What Was Left Us

By Susan Segal

When our mother was alive, she used to say that hot weather brought out the beast in our father. She may have said best, not beast, but that’s not how we heard it. 

At any rate, we agreed that the day of our father’s funeral was the kind that would inflame his  indignation: sun-drenched and redolent of fresh-turned earth. He had keeled over on just such a day, trying to whack a gopher on his lawn. His next-door neighbor ran outside at the sound of our father screaming that he was going to off the little fucker—apparently our father had uttered a similar threat to the neighbor’s teenage son a few weeks before. The neighbor arrived in time to see the plank of wood our father wielded come down just shy of the gopher’s ear. The gopher emitted a terrible, high-pitched screech. That little bastard is laughing at me, our father said in a strangled voice. Then he sank to his knees. 

The neighbor waited a minute or two, thinking our father might be saying something to the gopher, but then the old man slumped over. The neighbor relayed the story to us at the funeral. I knew he was gone before I even checked his pulse, the neighbor said, patting each of our shoulders in turn. 

Our mother had expired five years earlier, dying exactly as she had lived—so meekly that it took our father a full day to realize she was not just taking a very long nap. He emailed us a week after she died, informing us that there would be no funeral. We couldn’t prove that she would have wanted one, so we didn’t argue. 

The truth is, we never argued with our father. 

The last sentence of his email said that if any of us wanted our mother’s wedding ring, we could damn well make the trip to come get it. We knew he knew we wouldn’t.

We threw dirt on our father’s coffin—the oldest sister, then the middle one, then the “baby,” thirty-three now; we threw hard.

Maybe twenty people at the gravesite. We had no idea who most of them were—our mother long gone, the extended family strewn across the continent. Co-workers, the eldest suggested, even though our father had been retired for years and spent most of that time complaining he’d been forgotten by every person in his life.

We, of course, did not forget him.

At the middle one’s house, spouses and children and a cousin who’d turned up from Delaware—the funeral tacked onto a business trip, because who would set out expressly to pay tribute to the old man, we agreed, laughing, the three of us downing chardonnay in the kitchen, our children weaving between our legs like frantic cats.

More food than we could eat in a month. Jews and Italians, we laughed, always with the food. Jews, of course, not supposed to be drinkers, but there’s always the exception, like our father, that proves the rule.

We didn’t reminisce, because to reminisce would be to remember when he wasn’t drinking, which was when he had the wherewithal to consider our seemingly endless transgressions, forge himself into a tower of fury, find our tenderest spots. We did not forget how the house echoed with his thundering baritone, how our mother pressed herself into dark corners.

Drunk, he would just fall asleep.

We compared notes on the last time we’d talked to him. The youngest had called him two days before he died. I missed him, she said, crying a little. We were stunned at the call and the tears; so was she. 

We clinked glasses. Here’s to…said the youngest one; her voice trailed off. Our children, said the eldest. Our orphanhood, said the middle one.

In the other room, one of our children shrieked. Our wine glasses pinged on the counter as we rushed to find him. He was crouched at the food table having a tug-of-war with his cousin over the last brownie. We knelt down. The youngest sister separated them. The middle sister tenderly wiped our boys’ faces with a napkin. The eldest halved the brownie and smiled at each child in turn. Then we stood up and exchanged looks, each of us still in the process of adjusting her expression from terror to amusement.

We went back to the wine.

Emergencies! the eldest toasted with a grimace. We clinked glasses and downed our wine, each of us marveling at the ordinariness of our daily crises. The youngest poured more wine and recounted a similar food tussle at home, which her husband had broken up, but not before getting a face full of spaghetti sauce. 

The middle one told about a flat tire and being late to pick her son up from school. The youngest recounted forgetting to secure the carrier and dumping the baby onto the living room rug, where he promptly broke out giggling.

This last did not surprise us. All of our homes are filled with fat, cushioned furniture, rugs, and thick carpets that absorb arguments and childish falls, which are always accidents. We never touch our children in anger. We tell them we love them so many times in a day that they have begun rolling their eyes and walking away. We are generous with our spouses, having regular and enthusiastic sex, forgiving their laughably mild transgressions.

The eldest said she was the executor of the will, which surprised us because we didn’t know our father had anything to execute. His last days were spent in a tiny, rented house, a hundred miles away from us in any direction, each of us picking a different safe distance. The eldest said she’d no idea what he’d left—besides, maybe, our mother’s wedding ring—but she would find out when she talked to the lawyer, by which time we’d be scattered again.

We ran out of things to say after that, but we stayed together in the kitchen for a long time, clinging to our wine goblets. Shadows, gray and fuzzy as fur, fell across the granite counters. All of the guests were long gone. After the chardonnay, we moved to a bottle of merlot.

Published December 8th, 2019