The Garage My Father Made Them Open

The last thing my father asked me to do, he asked from a hospital bed in Kokomo with an oxygen line taped to his cheek and my brother Roy standing at the foot of the mattress checking his phone. Dad waited until the room was full. That was the part nobody understood at the time. He could have told me quietly. He could have written it in a letter and slipped it to me the way he used to slip me a stick of Juicy Fruit when I was little and our mother was not looking. Instead he waited until the whole family had crowded into that little room, Roy and Sheila and their kids, my aunt Faye, our old neighbor Glenn from down the county road, and then he lifted one hand off the blanket and pointed it at me.

“When I’m gone,” he said, in the flat, careful voice the morphine had left him, “Marian opens the garage. Everybody there. Nobody opens it before her.”

Roy laughed a little, the way he laughed at everything he did not want to take seriously. “Dad, it’s a garage full of junk.”

My father did not laugh. He looked at Roy for a long moment, longer than was comfortable for anybody in that room, and he said, “Everybody there.” Then he closed his eyes and did not open them again for anything but sips of water, and eleven days later he was gone.

I am fifty-eight years old. I have spent most of those years in the same small town north of Kokomo, Indiana, close enough to the grain elevator that you can hear the dryers running in October, far enough out that our mailbox sits on a post my father set in concrete himself. I am telling you where I am from because it matters to what happened. In a town this size, what people believe about you is most of what you have. My father knew that better than anyone. He spent forty years building a name here as the man who could fix any engine that came through the elevator’s shop, and he spent his last two years, though I did not know it yet, making sure that name would land on the right child.

I want to tell this the way it actually happened, in order, because if I skip to the garage you will not understand why my knees almost went out from under me when the door came up.

Roy is three years older than me, and for as long as I can remember he was the one our family pointed to when they wanted to feel good about themselves. He had the easy kind of charm, the kind that gets a boy out of trouble and a grown man out of a speeding ticket. When we were children, Dad took Roy to the shop on Saturdays and let him hand over the wrenches, and Roy would come home and tell our mother he had rebuilt a carburetor when all he had done was watch. Nobody corrected him. Correcting Roy was more trouble than it was worth, and besides, he told it so well.