At the door, John is holding boxes. "I found these in the garage."
"That should be good."
He nods and turns, leading me to Dad's room and resting the boxes on the bedframe. He turns, looking at the shelves, the nightstands, and the drawer units, taking in everything that Dad left behind.
I see his Adam's apple bob, as though he too is finding it hard to be here.
"This isn't going to be easy," he says. "I can still smell him in here."
"I know." I take steps further into the room. "We'll need some bags for things to give to Goodwill and some cleaning products too."
"I'll get them," John says.
When he's gone, I close my eyes, trying to picture my dad. My memories of my young childhood are sparse. One comes to mind of my dad boiling me an egg and teaching me how to smash off the shell. Another of him picking me up and turning me upside down so my hair hung down and my head swam with too much blood, and another riding on his broad shoulders through some fields, patting his soft dark curls as he walked.
Not enough memories for a daughter to have of her father, that's for sure.
John returns with bags, a cloth, and some furniture spray. When he sees me perching on the chair with a somber expression, I can feel his empathy from his kind eyes.
"Shall we start with the desk?" he asks, nodding to the surface nearest to me.
"Sure."
To his credit, John seems methodical and organized. He lines the boxes up by the wall, shakes open two bags, handing me one. "We can use this for trash." He holds up the one in his hands. "This one for Goodwill and the boxes for keepsakes."
I stare at the items on the desk in front of me. Papers. A laptop. There are drawers that contain unknown items. It all seems too overwhelming. John hesitates, seemingly waiting for me to begin, but I can't.
"Can you…"
He doesn't ask why I need him to step in. He just takes hold of the nearest pile of papers and begins. "Trash," he says after glancing through. "We're going to need a pile of paperwork for filing too. There are bills we will need to transfer. Accounts we will need to close."
"Okay. I'll put those here." I indicate a small clear space.
We start to go through everything. There is a lot of trash and plenty of papers for the filing pile. As we open the drawers, I pull out an unmarked folder. Inside, I find envelopes with the boys' names on them. John is quiet as I open the top one labeled Sean. Inside I find paperwork to do with the fostering arrangement. There are photographs of Sean as a young teen; scruffy and angry, he seems to snarl at the camera. I think of the flirty, happy man that I’ve met, and it's hard to put these two people together into one package.
"Sean was tough," John says quietly. "He had a difficult time."
"I'm sure you all did," I say, sliding the documents back into the envelope. This stuff is personal. A person's tragedy and heartbreak wrapped up in a few forms and some pictures that never should have been taken. No wonder my dad wanted to take on this lost little boy. No wonder he ended up with eleven of them under his wing.
"We did," John says, taking the folder and placing it into one of the keepsake boxes. I guess their separate histories is something that he doesn't feel comfortable discarding, even though they’d probably all feel glad to have left behind what the contents represent. "But things changed when we came to your dad. We found a home. We found each other."
"You all seem really tight," I say.
"We are." John picks up some more papers, glancing over them and handing them to me to throw away. "We all lost the security that a kid needs to thrive. Dad, well, he showed us how much stronger we were with each other. He taught us to trust each other, to rely on each other. He made us a team… his dream team, he called us. He created a family out of twelve individual lonely people." He sighs long and low. "I can't believe he's gone."
It's instinct to reach out and take John's hand in mine. An instinct that drives me to try to comfort him. I know what he's potentially here to do. If they voted in favor of trying to get me into a Danna style relationship, then it's John's role to soften me up to that. He could do that in lots of ways, but sympathy would seem like an easy option at this time.
The thing is, I have to be sympathetic. I have to empathize with him because I feel the same loss. We are in the same place of stunned grief, with the knowledge that neither of us quite has the right to feel like a child who has lost a true parent. Dad was a stand-in for these men and absent for me. I don't know if that fact makes things different for us or the same.