“Plus I lined up a real estate agent to sell the house for me. And one of those storage units for all this junk we accumulated over the years. I could use some help moving it out there one of these days.”
So the day before we checked him into his new apartment, I loaded four cardboard boxes of his stuff, all that was left of his life, into the back of my pickup truck, and we drove them out to the edge of town to one of those storage unit places where you can rent a big metal box for fifty dollars a month, one with a concrete floor, and pack away all the things you can’t bear to let go of but will probably never hold or look at ever again. We also took a load of old furniture Gee had inherited from her mother, a piece called a secretary and a rolltop desk and a vanity with an hourglass-shaped mirror. Plus a set of four wooden chairs, three of which weren’t safe to sit on anymore.
“She must’ve made me promise at least a dozen times not to sell any of it after she was gone,” he said. “I think she thought I was going to make a fortune from it and run off with some showgirl.”
“In other words, I have to hold onto it forever?”
“Keep it till after I’m in the ground. She’ll know by then I couldn’t find any showgirls to take me on.” And then he grinned those still beautiful white teeth of his. “’Course, I’m not dead yet, so I’m still looking.”
I’m sure I must have told you that Pops had been a boxer and a career Marine, retired as an E-7 not long after Hamburger Hill, so one whole box of stuff was left over from those days, maybe thirty pounds of photos and awards, his dress blues with the gold-on-red chevrons on the sleeves, the old brown leather shoes he used to wear in the ring, Gee’s big old leather-bound Bible with the family tree she had sketched in on a blank flyleaf, a half-filled scrapbook with shots of him and his buddies, an empty Whitman’s Sampler box, the little one that only holds four pieces, and inside it a braid Gee made of her and Pops’ hair when they were both young, his jet-black then and hers chestnut brown.
He also had two gun bags, one holding the .30-06 he’d bought for me when I was twelve, and another for his own .30-30. Thing is, I came back from Iraq with absolutely no appetite for hunting again. I told him I’d still go out walking in the woods with him anytime he wanted, but I didn’t feel much like killing anything anymore. To my surprise Pops was fine with that. He said the only reason he’d kept it up was cause I seemed to like it.
He said, “I’m guessing you won’t be raising those little girls to be hunters either.”
“The third one might be a boy though.”
“Then hang onto them for a while. Pack them away with everything else. But boy or no boy, my feelings won’t be hurt if you’d rather get rid of them. Go ahead and sell them if you can get a good price.”
Another box held what Pops called his miscellaneous. He already had it packed and taped shut when I got to his place, and as I was sliding it onto the dolly to wheel it out to my pickup he told me, “This is the one you’ll want to open first when I’m gone. It’s got all the legal stuff in it. Birth certificates, my will, that cheap gold watch they gave me from the plant, plus a bag of wheatie pennies and old dimes and silver dollars.”
“Feels like a lot more than that in here,” I told him.
“There’s more,” he said. “It’s stuff I want you to have. I’ll keep the key to the storage unit on my keychain, so that’s the first thing you’ll want to grab.”
Ever since he’d made his plans to move to Brookside he’d been talking like he was at death’s door. Fact is he was still making up to twenty circuits around the high school track every morning, walking faster than most of the other people there could jog, but he’d had his annual checkup a few months earlier and the quack doctor watched him walk across the room and announced that Pops had Parkinson’s disease. I asked how that diagnosis had been reached and Pops said, “It was the way I had my elbows cocked. Classic sign, he said.”
I asked, “How the hell are you supposed to walk? With your hands shoved down in your pockets?”
Personally I think Pops was looking for a reason to give up. As likely as he was to still crack a joke, most of the starch went out of him when Gee started to fade. Three strokes in a little over four months, bam, bam, and then bang, the lid slammed shut. I think a big part of Pops got buried with her. I tried to get him to move in with Cindy and me and the girls but he wouldn’t do it. He said, “There’s not enough room in that place of yours for a man to fart comfortably. A man my age needs his own bathroom.”
He didn’t want to be a burden to anybody, that’s all. He’d rather die alone than let anybody have to take care of him. I didn’t understand that kind of reasoning at the time, but I understand it all too well now.
Anyway, the last box we carted off to the storage unit was filled with what he always referred to as “your mother’s stuff,” meaning the scrapbooks and photos she collected over the years, her few pieces of inexpensive jewelry and a shoebox full of the valentines and drawings and poems I made for her up until I was maybe eleven or twelve and started to believe only sissies do that kind of stuff, plus a couple of quilts she’d made and three afghans she knitted after her back injury left her more or less unable to walk on her own. Pops said I could take those quilts and afghans if I wanted them, put them to good use, he said, the way I did with his and Gee’s bedroom suite. He kept two afghans for himself, put the one Gee made on his bed at Brookside and the one from my mom on his recliner, and I think he was a little offended when I didn’t take the rest of them.
So as not to hurt his feelings I told him I’d get that box of blankets someday, maybe in the fall when the weather turned cold. Truth is, Cindy didn’t want them; she prefers the thick, fluffy comforters and fleece blankets from the department store, said those old quilts and afghans make her think of the Amish, or like something you’d find in an old folks’ home or a flea market. It was hard enough to get her to take the bedroom suite, but we were going to need Emma’s twin bed for the new baby in a year or so, and we were watching every penny.
I know this makes Cindy sound like a not very nice person, but in fact the opposite is true. We’d got our own place a few months earlier, a three-bedroom ranch in a little development a couple miles out of town, which we were able to buy thanks to the money Pops gave us for the down payment, and Cindy wanted it to be exactly that, our place, not like the HUD double-wide she grew up in, stuffed with hand-me-downs and pillows and knickknacks her mother bought at the Goodwill store.