What We Leave Behind

The pool hadn't been drained in years. Green scum lined the tiles where I'd spent countless summers swimming laps while my father sat poolside with his bourbon, lecturing me about resilience. I was thirty-two now, the same age he was when he left. The house smelled like stale cigarettes and something sweeter—rot, maybe.

His cat, a ragged calico named Lucifer, wound around my ankles, purring like a engine. She was the only living thing left here. The dog had been put down six months ago, though Dad's neighbor Sarah had texted me about finding a stray collider near the porch last week. She called it a sign.

Bullshit, I thought, heading to the garage where everything important—or supposedly important—had been stored. Baseball cards, still sealed in plastic. The glove he'd given me when I made varsity, signed in sharpie: "To my champion." I'd thrown a no-hitter that season. He'd missed every game.

The realtor wanted to list by Friday. I grabbed a box and started sorting. One pile for donation, one for trash, one for—what, exactly? What do you do with a father's dreams when they never came true? When they were probably never real to begin with?

Lucifer jumped onto a stack of boxes, knocking over a photo album. It fell open to a picture of Dad in his twenties, muscular and grinning, holding a massive trophy. The caption read: "State Rodeo Champion 1985."

He'd ridden bulls. That's what Sarah meant by the stray by the porch—not a dog, a reminder. The animal he'd been, the man he'd pretended to be, the one I'd spent three decades chasing versions of in boardrooms and relationships, always choosing performance over substance.

I walked to the pool's edge and tossed the baseball glove into the green water. It sank slowly. Then the cards. Then the album.

The cat watched from the porch, indifferent. Some things finally go under easily. Others just learn to swim in filth.