He shakes his head again. “I’ll just run in and change. Give me a minute.”
He trots off, and I watch him go, observing for the fiftieth time, how much he looks like our father. Same height, same build, some coloring. Our father looks more like his twin than I do.
Dad watches him walk away, then glances at me.
“Thanks, sweetie. How are you doing today?”
He’s not asking how I’m doing, so much as how I’m feeling. I know that, and I shrug.
“Ok, I guess.”
Except for the freaking lump that won’t go away in my throat. Except for the fact that whenever I look in the mirror, I see my mom so I have to fight off the urge to rip them all from the walls and throw them over the cliffs. Except for those things, I’m fine.
I look at my dad. “Maybe we should become Jewish so that we can sit in Shiva and not have to worry about anything else.”
My dad look stunned for a minute, then smiles slightly. “Well, Shiva only lasts a week. So that wouldn’t do us much good at this point.”
Nothing will do us much good at this point. But I don’t say that.
“Well, I guess I won’t cover up the mirrors then.” Unfortunately.
My father smiles now, and I think it might actually be a little bit real. “Yeah. And you’ll have to keep showering too.” He pauses. “You know, there’s a grief support group that meets at the hospital too. You could poke your head in while you wait for Finn.”
I’m already shaking my head. Screw that. He’s got to give up trying to make me go to one of those. The only thing worse than drowning in grief is sharing a lifeboat with other drowning people. Besides, if anyone needs a grief group, it’s him.
“I think I’ll pass,” I tell him for the hundredth time. “But if I change my mind, I’ll look it up.”
“Ok,” he gives in easily, like he always does. “I understand that, I guess. I don’t want to talk about it, either. But maybe one of these days….”
His voice trails off and I know that he’s filing this under the One Of These Days folder in his head, along with a million other things. Things like cleaning out my mother’s closet, picking her dirty clothes up out of their bathroom, putting away her shoes and her jacket. Things like that.
It’s been six weeks since my mother died, and my father has left her stuff un-touched, like he’s expecting her to come home at any minute. He knows this isn’t the case since he embalmed her body and we buried her in her gleaming mahogany casket, but obviously it would be insensitive to point that out.
Instead, I hug him.
“Love you, dad.”
“Love you, too, Cal.”
Over his shoulder, my gaze freezes on the small ivy covered brick building down the path from the main house, and I stare at it for a minute before I pull away.
“Have you decided about the Carriage House yet?”
He and my mother had converted it into an apartment last year as an investment property, but they’d been in the process of trying to find a renter when mom died. Finn and I have been trying to get dad to let one of us live in it.
He shakes his head now. “You know, it’s not really fair to give it to one or the other of you. I’m going to rent it out, after all.”
I stare at him like he just grew a second head. “Really? But…”
But what a waste of a beautifully renovated space.
My father is unfazed. “You and Finn are going to college in the Fall anyway. It’d be extra income. That was our original plan, anyway.”
I’m still stunned. “Well, good luck finding someone who wants to live here.”
Right next door to a funeral home and crematorium.
“If you know of anyone, please let them know,” my dad continues, ignoring my pessimism. I scoff at that.