10,000 Miles with My Dead Father's Ashes

by Devin Galaudet

  I fell in love with books when I could admit to myself that my parents were not starring in Father Knows Best and I had to discover the answers for myself. I learned from the instructions in books and didn’t have to wait for my parents to come around. In fairness, I should’ve been grateful for what I received from them, but I was too entitled, sitting in a five-hundred-year-old parlor slurping tea from a fragile china cup in Spain, to see beyond my own selfishness. All the driving from appointment to appointment with Dad, alone with my thoughts, was getting to me.

  I had been driving for a good hour and a half. The two-lane road to Grazelima snaked along a narrow path with sheer drops on both sides beyond the road’s miniscule shoulder.

  I have never been a fan of heights, and the combination of a windy mountain road, a lack of guardrails, and not being sure where I was headed made me uneasy. It was morning, and a couple of cars had crept up behind me. I drove slowly. There was no place to pull over to let them pass.

  They honked. I perspired.

  After several miles of my not pulling over, which eventually became an act of spite from all the honking, they both eventually swerved around, leaving me alone for what would be the last twenty minutes of the trip.

  I thought about what a crappy father I had inherited—a father who now sat beside me in the front seat in a black plastic container. I slowed to a crawl along the empty road and looked at Dad’s remains. I said, “What a fucking jerk you are. Why am I here? Why didn’t you get your new and better family to do this? Because they couldn’t, that’s why!” I waited, expecting some reply to diffuse my anger. Nothing came. No gentle breeze from a distant great beyond, only the sounds of the car’s tires crunching along the gravelly road as I half expected to slide off of the mountain and to my doom.

  “No really,” I continued. “Where the fuck were you for the last fifteen years? And why the fuck did you not call?” The questions had been asked before, but it was the tone in my voice that was new. I slammed my hand down on the steering wheel until it hurt my wrist. I didn’t even know why I was so angry. Dad and our estrangement was old news. For the moment, I thought it was the honking. Then I stopped the car completely on that empty road, my foot tight against the brake, and breathed in and pushed myself into the cloth of my driver’s seat. I thought, This should be easy. Dad is gone and there is no one to be angry with—except for maybe me.

  Maybe it was my fault for not trying harder to keep my relationship with him alive. Maybe all of my disappointment about him was not so cleverly hidden. He probably picked up on my feelings. Maybe I thought only about myself. Maybe life had overwhelmed him to the point that it became too painful to be with those who loved him the most. I expected him to have all the answers, but he didn’t. Maybe it was my fault for not having more compassion for a man who handled problems by running away from them, for not knowing any better, because no one leaned over the open hood of a car with him and told him what to do. It was my fault for trying to be just like him.

  If I still smoked, I would have lit up. If I still drank, I would have polished off every bottle I could get my hands on, including floor wax and a jar of maraschino cherries. It could have been poignant, perhaps even appropriate.

  Fortunately, I had learned a couple of Dad’s lessons well. I learned to give up. Or to give in. Or to surrender. I wanted everything to be easy. I wanted things to be simple. I wanted a simple relationship with my father.

  My stepfather would have been much better at being a father. Ray came after Mom’s fourth husband, Jim, died of a massive heart attack on her front lawn after injecting an eight-ball. She met Ray while still in mourning over Jim, when she had been volunteering at the Veteran’s Administration teaching Vietnam vets how to play the guitar.

  Ray is a straightforward guy who says, “I love you,” and does not keep secrets. I am not sure he would be able to keep them, even if there were something he hid. Ray has a full head of silver hair and would often be described as fit. He had poor-quality tattoos with words like “Mom” and “Keep on Truckin’” on his forearms. Ray had a kindness to him. He also loved my mother and accepted her rashness without wavering or reservation. In many ways, he was much too good for Mom.

  I told her so when they started dating.

  He was a Vietnam vet who could help pull weeds from a tired garden or be equally valuable down a dark alley. Ray was likely the first man that would treat Mom well, a concept I think Mom was not ready to embrace.

  Ray would have been an easy father to have, someone who had less that needed figuring out. Mom finally had a good guy who loved her, after the wreckage of my father’s past, and Ray would always treat her well. I had a good stepfather, too.

  I took my foot off the brake and rolled into Grazelima along the gravely road, and it was no longer anyone’s fault, but nothing was forgiven. Not then.

  ✴✴✴

  After a few months alone at Nothing’s New and Dad officially living in Vegas, things began to get back to normal. I had adjusted to a new routine at the store. I was now buying, selling, delivering, refinishing, and appraising. However, I was not much of an entrepreneur. The inventory got low. Pockets where tables and chairs fit were now empty. What had been stacks of furniture three levels high was now only one. There were fewer glasses and bud vases. I had run out of African art after I refused to buy nine breakfronts that the African prince dumped in front of my store one morning. I had not shaved or taken a bath in a few days. My jeans smelled like beer and smoke. A couple of yellow Percocet rested in my pocket for any emergency, as well as a six-pack of beer in the tiny refrigerator by my feet. I sold stories well, but the risk of buying to make a profit intimidated me, so I avoided it. I learned everything I could about furniture, paintings, and collectibles. What I didn’t know, I made up—it was now a second-generation tradition.

  Before Dad moved, we had met up after a morning of walking the sprawling Rosebowl Swap Meet. When we sat in the truck, Dad reached in a bag and pulled out a framed pencil drawing of a clown holding the strings to a bouquet of colored balloons. The detailed drawing impressed me. Dad said, “It was done by a blind guy.” I held the drawing closer to my face for inspection. Impossible, I thought. Dad laughed hard. “You dummy. Look at the thing.” He took it from my hand. “It looks like a scientist made it with a ruler and protractor.” Dad laughed again.

  By the time Dad left, the story developed legs and each of us added new components to the blind painter story until he tried it out for real. He stood by the store’s front window, wiped oil off of his hands, and pointed at the painting a young woman asked about. The painting was a portrait of a Viking captain and no one in particular. A painting that made me wonder why it was ever painted in the first place. I think it came with the store and was a total dud. Dad began, “The painter was a promising art student and noted for his use of highlights before he lost his sight in the war. It was really a shame.” Over time, the “war” changed to suit the style and era of the painting. “After he lost his sight, he realized it was never the finished work but the process that inspired him. It was the feel of the brush in his hands against the canvas, the bitter smell of the oils, the stroke of his hand riding across the canvas. The actions inspired his imagination, inspired hope.” Dad pulled over a stepladder and carefully pulled down the painting and held it like it was a priceless work of art, or nitroglycerin. Dad continued, “He realized he could still paint, draw, etch.” The young woman leaned in for inspection. “But he wanted a goal. So he sought the help of art students, who outlined a little house on a hill. Or a tree next to a brook. Or the captain of the battalion, who treated him like a son.

  “The students devised a system to set up a color palette. He learned to mix the colors by the weight of the paint on his brush. They stood next to him as he painted and guided him through a scene. And his love for the process of art eventually changed the world.”

  The young woman looked up
at Dad, and as if on cue she asked, “Really, what do you mean?”

  Dad ignored her question. “Scores of canvases, from artists all over the region, outlines of simple scenes arrived at his door. He painted night and day. He became so prolific they eventually trained a dog to help him paint when students were not available.” Dad paused for drama. “Anytime he painted outside the lines, the dog would bark, which became the inspiration for the first seeing-eye dog.”

  While the woman stared at the painting with appreciation, Dad turned toward me and winked. After a few minutes of negotiation, she walked out of the store with a painting under her arm and an unbelievable story in her head. The game was so tasty, the story so touching, I almost believed it.

  It was the perfect ruse for bad art and tripled the price of every crummy painting in the store. Thank god Wikipedia was still off in the future.

  ✴✴✴

  Dad called me at the store in the morning. It was before the age of caller ID and he enjoyed a newfound anonymity without my mother. I did not have his phone number, even though I asked him for it, but he called often enough that I did not worry about losing contact.

  When the phone rang, I was sitting in the store at an old green desk chair that swiveled and was eating Oreos. The small table in front of me, which I used as a desk, was covered in unpaid bills and handwritten receipts, with a portable black-and-white television/radio that played daytime soap operas or jazz most days. I put down the bag of Oreos next to a large, billowing ashtray that smelled of ash and metal and sat on top of the bills.

  “It’s your father,” Dad said. He had a way of announcing himself so his voice sounded like something that would grate cheese. I had grown accustomed to its sound. Since he had been gone, Dad and I had been getting along well enough, but I felt guilty for thinking poorly of him.

  As I listened to his voice, I looked around the recently remodeled store. I had spent eight hundred dollars on the changes. It had brand-new carpet and a fresh coat of paint and it looked clean, but I began missing the morning flea markets and started sleeping in.

  “What’s up,” I said. I picked up a glass that sat near my desk and began to polish it with a rag I pulled from my back pocket. The rag was a plant. I used it to get me out of the chair and show customers a busy worker bee. Look at that industrious young man. I started to look more and more like that crumpled rag.

  Dad said, “Your old man has something to tell you. This thing isn’t that important, but it is very interesting. Not sure how it’s going to play out. You know, but it’s hard to say for sure. But it is probably happening. I find it interesting, you might not…”

  He yammered on in a vague way about some nondescript thing, prattling on between the heat in Vegas and something interesting. I knew that something was up, and I think he could have kept it up for another ten minutes if I had not interrupted.

  “Okay, fire away, I am all ears. What’s the mystery?”

  From the other end of the receiver, I could hear him smack his lips and then take a long drag from one of his Salems. I waited for something big, important, or at least interesting. The sound of tobacco crackled in the phone.

  Dad was a liar. If he had a secret, he wouldn’t say anything about it or he would just make up bullshit without apology. But this seemed completely different. He spoke slowly. He paused oddly between sentences that were careful and measured. He lacked enthusiasm. His timing was off. There was something wrong. I put down the glass that I was polishing and went for my own pack of cigarettes and nonchalantly lit one, even though there was no one in the store to see my cool. I tried to wait him out, to see if he would break form and say too much, but the anxiety-producing quiet had won out, and I folded.

  “Well!” I said.

  He laughed in an uncomfortable way. “Not this time. Not this phone call. Don’t worry. I’ll tell you soon. It needs to be in person. But it’s really interesting. Not good, not bad, just interesting.” It was more yammering. He sounded like my aunt Rose, who sang songs that never finished but repeated the same two or three lyrics in Russian.

  “Yes, interesting,” he said, as if he forgot I was on the other end of the phone. He sounded distant, if not confused.

  I said, “What the fuck kind of answer is that,” trying to squeeze the information out of him with aggression. I squeezed the coiled phone cord in my hand until my knuckles whitened, as two thoughts that came to mind and left my mouth.

  “Are you sick or something?” I asked. What I really meant to ask was, “Are you dying from lung cancer yet?” Something Dad seemed ripe for.

  “Are you fucking kidding me?” he said. “I’ll be kicking your ass when you’re a hundred, and don’t you forget that.” I nodded, even though he was not in the room.

  “Okay. So, are you getting married? You know, I would understand if you were. Did you meet someone?”

  “Are you fucking out of your mind? I have a house with a Jacuzzi in the bedroom and a red Maserati and I am living in Vegas, flush with cash. What are you, a fucking jerk? I just got rid of your mother.”

  He did have a Maserati, a red Chrysler Maserati convertible. I had visited him in Las Vegas a few times after he had divorced Mom. He had a ridiculous house in a private, gated community in Vegas. Beyond the Jacuzzi in the bedroom, he also had an indoor swimming pool, and his living room was all mirrors—it was revolting.

  However, his reasoning in that phone call made sense. Sadly, the news was not coming from a twenty-year-old friend about his bachelor lair, but from one of my parents. He was also in a relationship with Cathy, but I would not find this out for years.

  “So you’re dying right? I can handle it. Just tell me the truth.”

  “I did,” he said. “I have some interesting information and I can only tell you in person.”

  “So what else could it be?”

  “Calm down. What do you give a fuck about it anyway? But I will tell you this, it is very interesting.”

  And there it was. I had to wait and see him in person. As it was the middle of winter and I was the sole proprietor of a furniture store with no employees, I had to wait. I realized I was not breathing while I listened to Dad smoke. I tilted the receiver away from my mouth and let out a deliberate, quiet exhale. I did not want Dad to know none of this “interesting” business mattered too much, but it was all that I thought about for following months.

  The same conversation repeated itself once a week for the next six months. We would try to talk about other things until he would eventually say, “So this news I have but can’t tell you about is really getting interesting.” I would press my ear tighter to the phone, hoping the shorter distance and extra concentration would yield a clue. I only heard the deep drags on a cigarette on the other end and smelled my own stale saliva that coated the mouthpiece of the phone. While he denied it, I convinced myself he was dying but joked about being his best man in the wedding he wasn’t having. Inside, I waited for prickly news.

  ✴✴✴

  During the time Dad and I were communicating about that which was not to be communicated, I received a Federal Express envelope one morning with a single-paged letter giving me thirty days to vacate my store. It was signed by the Wooden Shoe Emporium, Ebba Andersson, the Swedish woman in the store next door; we shared a common wall and were friendly toward each other. She brought over cups of red Swedish glug, which was a hot mulled wine with spices, for the holidays. I helped her move boxes of clogs or sign for her UPS deliveries when she was not there. I read the page again and moved my lips as the words passed across my eyes. It was news to me that she had any right to evict me.

  My store was a monster chore for few dollars. I had been making more money playing poker and bookmaking on the side with the help of a local coke dealer, but it was my store. To this day, I find it odd that she didn’t just walk over, give me a sob story, and let me know I needed to move for one of four t
housand reasons I might have bought.

  I sat with the single page in my hand and read it again. I slumped back and my arms slid off the armrest. That fucking bitch, I thought. My mind raced across all the times we had sat and chatted with each other. We had spoken the day before. I picked up the phone to call Dad and put the phone down when I realized I did not have his number. I thought about locking the front door and leaving the furniture for someone else to throw away. Why did she need to be so distant and cold? I decided to confront her, indirectly. I paced around the store. I wanted to see where her head was at as I spilled some dark wood oil on a mahogany desk and wondered if I knew a junkie that would kill her. No one came to mind. I thought about a plan B, grabbed her letter, and marched next door.

  Ebba sat in her usual spot next to the cash register in her empty little store. On one small wall hung a rack displaying wooden-soled clogs with brightly colored vinyl tops that had a thin layer of dust on each. Did people wear these things? I thought. I often wondered how she made any money.

  I walked in with feigned panic. “Ebba, I just got this letter,” I said, and I flashed it in front of her. I didn’t wait for her to answer. “I think the bank wants us out, but I know we can fight this together. What do you say?”

  Ebba crossed her arms across her ample chest and crouched, a move which made her look small. She got red in the neck and stared blankly over my left shoulder. She refused eye contact, even when I purposefully shifted my weight to the left and into her field of sight.

  “It’s not us, just you. Umm, I am, umm, evicting you.” Her voice cracked at the end and when it did, I felt in a place that wanted to cry and punch her in the face at the same time, a helpless rage. I felt betrayed, but I was playing poker. I understood the rules of engagement, but I wasn’t smooth at it. I felt my face get hot and my throat clench.