MY DAD LEFT US NOTHING IN HIS WILL—BUT HIS “GOLF BUDDY” GOT THE HOUSE
I was still in black tights from the funeral when the lawyer slid the papers across the desk—and my sister Zofia straight-up laughed, like it had to be a mistake.
Dad left his condo, his boat, and every cent in his investment account to someone named Colin O’Brien. Not our mom (they divorced in ’03), not us, not even a niece or cousin. Colin. Colin who?
Turns out Colin’s been around for years. We just didn’t realize.
I remember the name vaguely. Dad mentioned him maybe twice—once after a golf tournament in Arizona, and once when I noticed he wasn’t at Christmas. “Colin had a rough year,” he said, shrugging. “Figured I’d keep him company.” I thought it was just another retiree buddy with a tragic backstory and a fondness for whiskey.
But when I called the number listed in the will, a young guy answered. Mid-thirties, Irish accent, tight-lipped. Said he’d get back to me.
He didn’t.
So Zofia and I drove to the condo. Lights on, curtains drawn. We knocked. Waited. Knocked again.
A man answered wearing one of Dad’s old sweatshirts. I recognized it from childhood road trips—it had the bleach stain by the hem.
And Colin? He looked… younger than I expected. Like, a lot younger.
When I asked what his relationship was to our father, he didn’t flinch. He just tilted his head and said—
“Depends who’s asking. Daughter, or lawyer?”
story picks up in the first 🗨
Five dollars
“Daughter,” I said.
I put my hand against the door before he could close it.
“Then you can come in. But she leaves the key on the counter.”
Colin looked past me at Zofia.
She pulled Dad’s spare key from her pocket. “You don’t get to order us around.”
“You let yourself in yesterday.”
“To find his funeral clothes.”
“You opened my bedroom drawers.”
My hand came off the door. The funeral had been that Friday morning. Apparently, there’d been an entire Thursday I hadn’t been invited to.
Colin stepped aside.
Inside, Dad’s slippers were under his chair. One faced the television; the other faced nowhere useful. He’d always kicked them off that way.
I wanted those slippers more than the boat.
Zofia pointed at Colin’s sweatshirt.
“At least take that off.”
He looked down.
“It was Dad’s,” she said. “I’ll give you five dollars. That’s about what it’s worth.”
“Zofia.”
“What? He can buy another.”
Colin pulled the hem away from his body, then let it fall.
“He gave it to me.”
She laughed again. I hated that laugh. At the lawyer’s office, I’d been grateful for it because somebody had to make a noise. Here, with Dad’s slippers between us, it sounded like a drawer being forced open.
I took my coat off.
“Can we sit down?”
“For what?” Zofia said.
“To have a conversation without putting price stickers on his clothes.”
Colin moved a box from the sofa. My name was written across the top in Dad’s handwriting.
There was another box underneath it for Zofia.
I reached for mine.
“Tomorrow,” Colin said. “Please. I’ve been answering questions about what belongs to whom since eight this morning.”
“Those belong to us,” Zofia said.
“They do.”
She held out her hand for the key he’d asked her to leave.
It was still in her own fist.
Dad’s block capitals
That Friday evening, I stayed on the sofa while Zofia stood beside the boxes.
Dad wrote our names in block capitals even on birthday cards. Mine took up more space than Zofia’s, so he always started too far left and finished halfway down the envelope.
The same thing had happened on my box.
I ran a finger over the last letter.
“What is this stuff?”
“Things he kept,” Colin said. “Things he said were yours.”
Zofia lifted her box. Something inside shifted.
“Careful,” Colin said.
She put it down harder than necessary.
When we were girls, Dad used that sweatshirt for every job Mom considered beneath a proper shirt. Painting. Fixing the car. Taking us on trips where the attraction was apparently driving past other places.
Once, Zofia spilled bleach while helping him clean the camper. She cried because she thought he’d be angry. He dipped a finger in the puddle and made the stain bigger.
“There. Now it’s a design.”
Back in the condo, the stain moved when Colin folded his arms.
“Did he tell you that story?” I said.
“The camper?”
I nodded.
“He said she tried to hide it with a sticker.”
Zofia’s mouth opened, then closed.
Dad’s phone lay beside Colin’s on the counter. Its case still had the corner he’d melted against a pan. I’d offered him a new one. He’d said the phone worked and the pan had learned its lesson.
Colin followed my eyes.
“I haven’t canceled it yet.”
“Does it still have his messages?”
“Yes.”
Dad saved everything. Voicemails about arriving safely. Photographs of parking spaces. A message from me asking whether chicken could be cooked from frozen, which he’d played back at two birthdays.
I almost asked to hear it.
Zofia picked up her coat.
“We need to speak to someone before we take anything.”
“We just spoke to his lawyer.”
“Someone working for us.”
Colin rubbed his forehead.
“Your mother and Ruth are coming Sunday. I asked them to help with the photographs. Come then. We can go through things together.”
Ruth was Dad’s sister. She’d spent the funeral gripping Mom’s hand so hard their rings left marks.
“You called our mother?” Zofia said.
“She called me.”
That stopped her longer than anything else had.
I said we’d come Sunday.
Zofia had always handled family arrangements. She could turn four adults having lunch into an operation requiring assigned parking. Dad used to call me afterward to check whether the arrangements also applied to him.
She pulled the door open.
“Sunday is for sorting things,” she said. “Nothing else.”
The place beside his chair
On Saturday morning, Zofia arrived at my apartment before I’d taken yesterday’s tights out of the sink.
She had coffee and a printed page of questions.
I accepted the coffee. That was my first contribution to the day’s mistakes.
“I spoke to another lawyer,” she said.
“Already?”
“He gave me an hour. Six hundred dollars.”
“Zofia.”
“We can split it.”
I said okay. I was still operating under the idea that she knew what to do and I was the family member who once mailed a birthday card without a stamp.
She sat beside me.
“We need to find out when the will changed. Whether Dad understood it. Whether this Colin person kept people away.”
“Dad did his own taxes in February.”
“People can be sharp about one thing.”
“He corrected the lawyer’s directions to the cemetery.”
“Would you please stop helping him?”
I put the coffee down.
“Who?”
She tapped the page.
“The man wearing our father’s clothes.”
We drove back to the condo with her questions between us.
Colin opened the door carrying a mug. He was wearing his own shirt, or at least one I’d never seen on Dad.
I hated that I’d checked.
Zofia walked straight to the chair beside Dad’s.
“How long were you living here?”
“Seven years.”
I stayed standing.
Seven years included the Christmases I’d spent elsewhere because Zofia said Dad preferred things quiet. It included the birthdays when he’d suggested lunch out rather than dinner at home.
“Seven?”
Colin put the mug down.
“Yes.”
“You never thought to introduce yourself?” I said.
His eyes went to Zofia.
“I thought your father should.”
“Don’t look at me,” she said. “Answer her.”
He pulled out the chair she’d nearly sat in and sat down himself.
I could’ve asked what Dad had said about us. Whether he talked about us. Whether the birthday cards stayed on the refrigerator or went straight into recycling.
Instead, I asked when the will was signed.
Colin gave us the year.
Zofia wrote it down with the satisfaction of somebody finding a dent on a rental car.
“And whose idea was it?”
“His.”
“Did you go with him?”
“I drove him.”
“There.”
“He couldn’t drive after his eye appointment.”
Zofia crossed nothing out.
I leaned against the counter. Dad’s phone was beside my elbow.
“Why didn’t you call me back?”
“I tried three times to work out what to say.”
“You could’ve started with hello.”
“I could.”
That answer made me angrier than an excuse would’ve.
Zofia pushed her page toward him.
“We have a right to know whether he was pressured.”
Colin read the first line, then pushed it back.
“Your father would’ve walked into traffic before letting me choose a restaurant. You think I chose his will?”
I nearly laughed. Dad once drove past three exits because he’d decided the sandwiches at the fourth were better.
Then Zofia said, “He was lonely. People who are lonely do stupid things.”
Colin got up.
I expected him to tell us to leave. Instead, he went to the sink and washed the mug he’d barely used.
I said, “We could work something out.”
He turned off the water.
“What does that mean?”
“The photographs. Some of his things. We don’t have to fight over everything.”
“We’re not giving up the condo,” Zofia said.
“I didn’t say that.”
“You were about to.”
Colin dried his hands.
“You can have the photographs with you in them. The boxes are yours. But you’re both speaking as if I moved in this morning.”
The handle of my box
That Saturday afternoon, Zofia decided we should take the boxes.
We were still in the condo. Colin hadn’t thrown us out, which I treated as proof that our visit wasn’t as awful as it felt.
I can be very resourceful when avoiding an apology.
My box held birthday cards, school photographs, and the blue scarf I’d knitted for Dad with a hole wide enough to serve as an extra neck opening.
He’d kept the note pinned to it.
Wear the hole at the back.
I sat on the floor.
Zofia’s box remained closed.
“That’s the personal stuff,” she said to Colin. “Now what about the rest?”
“What rest?”
“Don’t do that.”
I lifted a photograph of Dad and me beside the boat. I’d been twenty-two and furious because he’d insisted on taking it before we left.
There were six nearly identical photographs underneath.
He’d kept the ones where I looked miserable, too. A complete record of his daughter’s charm.
“Did he still use the boat?” I said.
“Until last summer.”
“By himself?”
Colin looked at the photograph in my hand.
“No.”
Zofia moved toward the hallway.
“I’ll get the albums.”
Colin stepped in front of her.
“We said tomorrow.”
“They’re family pictures.”
“Some of them.”
“Move.”
He stayed where he was.
I stood up so fast the photographs slid from my lap.
“Can everybody stop for one minute?”
Zofia turned toward me.
“Tell him.”
“Tell him what?”
“That we’re taking Dad’s albums.”
“We haven’t even looked at them.”
“We don’t need permission.”
Colin reached into the cupboard beside him and brought out an album. He held it against his chest.
“This one has your birthdays. Take it.”
Zofia reached past it toward the cupboard.
He closed the door.
She looked at me again.
And there it was, the familiar place she’d made for me: behind her shoulder, nodding. At restaurants. With repairmen. When Mom needed something explained and Zofia decided I couldn’t explain it quickly enough.
I picked up my photographs.
“Let’s take what’s ours.”
“That’s what I’m trying to do.”
“No. You’re trying to take whatever you can reach.”
Her face changed.
Colin set the album on top of my box.
“Thank you,” he said.
Zofia laughed.
“She’s not thanking you. Neither of us is. Don’t get confused because she’s being polite.”
My fingers stopped on the box handle.
“I can answer for myself.”
“Then do it.”
She pointed at Colin.
“Tell him what you said in the car.”
I’d said plenty in the car. That the will hurt. That Dad could apparently organize seven years with a stranger but couldn’t tell his daughter what was happening.
I’d also said Colin looked young enough to sell Dad an extended warranty.
I wanted that one back.
“Zofia.”
“Tell him you think he found a lonely old man with a condo.”
Colin picked up his mug again, though it was empty.
I should’ve said I was sorry.
Instead, I said, “We don’t know you.”
He nodded once.
“No.”
Zofia took the handle of my box.
“Come on.”
I pulled it toward me.
“Leave it.”
For a second we were both holding it, grown women fighting over a cardboard box containing a scarf nobody could reasonably wear.
Then she let go.
“You always do this. Make me be the difficult one, then act embarrassed when I do the job.”
“I didn’t ask you to say that.”
“You didn’t have to.”
Colin set the mug down carefully.
“That’s enough for today.”
Zofia walked toward the door, but she stopped with her hand on the latch.
“Sunday. Mom and Ruth can hear it, too. They should know what you took.”
“I didn’t take him from you.”
The sentence came so quickly I looked up.
Zofia opened the door.
“Nobody said you did.”
After she left, Colin crouched to gather two photographs that had gone under the sofa.
I crouched beside him.
“I’m sorry about what I said in the car.”
He handed me one.
“Did you say it?”
“Yes.”
“Then don’t apologize for her repeating it.”
I took the photograph.
It was Dad alone beside the boat, holding the camera out for somebody else.
Sunday at two
On Sunday, I arrived at the condo without Zofia.
Mom was already there. Ruth stood by the window with a photograph in both hands.
Colin opened the door and stepped back.
“I came early,” I said.
“She’s earlier.”
Zofia was on the sofa.
My box sat beside her. The birthday album was open across her knees as if yesterday had ended with everyone agreeing she was in charge.
Mom patted the space beside her.
I sat.
Nobody offered coffee. In our family, that qualified as a weather warning.
Zofia closed the album.
“I think we should deal with this while we’re all here.”
Ruth put her photograph down.
“Deal with what?”
“Dad leaving everything to Colin.”
“We know,” Mom said.
“Yes, but knowing isn’t the same as agreeing.”
Colin remained beside the door.
Zofia unfolded her lawyer’s page.
“The consultation cost six hundred dollars. Before anyone acts like this is just me being emotional, there are questions worth asking.”
I stared at the page.
“That’s not what you told me.”
“What?”
“You said the lawyer thought we should look into it.”
“He said we could.”
Mom held out her hand.
“May I see?”
Zofia hesitated, then passed it over.
Mom read it.
“This says he couldn’t advise you without seeing the will.”
“He can once we hire him.”
“Who is we?” I said.
Zofia gave me a look that had worked on me since I was eight.
“Us.”
I put my hands between my knees so I wouldn’t reach for the paper and tear it. It wasn’t the lawyer’s fault my sister treated a possibility like a marching order.
“I said I’d help with the consultation. I didn’t say I’d fight the will.”
“You said we’d sort this out together.”
“I thought that meant finding out what happened.”
“And now you have. He got everything.”
Colin turned toward the hallway.
“Where are you going?” she said.
“To get the rest of the photographs.”
“You can do that after.”
He stopped.
Ruth said his name, but he shook his head.
Zofia stood.
“Look at us. We’re his daughters. We buried him on Friday, and you sat at the back like some acquaintance, and now we’re supposed to accept this?”
Colin’s hand closed around the doorframe.
“You told me to sit there.”
I looked at her.
She kept going.
“I told you we needed space.”
“You told me neither of you wanted me beside you.”
“I never said that,” I said.
Zofia turned toward me.
“You wanted a quiet funeral.”
“I wanted Dad not to be dead.”
Mom put the page down.
Ruth moved away from the window.
Colin went into the hallway and returned with my box and Zofia’s stacked together. He set them by the front door.
“The album is yours. So are these. I’ll send copies of any other photographs you’re in.”
He reached into his pocket and put Dad’s spare key on Zofia’s box.
She’d left it on the counter the previous afternoon after I stayed behind. I’d taken that as progress. My standards were on the floor, somewhere beside the photographs.
“I’ll be changing the lock,” he said. “Don’t come without calling.”
Zofia picked up the key.
“You can change it after this is settled.”
“It is settled.”
She turned to Mom.
“Are you going to let him throw us out of our father’s home?”
Mom’s eyes filled.
“I don’t think we get to call it that and pretend he didn’t live here, too.”
Zofia looked at Ruth.
Ruth folded her arms.
So she looked at me.
I wanted somebody to hand me one decent explanation. Dad had been confused. Colin had lied. There was another page. Something that let me keep the father I thought I knew without examining how little I’d asked him.
Colin lifted my box.
I took it because he was holding it out, and suddenly I was back in the doorway.
My father’s whole life, reduced to what I could carry against my stomach.
“Please,” I said.
Colin waited.
“Don’t make the last thing I take from him a box.”
“Then stop asking me what things you can take.”
I put the box down.
Behind me, Zofia said, “He chose. That’s what he did. He chose Colin over both of us.”
Colin looked straight at her.
“You made him choose.”
She opened the front door.
Dad’s phone
I closed the door again that Sunday afternoon.
“What did you say to him?”
Zofia looked at Colin.
“Ask her,” he said.
I did.
“What did you say?”
“We’ve been over this.”
“No. You’ve been over it. I’ve been standing behind you.”
She pushed the key into her pocket.
“I told him how we felt.”
“How I felt about what?”
Colin took Dad’s phone from the counter.
He held it without touching the screen.
“I loved your father. We lived here together. He wanted you to come here and know that.”
Zofia said, “They don’t need the details.”
“I do,” I said.
My mouth felt awful. I’d spent two days asking when the will was signed. Now I couldn’t get the smaller words out.
“Was he happy?”
Colin sat down.
“Mostly.”
That hurt more than a yes.
I pointed at the phone.
“Did she write it?”
He nodded.
“Can I see?”
“Those are private conversations,” Zofia said.
“They’re apparently my conversations,” I said. “I should catch up.”
Colin unlocked the phone and opened her messages.
He didn’t hand it over until he found the part about bringing him to Christmas, three years earlier.
Dad had written that he’d like us to come to the condo first. He wanted us to meet Colin properly.
Zofia’s answer filled the screen.
No. Neither of us wants that. Don’t make this harder.
Dad had written my name.
She hasn’t said that to me.
The next message was from Zofia.
She asked me to handle it. Stop putting her in the middle.
I sat beside Colin.
There were more messages. Dad asking whether she was certain. Dad saying he’d tried to call me.
I’d been busy that December. I’d sent a text telling him to work Christmas out with Zofia. Whatever they decided was fine.
He’d kept that, too.
Colin moved his finger away from the screen so I could scroll myself.
Zofia’s last answer was short.
If you keep insisting on him, don’t expect either of us there. You choose.
I read it twice.
Then I opened my own messages with Zofia from that December.
Dad wants a quiet Christmas, she’d written.
I’d answered with a complaint about the grocery shopping I’d already done.
I put the phones side by side.
Ruth came over. Mom stood behind her.
Zofia stayed by the door.
“I said what needed saying,” she said.
I turned Dad’s phone toward her.
“Now say it with me here.”
The empty chair
Zofia didn’t look at the screen.
“You’re acting like I invented the entire situation. He put me in a terrible position.”
Mom sat down slowly.
“What position?”
“He called me. He told me. Then he wanted me to make everybody comfortable.”
Ruth pulled Colin’s chair away from the wall.
“Sit down,” she said to him.
He stayed beside me.
Zofia pointed toward him.
“See? You all feel sorry for him now. Try being the person who gets the call.”
“When?” I said.
She folded her arms.
“When did he tell you?”
“Three years ago.”
“Before that Christmas.”
“Yes.”
“And you never told me.”
“He asked me to let him.”
Colin looked up.
“He tried.”
Zofia turned on him.
“You don’t know everything about this family because you lived in his condo.”
“Our condo.”
There was no heat in it. Colin sounded tired of correcting an address.
Zofia’s eyes filled, but she kept going.
“He was old enough to be your father. You expected us to walk in here and pretend that was normal?”
“I expected you to come when he asked.”
“You got the house. You got the money. What else do you want?”
Ruth slapped her hand against the arm of Dad’s chair.
“Enough.”
Zofia stopped.
My aunt wasn’t a hand-slapping person. She’d once apologized to a shopping cart after hitting it with her car.
“He called me after that Christmas,” Ruth said. “He said he thought he’d lost his girls.”
Mom covered her mouth.
I looked down at the phone.
Dad had tried to call me twice the week before Christmas. I remembered seeing the missed calls. I’d called once while driving, got his voicemail, and told him we’d catch up after the holiday.
We hadn’t caught up about this. I’d asked about his golf.
Zofia wiped her cheeks.
“You could have called him yourself.”
“Yes,” I said.
That seemed to surprise her.
“I should have.”
“Then don’t put all of this on me.”
I lifted Dad’s phone.
“This part is yours.”
She reached for it.
Colin put his hand over mine, and she stopped.
“I was trying to keep things from getting ugly,” she said.
Mom took her hand away from her mouth.
“By telling him his other daughter didn’t want him?”
“Didn’t want this. There’s a difference.”
“Did he hear one?” Ruth said.
Zofia looked at me.
“You wouldn’t have liked it. You can pretend now, but you wouldn’t have.”
“I don’t know what I would’ve said.”
“Exactly.”
“I know you didn’t let me say it.”
She began crying harder. I was crying, too, and angry about it. I wanted at least one body part to remain useful.
Colin slid a tissue box toward me.
Even then, I almost thanked him in the bright voice I used with strangers.
Instead, I turned toward him.
“I said awful things about you.”
“You did.”
“I came here to make you explain why Dad loved you.”
His eyes closed.
“I’m sorry.”
Zofia made a sound behind us.
I kept looking at Colin.
“Did he think I hated him?”
“No.”
The answer came fast.
“Did he think I hated you?”
Colin rubbed the heel of his hand against one eye.
“He hoped you didn’t.”
I gripped the tissue until it came apart.
Mom moved closer to Colin.
“Why didn’t he tell me?”
“He said you had enough to carry from the marriage.”
She nodded, then cried into her hands.
Colin waited beside her. He didn’t try to explain Dad to the woman who’d been married to him.
Ruth sat in the chair she’d pulled out.
Zofia was the only person still standing.
Both of us
Zofia stayed by the door while we sat in Dad’s living room.
Then she said, “You can’t honestly expect me to be happy that he left everything away from his children.”
Nobody answered.
She tried again.
“We could still agree on something fair. Colin could sell the boat. There’d be enough to make a gesture.”
He looked at her.
“A gesture.”
“Dad would’ve wanted us to work it out.”
I took my own phone back.
“Don’t.”
“What?”
“Tell us what Dad wanted.”
She put a hand against her forehead.
“So that’s it? You’re taking his side?”
“I’m taking mine.”
“I paid six hundred dollars because you were upset, too.”
“Tell Mom what you asked the lawyer.”
“I asked about our options.”
“Did you tell him both daughters wanted to challenge the will?”
Her hand fell.
“That’s what we were discussing.”
“No,” I said. “That’s what you were discussing.”
She pulled out her phone.
“Fine. I’ll call him.”
“Write it.”
She stared at me.
“You’ve had trouble remembering what people said.”
Mom held out her hand for the printed page again.
Zofia unlocked her phone.
Her thumbs moved. She turned the screen toward me.
I read it before she sent it.
It said she was asking for herself, that I hadn’t agreed to hire him, and that no one should describe her as acting for both daughters.
“Send it,” I said.
She did.
“And the consultation?” she said.
“Yours.”
Six hundred dollars. She paid all of it.
Colin stood.
“The key.”
She didn’t move.
“Zofia,” Mom said.
My sister took it from her pocket and dropped it onto the box by the door.
Colin picked it up.
Then Ruth held out her hand.
“The album.”
“It’s ours,” Zofia said.
“It’s hers, too. You’ve been holding it all afternoon.”
Zofia gave it to me.
She looked around the room once more.
“So I just leave?”
Colin opened the door.
“You can come back when you can speak to me without asking for something.”
“I’ve lost my father.”
His hand stayed on the door.
“So have I,” I said.
She turned toward me.
“You should’ve called him.”
That one landed where she wanted it to. I would have to live with it, and she knew.
I stood.
“Yes. And you should’ve let him hear my answer.”
Her face folded. She reached for me, then stopped before her hand touched my arm.
“I thought you’d back me up.”
“You didn’t ask.”
She took her box.
At the doorway, she looked down at Dad’s name on a piece of mail beside the counter.
For a second I thought she’d say something to Colin.
Instead, she said, “I suppose you’re happy now.”
I held the album against my chest.
“You don’t speak for me.”
Colin closed the door.
The bleach stain
The following Sunday, I knocked on the condo door with Mom beside me.
I had called first.
Colin opened it wearing Dad’s sweatshirt.
This time, I didn’t look at the hem until he caught me.
“Still his,” he said.
“Looks better on you. He wore it with those terrible shorts.”
“The ones with all the pockets?”
“He looked like a man smuggling camping equipment.”
Colin laughed. It came out badly at first, and then it came out properly.
Mom touched his arm.
“Can we come in?”
He stepped aside.
Ruth was on the sofa with the photographs. My box sat underneath the window because I’d asked Colin to keep it until I could look through it without treating every object like a final exam.
The condo was his. The boat was his. Every cent Dad had left him stayed his.
Zofia had no key. No lawyer had permission to speak for me. When she called later that week and started with “We need,” I’d made her stop and begin again with “I want.”
There was no cheque waiting for me on the counter.
There was a photograph.
Dad and Colin stood beside the boat. Dad had one hand on Colin’s shoulder and the other over his eyes because he’d insisted on facing the sun.
“Ruth found that one,” Colin said.
“Of course he stood there.”
“I told him.”
“Did he explain how cameras worked?”
“For some time.”
I sat on the floor beside my box.
Mom took the chair nearest Colin.
“I owe you something,” she said.
“You don’t.”
“I knew he was happier. He called me once about changing some old paperwork. He sounded lighter. I told him he was getting lazy without me.”
She wiped beneath one eye.
“He laughed. I should’ve asked.”
Colin sat beside her.
“He liked that you could still make him laugh.”
She nodded.
Ruth pushed the photograph toward me.
“Put that with yours.”
I slipped it into the album after the six pictures from my boat trip.
There was room. I’d spent a week behaving as if there might not be.
Colin brought Dad’s phone over.
“There’s something you asked about.”
He found the chicken voicemail.
My own younger voice filled the room, urgent and slightly offended that frozen food required advance planning.
Dad had saved the entire message, including the part where I said I might simply order pizza and lie to him.
Mom laughed into a tissue.
Then my voice on the phone said, “Love you. Call me, but not just to tell me you told me so.”
Colin stopped the recording.
“He played that when he missed you.”
I pressed my hands against my eyes.
I couldn’t have the missed Christmas back. I couldn’t call Dad and ask him to start again. But Colin was sitting beside me, and I could stop making him wait for permission to belong in a room that was already his.
“Will you tell me about Arizona?”
“The golf?”
“After the golf.”
He leaned back against the sofa.
“Your father got us lost looking for a restaurant.”
“On purpose?”
“He claimed not.”
Ruth said, “He always claimed not.”
Colin laughed again.
I stayed until Mom needed to leave. At the door, I picked up my box, then put it down to hug him.
He held on.
The sweatshirt was soft against my cheek. That stupid bleach stain brushed my wrist.
“Next Sunday?” he said.
“Yes.”
He reached for the box.
“I can carry it down.”
“Keep the scarf here. You might need a spare neck.”
He took it out and laid it over Dad’s chair.
Then he opened the door, and Mom put her arm through mine.
If this one stayed with you, give someone you love a chance to answer for themselves.
Family keepsakes and old wounds can make the smallest moments feel enormous – see the hospital bag my mother pulled from my wife’s hand and the lunch my father placed beside the principal’s plate. For a very different kind of awkward family story, there’s also the chair my boss left outside his office.
