The Inheritance

The corporate pyramid loomed over my cubicle, its brass plaque catching the afternoon sun: 'Teamwork Makes the Dream Work.' I'd been staring at it for three years, climbing nothing but the ladder of my own resignation. My father would have hated this place—hated the fluorescent hum, the motivational posters, the way we all pretended to care about quarterly projections while living lives of quiet desperation.

He died last Tuesday. I found out Thursday.

I'm sitting by the apartment complex pool now, the one he'd never been able to afford. The water's an impossible blue, chlorine stinging my nose, kids screaming somewhere in the distance. I'm wearing his baseball hat—the one with the frayed brim and the sweat stain shaped like a question mark. It smells like him: tobacco and sea salt and that particular odor of men who've worked with their hands until the skin grew tough as leather.

He left me a voicemail the week before his heart gave out. I never listened to it. Too busy climbing the fucking pyramid.

The baseball diamond where he taught me to hit is gone now—condos called 'The Heritage at Emerson Park.' They paved over the infield and put in a reflection pool. I learned to swing a bat there, learned that sometimes you have to hold back, sometimes you swing for the fences and miss anyway. He never said those things explicitly. He just let me fail until I didn't.

I'm thirty-five and I don't know what I'm doing. I have a 401k and no one to leave it to. I have a father's last voice trapped in some server somewhere, too terrified to press play.

The sun dips behind the management office. I slide the hat off and place it on the empty lounge chair beside me, like he's sitting there, like he might tell me what to do next.

'You're up,' I imagine him saying.

I pull out my phone, find the voicemail. My thumb hovers over the screen, then presses down.

His voice crackles through. 'Hey kid. Just called to say I love you. Also, I finally beat that level you couldn't get past. Dad: 1, You: 0.'

I laugh. It sounds like sobbing. The pool water ripples in the gathering dark, the pyramid waits back at the office, and somewhere beyond the horizon, the game goes on.