Here Lies a Father. Mckenzie Cassidy

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СКАЧАТЬ you,” said Carla, sniffing. “But … this just isn’t appropriate.”

      “You got that right,” said Catherine.

      Carla retrieved a balled-up tissue from her purse and dabbed her tears.

      Marie turned to Catherine and me, and I could tell she was concerned. “Are you telling me your parents never mentioned any of this?” she asked.

      “Other marriages?” said Catherine in a strained voice. She was an English major in college and knew the difference between plural and singular. “No. Absolutely not.”

      “Marriages. Yes. Your father had a few,” said Marie, smirking.

      Not long after Marie dropped this bomb, Carla also dropped the shy-and-withdrawn act. “Thomas and I had two children together, Mark and Ashley, before he left me. They’re much older than you, as you’d probably guess, and they have lives of their own now, but they’re your half siblings.”

      Marie clearly had no idea of how this shocking news would plow through our psyches, leaving craters the size of volcanoes. Speaking openly about our personal lives didn’t come easy for my family. Before leaving town Mom and Catherine had specifically told me not to give them an inch, to keep my eyes and ears open about whether any of those backwoods kooks were trying to profit from Dad’s death. If there had been money floating around, Mom said, we’d better figure out if they’d fight over it or not. Money was funny business in my family; we refused to admit we cared about it, but there was never a time when it wasn’t the topic of conversation.

      “Is this a prank?” asked Catherine, struggling to crack a smile to show she was in on the joke. Considering Dad’s dark humor, it was fair to assume he got it from his family. “My father did not have other families or other children, and if this is a joke I’d appreciate it if you all stopped carrying on with it. It’s not the time or place.”

      Marie, unruffled, responded calmly to Catherine’s outburst: “I’m sorry, sweetie. I wish it was a joke.”

      Catherine and Mom never included me in the important matters of the Daly family. As if I’d been bestowed a nonessential status, it wasn’t important for me to know what was happening or why they had made certain choices over the years. They excluded me because they wanted to protect me from the harsh realities of this world. How could I fault them for that? But now I was hearing something live, at the same time as Catherine, and we were left to figure out whether it was true. Dad’s family had no reason to lie, nothing to gain.

      If it were true, and at that moment I thought it might be, it meant Dad had lied to me—to everyone—for years.

      “Hey, these confessions are great and all, but don’t forget we’re all here for a funeral,” said Neil. “Let’s get on with it and we can all catch up later.”

      “I agree,” said Marie. “We have all of the time in the world.”

      “Yes. Fine. Let’s just do it already,” said Catherine. She gently placed Dad’s box, which she had been hoarding since we had arrived, at the bottom of the shallow hole.

      Carla reached inside her behemoth purse and pulled out a handful of roses like a Las Vegas magician. She told us she’d bought them fresh at a grocery store on the way to the cemetery. She handed one to each of us. I remembered how Mom hated roses because they reminded her of funerals, but Dad bought them for her every Valentine’s Day regardless. As much as she complained, he kept buying them. He never listened, she said. I wondered if he bought roses for every woman?

      Uncle Neil explained that the diggers would fill the hole properly that evening, but the dirt inside of the white buckets could be ceremoniously spread across the top of Dad’s box. He reached into one bucket and pulled up a handful of dirt, sprinkling it on the box like he was seasoning a stew. He passed the bucket around and each of us took our share. We also dropped the roses onto the uneven mounds, which had transformed into mud upon hitting the wet ground. I thought it all defeated the purpose of buying fresh flowers. Some of the soil stuck to my hands, so I wiped them across the wet blades of grass by my feet.

      “I think that about does it,” said Neil.

      “Should we say something?” asked Marie, her hands folded and resting on her stomach.

      “Like what? I’m not a goddamn priest,” he said.

      “No, Neil, she’s right,” said Carla. “I can say something if—”

      “No, that’s quite all right, Carla,” Catherine blurted. She could barely speak through a clenched jaw. “You’ve done quite enough. He was my father, so I can take it from here.”

      We all bowed our heads.

      “We are gathered here on this peaceful and beautiful hilltop today, somewhat overcast, to say goodbye to Thomas Daly. He was a good man. He cared deeply about his family, friends, and the community in which he lived. Anyone who had the good fortune of spending time with him loved him. He will be greatly missed and I only wish I could do more to help celebrate his tremendous life. Amen.”

      A cold breeze blew a pile of soggy leaves down the hill. We took a moment of silence, yet my mind was screaming. Thoughts of death bounced across the empty spaces. I had only faced it one other time in my life, when my grandfather passed away and I was too young to understand. My younger cousin and I had climbed up to the lid of his coffin to wake him up from his nap, something I had done a hundred times before. I tried to visualize the day of my maternal grandfather’s funeral too, but like most of my memories, they were murky and disjointed. I remembered how people were packed elbow-to-elbow, all in black, sobbing and sharing stories about him. He had a full wake with cold cuts and my grandmother sat in the living room to greet the people who came to pay their respects.

      In the end, Dad’s funeral was five strangers standing awkwardly around a two-foot-by-two-foot hole, tossing handfuls of dirt into an unmarked grave with grocery store roses. I decided on that hilltop, staring at his partially filled resting place, that when I died I wanted hundreds of people at my funeral—a great party where everyone shared their fond memories of me, and stayed late into the night because they couldn’t stand to let me go. I didn’t want to die alone.

      CHAPTER 2

      EACH OF US WANTED TO PAY OUR RESPECTS, yet none of us wanted to overstay. Funerals weren’t for the dead anyway. They gave those left behind a chance to grieve and tie up loose ends. I watched Catherine as she delivered her impromptu sermon. Her black hair, in sharp contrast with her pale skin, fell down the sides of her pronounced cheekbones. As brother and sister we were both pale and turned red like boiled lobsters on the beach, which was another reason I never understood why our family moved to Florida for two years and then unexpectedly came home in the middle of the school year, about six months earlier. We never finished what we started. People said Catherine and I looked alike because we both had full cheeks and slightly pointed noses that appeared to slide down our foreheads. And we both had big Irish chins. My father, Thomas Daly, was of full Irish descent—at least that’s what he told us—while Mom’s family was mostly German or English. Her name was Helen.

      We all had loose ends to tie up. Catherine needed to say goodbye to her beloved father, Marie and Neil to their estranged brother, and our esteemed guest Carla a farewell to her old flame, if in fact there was any truth to her story. I’d come to do what any good son did when his father died, yet none of it was going how I’d expected. Once Carla opened her mouth about Dad’s other СКАЧАТЬ