Bonus Epilogue
Tank
“I’ve got another bunch, Pop. Where do you want them?” Pat’s face peers around the side of a stack of flattened moving boxes.
I straighten from the box I’m currently bending over, filling with folded towels from the bathroom closet. My lower back screams in protest.
Not for the first time, I wonder at my insistence on packing up the house myself.
I can afford a moving company. But I’ve always taught my kids not to pay for things they could do themselves.
We’ve handled the house, lawn, and pool ourselves.
Each of them had weekly chores, though we did have a cleaning service every other week.
Because even if my kids did scrub toilets, they didn’t necessarily scrub them well.
I wanted to teach as well as model fiscal responsibility and hard work to my kids. But now you’ve done that, a little voice—a lazy voice—tells me. Your kids are grown. Why not hire a moving company so you’re not packing an entire house yourself?
Stubbornness—that’s why.
“How about the game room?” I suggest, wiping sweat from my brow. Since when did packing a box become a sweat-inducing activity? “I haven’t touched that room yet.”
“Will do,” Pat says, turning and awkwardly making his way back through the bathroom door with the stack of boxes. “You’re planning to donate most of that stuff, aren’t you?”
Donate. Stuff. Not sure why these simple words are making me bristle.
“I’m not sure yet. Just leave the boxes in there.”
If Pat notices the sharp edge to my tone, he doesn’t comment on it.
Then again, he’s distracted—justifiably so.
Lindy’s in the last weeks of her pregnancy, so he’s essentially on call.
We all are. Because you better believe we’ll all be parked in the waiting room to meet the newest addition to the Graham fam.
I’ll be extra glad for the distraction from packing up the house. This is a choice I made, but I didn’t anticipate the house selling almost immediately.
Or the emotional and physical toll it would take.
“Yo, Dad!” Footsteps pound up the stairs and Collin bursts into the room. “Sorry I’m late. Put me to work. And is there food?”
I chuckle and shake my head. People warn you about grocery bills going up exponentially when you have teenage boys. They don’t tell you that it never ends. My boys would still eat me out of house and home. Which now is technically former house and new home.
“Pat just dropped some boxes in the game room. They need to be assembled, and then everything in there needs to be packed.”
Collin frowns. “You’re packing up all our old games?”
I put my hands on my hips, stretching out my lower back. “As opposed to …?”
“Donating them. Throwing them out. You won’t have room in the loft.”
“I don’t plan to stay in the loft forever,” I tell him. “I told y’all I’m renting a storage unit.”
“You’re paying for a storage unit so you don’t have to get rid of checkers and Monopoly? Who do you think is going to play these old games?”
You know what else people don’t tell you about teenage boys? They don’t ever seem to outgrow thinking they’re experts in everything.
“Do you want to help me pack or give me your two cents about how you think I should do it?”
Collin holds up both hands. “Sorry. I didn’t realize board games were such a touchy issue for you.”
Everything is a touchy issue for me right now. But I don’t say that. Instead, I draw in a deep breath. “It’s fine. I’m sorry for being a grump.”
“Yeah, that role is already filled,” Collin says as James walks into the room. “Hello, grump!”
James only grunts in response, and Collin’s laughter echoes down the hall after him.
“I’ve finished boxing up the garage. You look like you’re making good progress.”
James glances around the bathroom, assessing. The marble counter is bare, all my things neatly packed in my toiletry bag since tonight will be my last night in the house. But my oldest son’s gaze snags on the second sink, the one that’s been bare for years now.
His mother’s sink.
And maybe that’s part of why this process has been so much harder than I thought: the last time I packed things up in this house was after Michelle died.
Then, I was grief-stricken, barely dragging myself through each day.
But I knew I had to box up everything of Michelle’s or I’d continue drowning daily in memories.
The littlest things set me off: her hairbrush, with dark strands tangled in the bristles; a pair of socks, discarded by the closet door where she’d kicked them off; a grocery list scribbled on the back of a receipt for Taco Bell.
Signs of life.
Signs of normalcy.
Signs of the woman I loved with all I had, then lost.
Now, even though all Michelle’s things are stacked in their own boxes in the attic where they’ve been untouched for years, the heavy blanket of grief has fallen over me once again. It’s less sharp than it was years ago, but even time-dulled grief has a way of cutting straight through to the heart.
I wait for James to say something. He doesn’t. Instead, he walks back through the doorway. “I’ll help Collin.”
“James,” I call. He stops but doesn’t turn. “I’m sorry you had to carry so much.”
Keeping his back to me still, James nods.
“You’ve apologized, and, as I’ve said, you have nothing to apologize for. We’re a family. We all chip in where help is needed.”
I swallow past a heavy lump of regret, lodged uncomfortably in my throat. I remember the day I finally emerged from my grief. It was the sight of thirteen-year-old James at the kitchen counter that did it.
He was scowling, cutting the crusts off a sandwich for Harper, who went through a long period of refusing to eat bread with what she called the brown line. Before he noticed me standing in the doorway, watching, still only in the boxers I’d been wearing when I rose from bed, a timer went off.
James sighed, set down the knife, and slipped an oven mitt over his hand to retrieve two pizzas from the oven. He placed the pizzas on the stove, turned off the oven, then turned, saw me, and froze.
I’m sure I was a sight. Unshowered, wearing only underwear, tears streaming down my cheeks.
“Dad?” he said, and I remember realizing that his voice was changing, starting to deepen.
I hadn’t noticed because I had been wallowing in my grief from the discomfort of my own lonely bed for weeks.
“Son,” I said then, “I’m so, so sorry.”
I planned to retreat then, to shower and force myself back to the dinner table with my children, who all surely would have been neglected save for James. But he almost leaped across the kitchen to throw his arms around me in an uncharacteristic hug.
“You don’t need to apologize,” he said with a fierceness that stole my breath. “You can go back to bed. I can—”
“No.” I pulled back, taking him by the shoulders and meeting his hazel eyes. “I’m not going back to bed. I’m up now. From now on, I am here. Thank you, son, for holding down the fort. But I’ve got it now.”
And I did. My life’s mission has been since that very moment to hold my family together. I’ve done that.
But now, I think, looking at James’s broad back and the stiffness in his shoulders. Now, they’re grown. Happily in relationships of their own. It’s time for you to stop thinking only of keeping them together.
What that means, though, I have no idea.
“Thank you, son,” I tell James now, wondering if he hears the echoes of my words from years ago the same way I do.
With an abrupt nod, he walks away.
A few minutes later, Winnie joins me as I’m taping up the box of towels. “Can I help?” she asks, pushing her black-framed glasses up her nose.
“I was just about to start on the kitchen. But you don’t have to help. Everything has to be wrapped and—”
“I’m on it,” she says, and when I enter the kitchen, I find her stacking glasses and cutting bubble wrap from a giant roll. “I came prepared.”
“Of course you did,” I say. “Thank you.”
For the next forty-five minutes, Winnie and I wrap glasses and plates, cups and bowls in relative silence. We get into a wordless rhythm of packing, wrapping, handing tape and bubble wrap back and forth. It’s as comfortable as it is comforting.
I don’t miss the fact that Winnie, often known for her refusal to keep her words to herself even when she should, says nothing, a silent companion.
The only voices echoing through the house are Collin, James, and Pat arguing about which Austin restaurant has the best queso.
“They’re all wrong,” Winnie says, handing me the scissors with a smile. “It’s the Barton Springs Chuy’s. And I don’t care if they now have Chuy’s all the way in Virginia—the Barton Springs location has the best queso in Austin, and no one can change my mind.”
“I don’t remember the last time I went to Chuy’s.”
“You should go,” Winnie says. “I make James take me anytime we’re in town. He grumbles about it, but he loves the Burrito As Big As Yo’ Face. Here.” She hands me the tape, and I close and seal the last box. “Should we go tonight?”
Her eyes are so lit up that I won’t be able to tell her no. Just like I can’t tell my own kids no most of the time, even at times when maybe I should. Or when I really want to.
I’m saved by a shout from upstairs. “Lindy’s in labor! It’s happening!”
Chaos breaks loose in the house, and in moments, everyone has driven off. I promise to meet them at the hospital soon.
But I have something I need to do first.
The attic stairs creak as I let them down, and they groan under my weight.
I make it up there, pulling the single cord to light the little area.
Most of the space is taken up by the HVAC system—silver ducts running across the pink insulation.
But there is enough room for a few stacks of boxes, and I go right to the one furthest from the entrance, shrouded in shadows and unlabeled.
I rest my hand on top, sliding my fingers along the brown packing tape, bubbling up a little in the center.
“Hey, Michelle,” I say, my voice sounding cracked and rusty.
“I’m finally selling the house, and we’re about to be grandparents again.
Jo’s going to have a sister. Can you believe out of all our kids, Pat is the first parent? A darn good one too. You’d be proud.”
I pause. Swallow. Glide my fingertips along the top of the box.
“And I think I’m finally ready to get out there again.
Not that anyone could compete with or replace you.
It’s different now. I’m different. I know you wanted this for me, but before, I just couldn’t imagine it.
Now, I still can’t. But I’ve seen how happy all our kids are, and I think, finally, I’m willing to try. ”
Michelle doesn’t answer, of course. There isn’t some magic dust rising from the box of her things, swirling to form the words Go For It! or anything like that. No signs and wonders.
Just an old—but not too old—man sitting alone in his attic talking to a box of his late wife’s things and experiencing a sense of peace and rightness about the idea of finally thinking about himself and his personal happiness.