The room was dark except for the red and blue lights on the monitors next to Pa’s hospital bed. A gentle beep and the whir of machines hypnotized me and I don’t know how long I’d been there in the antiseptic shadows. I wasn’t sure I wanted to be in that room. I was though, because no matter how much I disdained him, I owed a small debt—to be there at the end. After all, he had brought me into this imperfect world where he was one of its most flawed inhabitants.

I didn’t need light to see him lying on his bed. If his thin lips were to part, there were two front teeth missing with the remaining ones askew and gray, like old tombstones at the church in town we never attended. Pallid skin, white as a gator belly, was covered by a blanket, and one eye drooped into a squint. As Pa would say in his reedy voice, “I ain’t one of those pretty boys.” I don’t know if that’s what made him so nasty—jealousy for those who started off life with a leg up due to their looks.

He stirred and gestured to me. “Come here,” he croaked.

I leaned in and the scent of death was close.

A thin finger, the nails yellowed and cracked, touched the pillow.

“What is it, Pa?”

“Do it.”

“What?”

“End it.” His eyelids lowered.

My hunch was he didn’t want to go out with a whimper. A police shootout or flaming car crash would have been more to his liking. As if he could shape the end of his life. Pa was dying, but it was his deep vanity making him suffer.

A long moment passed between us. I didn’t know if I was afraid to smother him with the pillow, or if I should get it over with, for both of our sakes. In a way, it brought me closer to him than I’d ever been. I sat back in my chair, breathing heavily, and Pa shook his head ever so slightly, disappointed again.

During the night, a nurse in green scrubs checked on him, and I startled in my chair. The jacket draped over me slid to the floor.

“I’m sorry about your father,” she said.

“Don’t be. He’s a mean old bastard.”

“Still,” she said, “he is your dad.”

“Can’t do much about that.” She had no idea of the highs and lows I’d suffered from Pa. The valleys were so deep they were hard to claw out of. How to make sense of it all? The father whose wife died suddenly and left him with an infant he should have never had and wasn’t fit to raise.

He wasn’t dead yet although it was imminent—the message from the hospital had said, “We don’t think he’ll make it ‘til the end of the week.” Did I want to say goodbye or all those other things children say to their parents on a deathbed? I wanted to say screw you. I couldn’t find it in me to do it though.

A rattle in his chest awakened me; his breathing was not strong enough to raise the blanket. It reminded me of the sputter of his beloved Ford Fairlane. There was always something amiss with that car. The engine had a weird ticking while it idled, fuses mysteriously burned out, and rain would leak in at one place, stop, and then drip at another.

“I’m gonna need more duct tape and bailing wire to keep this contraption together,” Pa
used to joke. “I think it’s cursed but it has spirit.”

To this day, I have no idea why he cherished the Fairlane. Maybe it was because it was a scrapper like he was, and just kept on going. He had cobbled his life together doing odd jobs: cook, mechanic, machinist. They always ended with him getting fired for mouthing off or quitting in one of his know-it-all rants. Pa could fix a lot of things. With me, he broke stuff beyond repair.

Pa shifted in bed, suddenly awake and lucid, talking as if we had been in mid-conversation and he’d perceived what I’d been thinking. “I’m willin’ ya the Fairlane,” he said. “It’s got sweet memories attached to it.”

Ah, the Fairlane! “You taught me to drive in that car and I took Billie Jo Parmenter to the prom in it. Even washed and waxed it for me.”

“Ya know, I heard that girl was known as BJ.” Pa put a finger in his mouth and made a sucking sound. “Did you get a BJ from her after springing for the prom?”

“Pa, what kind of question is that?” I could almost see his eyes beaming at me through the dark at the thought of a BJ. A perv to the very end. Half of Pa’s troubles came from letting his dick do the thinking.

“So, did ya?” Pa asked. His chest, struggling to rise from the bed, settled back.

Earlier in my life I might have risen to the bait. The best way to deal with Pa was to ignore the question. I changed the subject to the Fairlane and said, “Besides, I thought it was in the junkyard a long time ago.” He was right; the Fairlane did bring back good memories. It also conjured the bad ones.

On a full moon night, we were coming back from Shanesville where Pa had played a few games of pool. He’d parked me in the corner on a bar stool. Dinner was popcorn, pop, and one of those wieners spinning on a rack. Pa lost every game and was hopping mad. As we rounded a corner, the opossum was hunched on the road shoulder, its eyes emitting a glow in the headlights.

“Watch this,” Pa said. The car swerved and the opossum thumped against the tire. Pa looked in the mirror and saw the opossum behind the car. “Didn’t get him clean.”

In the side view mirror, I saw the opossum dragging its back legs along the shoulder, a strange guttural chattering emanated from it. I gulped hard and turned away while a wave of nausea swept over me.

“We gotta finish him off.” Pa reached across, opened the glove box, and pulled out a snub-nosed .38. “Here, you do it. You’re old enough.”

I was eight. As I looked back at the opossum, illuminated by the red brake light, I could see it turn its head toward me, as if it were pleading to get it over with. I shook my head, no, eyes searing with tears.

“Well, shit,” Pa said. He shoved the gun back in the glove box, jerked the car into reverse and backed over the opossum several times until we couldn’t hear any more bones crunch.

“Saved me a bullet, too,” Pa said. Glowering at me, he spit, “Pussy.”

I didn’t want to hear one more word about his Fairlane but Pa kept at it.

“Junkyard?” he crackled. “No fuckin’ way.”

The last thing I wanted to inherit was a bucket of rust.

“It’s in the Johnsons’ barn. I fixed it up, reupholstered the seats all by myself, and the engine purrs now.” His eyes gleamed like he was eyeballing Dottie, at the pool hall, in those itty-bitty shorts and taut t-shirt.

“I thought Gus Johnson hated you,” I said.

“He did. But his wife didn’t.” Pa winked at me. “After ol’ Gus passed on, I had access to that barn and a lot more. “Towed the Fairlane into the barn with Gus’s backhoe and she’s good to go now.”

The thought of the Fairlane had tuckered Pa out like it had run out of gas on a backroad. He lay rasping for a minute, a trace of saliva at the edge of his mouth, and slowly nodded off.

The pattern those last few days was him sleeping for hours until a memory jerked him awake as if he’d been kicked by a horse. He’d spout it out, coherent as hell, then fall back asleep, the memory dissipating like morning fog.

His last outburst illuminated a part of him I’d not seen before. “You run off and left me. Left your kin, left your people. Might as well skipped the country. What kind of son does that?”

“Pa, I didn’t run off—I went to college. You didn’t want me to go, remember?” I sat back in disbelief. It struck me: he was angry because he was lonely. How could he not feel deserted? The few relatives we had despised him. He stole, insulted, or screwed over everyone he’d ever met. Now he only had himself. And he didn’t like his own company.

I had no choice but to leave; like a crab, he would have clawed me back into the pot to cook with him. The man’s contradictions were all there: every good deed was undone by a dozen thoughtless, cruel ones.

On the rare occasions I’d called, he’d asked, “When you comin’ home?”

“Sometime,” I’d say. I had moved a whole state away to put distance between us. No bridge was long enough to bring me back. I’d managed to settle myself over the years with a bunch of sit-downs with high school and university counselors. It was Billie Jo who said, “You best get help or you’ll be shittin’ in the same pot as your Pa for the rest of your life.” If he had known I’d gone for counseling, Pa would have thrown a rod just like when he gunned the Fairlane on Route 31. “Crazy-ass shrinks will just mess you up,” he’d say. My wife—a very patient woman—had heard me gripe about Pa often enough she was afraid he’d wring the kindness out of me if I visited. Our son’s five now and every time he does something crazy, a little man sitting on my shoulder says to me: “Don’t say or do anything like Pa would.” I want my boy to walk a different road.

My silent vigil continued. I couldn’t remember if I’d been there for three or four days, sleeping in fits and starts, punctuated by cups of thin coffee, white bread ham sandwiches in the hospital café, and treks to the men’s room.

At one point I awakened and Pa was staring at me. He grasped at the pillow, his chosen instrument of death, but was too weak to pull it from behind his head. “Where your balls?” he asked. “Too scared to finish me off?

I shook my head, not with a yes or no but in simple amazement at how Pa could be such a prick. He was goading me to do it, testing, pressing to see what I was made of.

“Afraid the cops will find out you did it?”

“Maybe I want to see you suffer,” I said with more than a little satisfaction, even if I didn’t fully mean it. My words unsettled him.

“Mmm,” he murmured. “Maybe you do have some of me in you.”

“Bullshit!” I half-shouted. “I’d never smack my kid’s head for missing a Little League pop-up, and then send him to bed without dinner.” A dam had ruptured and the flood of memories spilled out. “And I’d never shove somebody’s face in the bait box just because worms grossed me out. Or lock me out on a winter night because I forgot to feed the cat.” Tears welled in the corner of my eyes. “I had to crawl into the Fairlane and froze my ass off.” Unknowingly, I had reached for a used paper coffee cup on Pa’s nightstand during my diatribe and crushed it in my hand. I let it drop to the linoleum.

“Yeah, you got your Ma’s goodness.” He turned his head to the window. “Maybe if she’d lived longer, more of that would have rubbed off on me.”

Ma died a few months after I was born, so the only memories I had of her were from the scattered photos Pa kept on a wooden hutch in the hall. She was the only person Pa never had a cross word for. Cora—that was her name—she must have been a saint and he lit a candle every year on her birthday. It was as close to a religious ceremony as we’d have. Why she married him was a great mystery to me. Could she have seen something in him nobody else saw, or made him a better man? I don’t know if he was bitter because he couldn’t save her, and took it out on me and everyone who crossed his path. Those were inscrutable questions I’d never be able to answer so I let them float away.

In a sleepless haze I stood, hovering over him, one hand on the pillow contemplating his wish. It’s no simple act to kill someone, let alone your Pa. There were a million good reasons to do it. How long did I stand there parsing them? Could I snuff the flicker of life out of him like that poor opossum?

A nurse on her rounds popped open the door, nodded at me, and checked his chart. I stood aside while she pressed a button and reset an instrument, interrupting the flow of my thoughts. Would I have done it if the nurse hadn’t entered? She had departed and the pillow was only a few feet away. I couldn’t bring myself to put my hand back on it.

I retreated to my chair and drifted off to sleep, vaguely aware of heavy rain beating down from the heavens. When I awakened, he was gone. The monitors stared at me, flatlined. My brain told me it was okay to cry. In my heart, I couldn’t.

After signing a packet of forms, I stumbled out of the hospital into a pewter dawn. Fat nightcrawlers lay on the concrete sidewalk outside the hospital, flushed out of the rain-soaked lawn. I stopped and watched their thick pink forms inching along. Pa would have stomped them or scooped them up for bait. In the end, both of us had hardened into walls that could not be breached. I carefully stepped over the worms and kept walking with plans to use the Johnson backhoe to bury Pa in the Fairlane.