“Hey, buddy,” Mark’s father yelled from the foot of the stairs. “Can you come and help me out in the garage?”
Mark had been sitting in his room, highlighting passages of Shakespeare for English, but nothing had found purchase in his mind. It was like the words entered his eyes, hit his brain, and slipped off as though they hit Teflon. He hated Shakespeare and, even with the translations on the opposite page, felt there was no reason that ‘forsooth’ needed to be in his personal vocabulary.
This had been going on for the better part of an hour now, and he was certain that staring for another hour wouldn’t help any.
Maybe going out to the garage would help clear his mind a little.
“Down in a minute!” Mark yelled.
He threw on his beat-up sneakers and headed for the door. It was then it struck him that his father probably wanted to clean out his mom’s old stuff. A cold spike dug into his stomach as he froze, one hand on the doorknob. He heard his heartbeat in his ears. There was a slice of pain in his jaw as his entire body clenched hard.
His mother had been gone for a month now.
He felt saliva pooling at the bottom of his mouth and swallowed it down.
I’m going to throw up, he thought.
He hadn’t moved. A full minute flew by and the doorknob felt slick from the sweat of his palms.
Mark’s father called up again. He said, “I’ll meet you out there.”
Mark heard the screen door slap against its frame. Heat came back to his face. His grip on the doorknob relaxed.
Stop being a child.
He sighed with an audible tremble as he headed out to the garage. The ice cube that was his stomach hadn’t melted though; he knew it wouldn’t until this was over.
For a moment, he considered going back to his desk and trying to puzzle out Shakespeare. That seemed like a better alternative than what awaited him in the garage.
~*~
Like many other families, the Engleson’s garage had become over the years a repository for an infinite amount of useless crap: layers upon layers of family history put into a vague organization of where it fit when it was brought there.
One corner featured an entire wall of Tupperware bins with labels like ‘Christmas’ and ‘Class Projects’. A set of shelves housed gardening equipment, car supplies, an assortment of screws and bolts, two or three toolboxes, a half dozen flashlights, and other items used once and forgotten.
The rest of the wall was just garbage. From beneath a half-dozen garbage bags filled with clothes, the handle of a lawnmower poked out, enclosed by a wall of telephone books, boxes—which could potentially contain anything—and another assortment of tools and gardening supplies.
When Mark stepped in, his father stood in front of the wall of detritus with his fists on his hips, clearly trying to organize in his mind before he went to work.
When he recognized that his father hadn’t heard him approach, Mark said, “Hey, Dad. I’m ready.”
His father turned and smiled. “Seems we’ve got our work cut out for us. This here is a lot of shit!” He laughed.
Mark smiled for his father, but his eyes were frozen on the Tupperware. He knew what was in it and that same sense of foreboding filled him.
He didn’t know if his father knew. He wasn’t even sure if his father was thinking about Mom, but Mark was. It was all he thought about. Every inch of their home was wall-to-wall Nancy. She was the one that put the pictures on the wall and repainted the bathroom. She had started organizing this garage two years ago.
Ice once again pumped through Mark’s body instead of blood. He had felt waves of despair and sadness crash over him before, but never in front of his father. He had to be strong for him. Mark only lost a mom where Dad lost a spouse, a wife, a friend. Mark had seen his Dad crying during the funeral, and it was then Mark chose not to let his dam of emotions explode.
He wouldn’t let it. He couldn’t.
He couldn’t….
But that carefully constructed dam, at that moment, was dripping water out of every seam. When Mark saw his father touch the first Tupperware container, the dam burst.
Mark drew in a sharp breath before he shouted, “Why don’t you care?”
His father turned in slow motion, wide-eyed and unblinking. “Excuse me?”
Mark raised a trembling hand to his wet cheeks. He was crying. How had he not known that? Was he that dead inside?
He shook his head. “She started this project, Dad. She piled those boxes and bought that shelf and left that garbage in the corner. She wanted to give stuff to Good Will and put the box on top so she could get it out. Did you knowthat?”
Mark stared at his father, who watched him blankly.
“Everything she did to make you happy,” Mark said, “and now you’re in here to throw out her work. Even though she didn’t finish it, she wanted to… for you. Now we’re going to throw it out. We’re going to throw out everything.”
Mark turned to run before his father could stop him. He heard his name yelled out miles in the distance as the screen door slammed behind him. He heard it again as his head crashed onto his pillow. He expected to hear it again as his father entered his bedroom, but he didn’t. The house had gone silent.
Mark cried like he had never let tears come before. Partially, he was lost in misery trying to comprehend what just happened, but another part was remembering the day his mother put that box on the top of the pile. She hadn’t known that Mark was watching, but he was…
She sat on the floor in the garage, cheeks flushed and strands of hair clinging to her face from sweat. It was a hot summer afternoon, and she spent it reorganizing the bookshelves. She asked Mark to help, but he was too distracted with his video game. So she did it on her own.
When Mark stepped onto the threshold of the garage and saw her, it took him a minute to understood why she crying. She was disheveled but alive and vibrant, smiling one of the brightest smiles he had ever seen into the hard plastic container.
Mark backed away slowly as to not disturb her. Whatever was in that box was too important for him to interrupt.
He had meant to ask her, but had forgotten. Now he couldn’t. He wanted to know what was in there and brought her so much joy. He would have known if he helped her that day. He would have known if he had asked.
Now she was gone and he had lost that opportunity and probably a thousand more he hadn’t thought of yet.
There was a knock on his bedroom door and his father’s voice, soft and congenial. “Mark? We need to talk, buddy.”
Without responding, he felt the air shift as his father entered the room and heard a muted thump of something being placed on the ground.
Mark turned to see his father looking at him with sad eyes. Next to him was the box.
“I’m sorry,” Mark said, and he was. “I don’t know why I said all that stupid stuff. I just–”
His father raised a hand to stop him. “You don’t need to apologize. I mean, thank you. I appreciate that you realize you were out of line, but not as out of line as you think. You and I haven’t really talked much since your mom died. I’m really the one to blame for that. You deserve better. You are…”
His father stopped. His upper lip trembled as he stopped his own tumult of emotion.
“You’re the most fantastic result of what your mom and I have accomplished. You deserve more attention than anything else I’ve thrown myself into. So, I should say I’m sorry to you.”
Mark sniffled and nodded. “It’s okay.”
“So, somewhere in your tirade down there, you mentioned a box. I went and looked and it’s obviously this one. I thought maybe you and I should check it out together. Care to tell me what I’m going to find inside?”
Mark told him about the day he saw his mom with it. His father nodded and looked at the box with an eye of curiosity.
At the end of the story, his father sighed and looked up to the ceiling. “Nancy, is this where you put it? Really?”
His father peeled the lid off to reveal two shoeboxes and a faux-leather book imprinted with the words ‘When Two Become One’. Mark had seen it on the bookshelf before, but had never taken the time to look at it. He knew that it was his parent’s wedding photo album.
His father lifted the album out of the box, saying, “I’ve been looking for this thing since, well… since.”
He opened the binding to a picture of two twenty-somethings laughing in front of a gazebo. It wasn’t the usual wedding picture fare where the bride and groom were looking towards the future like an oil painting. This was Mark’s parents laughing like he had seen them do so many times. Sometimes they let him in on the joke, and sometimes it was just something personal between them. This was his parents encapsulated into one photo.
They went through the book and his father began telling Mark about their wedding day. Not just about Nancy, although during almost every one of the stories his father noted how she looked or what she chimed in with or even just where she was while it was happening. Mark heard more about their wedding and honeymoon than he ever had before, and his father even insinuated that he was conceived on a beach in Puerto Rico.
When the book was finished, Mark asked what was in the shoebox.
His father said, “Not the foggiest idea. But, if Nancy put it in with the album, it must be something she thought was just as important.”
Inside the shoebox were more photos, but every one of them featured Mark. It started with ultrasounds and went all the way up to last year, when he had received a ribbon for second place at his school’s science fair.
This time his father asked questions about some of the photos instead of telling stories. Where was Mark when he skinned his knee in this photo? What was the first place science project that beat his?
For hours, the two men sat on Mark’s floor and poured over memories and thoughts and stories that they had forgotten. In the end, they agreed that the box should remain in the house instead of out in the garage. And, in the future, they would try to talk more.
The pain hadn’t gone away—it would never disappear entirely—but at least now Mark knew he wasn’t dealing with it alone. Neither of them were.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR – James Hatton is a freelance writer and webcartoonist. You can find his long running minimalist comic about the gods, In His Likeness, at www.inhislikeness.com