What We Leave Behind

The morning after the funeral, I sat on the porch of my father's house watching storm clouds gather. His cat, a crotchety tabby named Buster, rubbed against my ankle—probably hungry, certainly confused about why Arthur wasn't filling his bowl anymore. I'd never been a cat person myself, but Arthur had loved this creature with a devotion he'd never quite managed to extend to people.

Lightning cracked the sky in half, illuminating the boxes stacked in the hallway. My brother had taken the furniture and the money. I'd taken the job of sorting through three decades of accumulated life. It felt less like清理 and more like forensic archaeology.

In the garage, I found his baseball glove from his company league days, leather still soft from yearly oiling. He'd played shortstop until his knees gave out, then coached my team for two disastrous seasons where he'd smoked cigarettes behind the backstop and screamed at umpires. The glove smelled like old dirt and regret.

On the kitchen counter, a goldfish bowl sat cloudy and neglected. I couldn't remember when he'd bought it or why. The fish, a plain orange comet, swam in listless circles. I wondered how long it had been since anyone fed it. A week? Since his heart attack?

On his bedroom doorknob hung his hat—a brown fedora he'd worn since the seventies, sweat-stained and somehow both ridiculous and dignified. He'd worn it to my college graduation, to my wedding, to my divorce proceedings. A constant in a life that had otherwise churned through marriages, jobs, cities.

I flushed the goldfish down the toilet. It seemed crueler to let it starve. I packed the baseball glove with my own things. Buster went to my sister who'd actually liked the damn cat. The hat—I kept that too.

Some things you keep. Some things you release. The lightning storm broke as I backed out of the driveway, rain washing away the last traces of a man who'd been, by turns, wonderful and terrible, present and absent, human and flawed. Just like the rest of us.