Two weeks later, our family gathered for the dedication of a memorial bench in Dad’s honor. Everyone stood near the courthouse lawn as I walked toward them, and my sister had the little brass plaque under a cloth because she had made it a whole production, and she pulled the cloth off, and then she stopped talking in the middle of a sentence.
None of us had ordered that plaque. Dad did.
Hoosier Monument on Wabash Avenue had it on file. He came in on a Tuesday in the spring of 2019, alone, and he paid four hundred and sixty dollars, and he filled out the order form in his own hand and told them to hold it until the family came asking. The man behind the counter had the original form in a folder and he brought it to the dedication because he thought somebody might want to see the handwriting.
My sister had called them in March and given them the wording she wanted, which was his name and his dates and a line about a life well lived. They told her there was already an order on file. She assumed it was a formality. She did not read it.
What is on that bench is his name, his dates, and then this:
He drove me to breakfast. Ask him about the furnace, he will tell you it was nothing, it was not nothing. Sit down here a minute, you have been going since five.
He wrote it in the third person on purpose, and he did not put my name on it, because he knew exactly what would happen if he did.
Twelve years I fixed that furnace. He called me at ten at night in February 2015 and I drove over in the ice and I never once told him it was a hard drive. My sister is right that I always said yes. That is the truth of it and I am not going to pretend it was some noble thing, I said yes because I could not stand the thought of him sitting in a cold house being polite about it.
What I did not know, until the man from the monument company handed me the form, is that Dad understood every bit of it. He was not oblivious and he was not taking. He was a proud man from a generation that could not say thank you to a son’s face without something going wrong in his throat, so he went downtown and paid a stranger four hundred and sixty dollars to say it for him, on a bench, after he was dead, where nobody could argue with him.
My sister sat down on it. That is where she cried, and I sat down next to her, and neither of us said anything for a good while.
She told me later that she had said what she said in the workshop because she had spent twelve years knowing what she was not doing and not knowing how to start. That is a hard thing for a person to admit standing in the wreckage of their own sentence.
We go to breakfast on Sundays now, her and me, at his place, and she reaches for the check and I let her have it about half the time.
The bench faces the courthouse. There is a maple over it, so it is cool in the afternoon, and people who never met my father sit down on it every day and rest their legs.