog, though, buried years ago behind the garage in a cardboard box wrapped in drycleaner’s plastic, had decayed into a skeletal memory while the rest of us waited downstairs in the dining room near the cold snacks and overstocked bar for guests to arrive. They would be draped in their best black, no doubt.
Three nights before, when he managed to turn on the tableside lamp by himself, Dad lay on top of his bed covers, refusing to get up. Earlier, at the end of her shift, the home health aide had dressed him, at his gestured insistence, in his old Sunday suit, the one he kept in back of his closet, a severe charcoal solid that he always wore whenever he used to corral us into going to church. Still, he stopped beating his fists against the mattress and kept them clenched by his sides as we put away his flannel pajamas. It was a fight he’d won as the wind pulled down the lifeless shade of twilight with the same chilled hands that slapped at the bare tree branches outside his window.
Before he drifted off, Dad complained the way he usually did, with only a huff. We knew it was about Mom because he scowled at her picture which sat framed under the lamp light. She’d already left a couple of years earlier, having done so during the summer. “Typical” he said, which in retrospect, surprised us since he had lost his ability to speak after his-next-to-his-last stroke.
