Storage

Last week we played out the deathbed scene and it wasn’t a life-changing experience, but with Dad dead my tool collection tripled. I have enough power drills to arm a framing crew, which I do in fact arm, since I run a framing crew. We’re the guys who put up the outlines of houses—braces, trusses, etc.—and then other crews come in for the interior and surface work.

Today’s my last day off work. I took the week off for arrangements—ordering the box, funeral logistics, church reception, nodding at lawyers. Today’s my last day to get shit done around the house before going back to work, so I open the kitchen cabinet next to the dishwasher and extract all the food storage containers and pile them on the counter. I open another drawer and pull out all of the lids and pile them next to containers of various sizes from small transparent cubes to large oblong orange ones with vacuum-sealable lids for foods like brownies and nachos. Some of the containers seal in moisture while others preserve crispness.

“Where are all the goddamn lids?” my wife always yells. “I can’t find a lid to match a container.” That’s why I’m taking care of this problem.

I match lids to containers, and of 37 lids and 43 containers, I find only twelve matches of containers to lids, which makes my armpits suddenly burn like a gas grill and itch like mad. Just before I’m about to crash my fist into the refrigerator, my son Danny screams and I hear falling objects pound his closet floor upstairs.

“Hey, Dad,” says my other son Alan, walking into the kitchen. “I’m going over to Kimmy’s to play XBox.”

“Who’s Kimmy?” I say.

“Jimmy,” he says.

“I swear to God you said Kimmy.”

Last Friday when I got to the hospital after work, I knew Dad was dying because he had scared little-child eyes, except they weren’t white and clear like kids’ eyes. They were yellowed, almost brown, because his kidney was shutting down and shit was filling his blood, and I said, “You want the baseball game on? Santana’s pitching tonight.”

Dad mumbled through the mask that cupped his mouth and nose and pushed in and pulled out air. I couldn’t find the right TV station. Even the ICU, where terminal people went to die, had the deluxe cable package. The biggest lesson I learned from the deathbed scene: people about to die still care about what’s on TV.

“Norty tree,” Dad said, voice limp like a wrist through the incoming and outgoing air. At his house on the lake, he got the games on channel 43. The nurse came in and said, “Lift the back of his head. I’ll take this thing off so you two can talk. You’re his son?”

“Norty tree,” Dad said again, this time closing his eyes because of the effort.

I reached behind his head and lifted. The back of his neck felt like fish skin hardened by sun. Dad was a roofing contractor who had half the sun’s energy stored in his neck flesh. His skin still released heat. The nurse pulled off the mask. I let his head fall back. He panted for air.

“Santana’s pitching tonight,” I said.

“Get ice cream,” he said. “I got chocolate and vanilla. Where’s the kids?”

“They have chores tonight,” I said, lying. Bringing them to a deathbed scene was just too much work. I’d have to pay attention to Dad and watch the kids at the same time, make sure they didn’t start screwing with sensitive medical equipment. Also, my wife promised to watch some neighborhood kids because the parents were going to a church function and I’d worked sixty hours through Friday and was lucky to get off by five so I could see Dad, who’d been in the hospital since Wednesday. Long story short, I was tired and couldn’t deal with the kids.

I sat on a little metal chair in the corner off the foot of Dad’s bed. He was way up high and I could just barely see his head angling down at me, his cheek flesh scrunched up as he tried to make out my shape, and I laughed at a quick thought about the Hallmark Hall of Fame ending where a sensitive son would hold his dad’s hand and whisper, “What’s it like, Dad?” And then pause. “Dying, I mean? What it’s like?” And the dad would look his son in the eyes and say, “It just feels right, son. No more pain.”

But instead I said, as I fiddled with the remote for the TV, “You can’t get sick on me now. I have to finish that tile work behind the stove.”

“I got the glue and grout over there,” Dad said. He pointed limply at a wall of white cabinets full of medical supplies. He thought he was at home.

I didn’t hold his hand the way my sisters did when they came into the room later, one standing on each side of the bed and squeezing his leathery mitts over the bedrails. If I held his hand, he’d know he was dead.

I figured out the remote control and got the game, the Twins against Tampa Bay. I wanted a more historic rival like the White Sox or the Tigers for Dad’s last game, but we got the fucking Devil Rays. Life is bullshit, and so is death. That’s also a thing I learned.

Now that things have slowed—we’re done with the paperwork—I can get to projects. Before I organized the food storage containers, I’d been on the toilet reading an article in Better Homes and Gardens on how to build a backyard Japanese garden. I always read BHG, which my wife subscribes to, when I’m taking a dump. Though my next project is to wrap our two-tiered deck around the side of the house and install a recessed hot tub, I’m vacillating on putting a meditation garden there instead.