Our section editors chose some of their favorite published submissions from past issues to feature on our blog. This piece is from Issue 41, selected by Anna Brunner, our current Prose Editor.
I learned my father was dead the week after they buried him. In the end it was my sister who told me, not a quiver to her soft voice. It was over the phone, because even after all these years we still struggled to meet each other’s eyes.
She said they meant to tell me but couldn’t find the time. She said it had slipped their minds. I think she was glad I wasn’t there. I think she wanted to hoard the grief. I would have let her.
I went to visit his grave a month after she called me. It was hard to get the time off work, I tell her, and my sister says nothing. She tucks the long trails of her scarf back into her coat and waits for me lace up my boots. We take separate cars.
October skies beckon our presence, and I regret my thin layers. The sun was yellow and high, and I had assumed the frost would thaw by midday. I am not yet used to the Oregon cold. I won’t stay long enough to grow accustomed to it.
They are taking groups in turns, the caretaker tells us. It’s been unusually wet this year, he says, and too many people at once threaten to overturn the freshly laid earth.
My sister offers me the last seat on the wind-eroded bench and leans against the iron gate beside me.
The quiet stretches and shifts before us until suddenly I am five and she is ten and we are hiding underneath the kitchen table while our parents’ voices rise. In this memory I do not know they are arguing. My sister has me entranced with only her hands and a flashlight set on the white tablecloth. A rabbit becomes a horse and then a bird. She makes a dog last because it is my favorite. She had wanted to listen to our parents, I know now. I must have followed her when she ducked beneath the table, every action with her a game.
Our mother took pains not to bring their quarrels to us. Our father had no such qualms. I do not look like him, he had argued; I have neither his sharp jaw nor his dark hair. My sister is him incarnate. I look a little like my mother, a little like my father’s brother. Nothing of me is my father’s alone.
When our parents separated but never divorced, my mother took my hand and together, we left our two-story house in the suburbs for an apartment in the city. I had turned in my seat until our house faded in the distance. I kept looking even as my mother pulled into a dark garage and stopped the car. No one had looked back.
I missed the fresh grass between my toes and my sister’s kind voice. I missed a family of four even if we had never been a good one.
I visited my father for a weekend each month. My sister, old enough then that she could choose, stayed only with our father.
He had tried, in the beginning. My father opened the hood of his car and pointed out the engine and battery fluid. He took me fishing, just the two of us in a boat that barely held our weight, my sister on a towel where the sand bled into silt. We came back empty handed because I could not hold the awkward shape of the fishing rod and it slipped from my small hands. Years later I would swim to the bottom of the lake and see it, rusted and half buried. I would leave it there and break through the surface with a gasp.
I could not catch a baseball nor throw it properly and when my father yelled, I cried, and in turn he only grew louder. My sister did not make rabbits or horses or dogs, and when I looked to her for comfort it was my father’s gaze she sought instead. That was the first time she stood with him and not me. It would not be the last.
The caretaker lets us in then. The walk to our father’s grave is short. He’s buried at the top of a small hill, hidden in the shadow of a cedar tree. A few browned pines litter the earth, and my sister bends to collect them. She tucks them into the pocket of her long skirt and then sits beside his headstone. I do not join her on the ground.
I’m wearing the watch my father gave me although it does not fit my thin wrists. I do not know what I was thinking when I brought it from its velvet box and brushed off the dust. It has never fit, and I stopped growing years ago. I’m not sure what I thought would have changed.
The watch was passed from son to father, he told me. He did not seem happy when I tried it on the first time, but I was alright being happy enough for the both of us. It was tradition he said, loud enough for my sister, peeking out from the banister, to hear. From father to son to son again until the watch would not wind anymore. It was the only thing he gave me that my sister had not grown bored of first.
I didn’t cry when my sister told me of our father’s death, and I don’t cry now. I almost want to. He would have hated it. If we still spoke, he would have hated a lot of things about me. I would have hated all the things he didn’t.
My sister speaks to his grave softly. If I strained, I think I would be able to hear. I do not try. She is mourning her father, and I am but a witness.
That is where they differ, I think. Our father was a loud man, but she is quiet. I am too, but our quiets are not the same. Hers are soft and strong; nothing is said because nothing needs to be. I am quiet because I am afraid; I bubble and burn with words not spoken. I think our father could sense the difference.
“He would have let you come home if you had asked,” my sister says. “He missed you. He loved you.” There’s a lie there, but I don’t know my father well enough to know where.
I left the morning after I turned eighteen, my bags packed for me. I did not look back then.
“I couldn’t,” I say. And intend to leave it at that; for once I will be like my sister.
“You could—”
Loud like my father I say, “no,” and think he might have been proud of the steel in my voice. Softer, gentler, I add, “I didn’t want to.” I was tired. Tired of fighting against the constantly moving metric our father held only me to. It was kinder to fall from his affections on my own then be thrown from them. It was easier to brace for impact when I knew it was coming. But I don’t tell my sister that. She did not have the same father I did.
We sit in silence until the sun gives rise to lightning bugs. She leaves me with the rotting corpse of our father and heads back to her car parked at the bottom of the hill.
I leave the watch of my father’s father on his grave and join her.
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