The Pyramids of Salt

I dip the cloth into the basin of warm water, wringing it out carefully. My father's scalp shows through what's left of his hair—thin white strands like abandoned spider silk. He doesn't flinch when I touch him. The morphine sees to that.

"Your mother always liked the water too hot," he says, eyes closed. "Used to burn herself showering. Said she couldn't feel it otherwise."

I haven't heard him mention her in ten years. Not since she walked out with nothing but a suitcase and his dreams of early retirement. Dreams he'd invested everything in—those copper pyramids in Utah, the supervisor-level access, the guaranteed returns that never came. The man who sold it to him had the sort of hair that doesn't move in wind, expensive and shellacked. He drove a Mercedes and showed my father charts with exponential curves climbing toward heaven.

"I was going to take you to Egypt," my father whispers now. "When the payout came. Real pyramids. Not the ones made of other people's money."

My hands shake as I rinse his hair. The water turns gray in the basin, swirling with dead skin and his dignity. I'm thirty-eight years old, and I'm washing my father's hair in a hospice room that smells of false lavender and impending death. I should feel something profound. Instead, I feel tired. The same tired I've felt since I was twelve, watching him pace the kitchen with the phone pressed to his ear, demanding answers from people who'd already moved to the next mark.

"I would have paid for your wedding," he says. "The house. The college funds for your kids."

"I'm not getting married, Dad. I told you."

"You will. Someone like you—" He stops, coughing. When he continues, his voice is thinner. "Someone like you finds someone. That's how it works. That's the pyramid. You build up, you lift others up, and everyone rises."

I want to laugh. A pyramid scheme of marriage, of life, of children paying for parents' mistakes in an endless chain of debt and disappointment. But his hand finds mine in the water, floating like a pale fish among the gray strands.

"I should have listened to your mother," he says. "She saw through it before I did. She tried to tell me."

The water has cooled. I pull the drain plug and watch it spiral away, carrying his hair and my history down into pipes that lead to oceans I'll never see. When I look back at his face, a single tear has traced a path through the powder his nurse applied this morning.

"It's okay," I lie, leaning forward to kiss his forehead. "We all build something. Sometimes it's just sand."