My father asked me to take him to a funeral after the dead man’s daughter pushed the arrangements back at us. “Put him wherever they put people nobody wants,” she said. I nearly refused the trip myself, until Dad handed me his tie beside the mirror where he’d taught me 35 years earlier.
Without a ride, he couldn’t get there, and the chair beside the grave would stay empty.
He’d already asked me to leave work early twice that month, and I’d started answering with my calendar open.
That part was mine.
At eighty-six, Dad still kept his shirts on hangers facing the same direction.
He used a wheelchair, but he rolled himself to the kitchen before I got there most mornings.
He wanted his coffee in a cup with a handle big enough for his fingers.
He also wanted me to stop checking whether he’d finished it.
“You’re getting a little aggressive with the beverage supervision, Karl,” he’d said the week before.
Then the call came.
I was putting groceries away when he covered the receiver and asked whether my suit still fit.
“For what?”
“A funeral.”
I said yes without checking the pants.
He took the receiver back and told Paulette we would be there.
We.
He hadn’t asked about my schedule that time.
The next afternoon, Susanna came to the house with an envelope tucked under her arm.
Dad introduced her by her first name and asked me to stay.
She sat across from him while I moved the grocery receipt out of her way.
There was a purple rubber band stuck to the envelope.
“I brought what the office sent,” she said.
Dad put on his glasses.
The packet had spaces for someone to choose a service and provide information about the deceased.
Susanna kept her purse on her lap.
“I’m not signing for any expense.”
“Paulette said there’s a basic arrangement available,” Dad said.
“Then use that.”
She pushed the packet toward me, though I hadn’t reached for it.
Dad asked whether she wanted to choose anything her father would wear.
“He wore whatever people gave him.”
Her mouth barely moved.
“Did he have something you’d recognize?” Dad said.
She looked at the clock instead of answering.
I turned the packet so the printing faced her again.
“There’s a space here for FAMILY.”
“You can leave it empty.”
Dad’s thumb stayed on the corner of the page.
Susanna called her brother and set the phone between us.
“Binh, tell them what we agreed.”
A man’s voice came through the speaker.
“We’re DONE with this.”
Dad leaned forward enough that I put my hand behind his chair.
“Nobody’s asking you to explain yourselves,” he said.
“Good,” Binh said. “Because you don’t know what you’re volunteering for.”
Susanna picked up the phone before Dad could answer.
She said the line about putting him wherever unwanted people went, then stood.
I opened the door.
She stopped beside me and lowered her voice, though Dad could still hear.
“He’s eighty-six. You should be helping him let things go.”
I couldn’t get an answer out before she stepped past me.
Afterward, Dad asked for the packet.
I handed it over.
“She shouldn’t have spoken to you like that.”
“She doesn’t owe me anything,” he said.
He smoothed the page she’d bent.
I wanted him to be angry so I could be angry without having to think any further.
Instead, he asked me to check the van reservation.
That was where I nearly failed him.
The accessible van I’d requested wasn’t available until after the service.
The office could move the appointment, but the transportation company couldn’t promise the later pickup either.
I called from my car outside work and kept looking at the time.
When I got home, Dad had his shirt laid across the bed.
I stood in the doorway with the phone still in my hand.
“We could send flowers.”
He looked at me.
“I mean, if getting you there is going to turn into this whole thing.”
He folded the shirt along its sleeves.
I kept talking.
“Paulette could read something from you. We could do it over the phone.”
He set the shirt down.
“Would that be easier?”
I said yes.
Too fast.
Dad reached for the wheel rim and turned toward the dresser.
I stayed in the doorway while he opened the drawer himself.
Later, Paulette returned my call and offered a different transportation number.
I asked whether anybody else was attending.
“Your father is the ONLY person who’s confirmed.”
“His daughter said there were arrangements.”
“There are arrangements for the burial,” she said.
I pressed the phone against my ear.
“She and her brother declined to claim him. He’d been staying wherever he could before the hospital.”
Paulette paused to answer someone away from the phone.
“Your father asked whether there would be chairs,” she said when she came back.
“He brings his own.”
“He asked for a chair for you.”
I wrote down the transportation number on the back of my hand.
Then I booked the van.
That evening, I went looking for my tie in the drawer where Dad kept things I’d left behind.
An envelope of photographs caught beneath the drawer’s runner.
The picture on top was from 1991.
I was ten, standing at the hallway mirror in a sweater I remembered pulling over my hands.
Dad stood behind me in his navy uniform, working the ends of my tie.
We were getting ready for the courthouse.
My adoption was being finalized that morning, and I’d decided a tie would keep anybody from changing their mind.
I’d made the knot so tight he had to loosen it before he could teach me.
He’d let me start again.
In the photograph, his head was bent over mine, and my hands were still on the fabric.
I sat on the bed with it.
Then I went downstairs and told him the van was booked.
“For both ways?” he said.
“For both ways.”
He asked me to put his gray tie over the chair by the mirror.
On the funeral morning, I arrived before he called.
He had his white shirt on and was working a button through its hole.
I waited.
“Don’t make that face,” he said. “I’m not defusing anything.”
He finished and rolled into the hall.
The house in Norfolk still had the same mirror, and I had to move the walker to kneel beneath it.
I draped the gray tie around his collar.
My first loop came out crooked.
“Long end,” he said.
“I remember.”
“Then stop arguing with it.”
I started again, keeping the fabric flat between my fingers.
He held his chin up while I brought the knot toward his collar.
“Paulette asked what to put beside our names,” I said.
Dad looked from my hands to my face.
“She said the form asks for NEXT OF KIN.”
He rested his hand on my sleeve.
“Before you answer that, there’s something you need to hear.”
I straightened the knot and slipped its narrow end through the keeper.
Dad turned toward the mirror.
“His name was Quentin,” he said. “And the reason I asked you to come goes back to before you were my son.”
The collar button
“Quentin drove me to the first meeting about adopting you,” Dad said. “I was going to cancel. He came anyway.”
I took my fingers off the knot.
“He sat outside for two hours. When I came out, he asked when we were going back.”
Dad pulled his collar clear of the fabric.
“That’s who we’re burying.”
I picked his jacket off the walker and held it open. He put one arm through, then leaned forward for the other.
“Why didn’t you tell me?”
“I wanted to ask you myself. Without giving you a bill from before you could count.”
The jacket lining bunched beneath his shoulder. I freed it.
I’d taken an unpaid day. The van would cost $310 for both trips, and I’d already put it on my card. Those numbers had occupied most of my thinking since the night before.
Now I was trying to put a stranger into the beginning of my life.
“Was he there at the courthouse?”
“No.”
“Did I meet him?”
“Once. You wouldn’t remember.”
I wanted to tell Dad I did. There were men from those years whose faces I could still produce, men with caps in their hands at our kitchen door. I couldn’t give any of them Quentin’s name.
Dad reached into his jacket pocket for a folded sheet.
“I wrote down what I want to say. You might have to read it if the wind gets at it.”
I put it in my inside pocket without opening it.
“You could’ve told Susanna.”
“She knows he drove me.”
“Then she knows what he did for us.”
Dad turned his chair until we faced each other.
“She knows him from somewhere else.”
Outside, a vehicle slowed near the house. I went to the window, but it kept going.
The van was due in twelve minutes.
I had enough time to get Dad down the ramp and check that his footrests wouldn’t scrape the doorway. I didn’t have enough time to make his answer fit the woman who’d sat at our table.
“Did they know you were adopting me?”
“Yes.”
“Both of them?”
Dad put his glasses into his shirt pocket.
“What did you say to her after she left?”
The passenger seat
The phone was in my coat. I left it there.
“Why?”
“She called me last night.”
I’d sent Susanna a message after booking the van. Before I showed Dad the photograph. Before I asked whether he needed his shoes brought downstairs.
I could still remember every word.
But Dad had put his hand against the wheel rim, ready to move, and I asked him to wait.
“What happened at that first meeting?”
He looked up at me.
“You need to know about the message too,” he said.
“I will. Tell me this first.”
He stayed beside the mirror.
Quentin had come to this house on a morning before I lived here. Dad had the appointment letter under the sugar bowl and hadn’t put his shoes on.
He was fifty-one. There were forms on the kitchen table asking about people who could help him raise a child. He’d filled in the parts about himself and stopped at the empty spaces.
Quentin had come to fix a cabinet hinge. That was how Dad told it: a screwdriver in his pocket, no interest in coffee until he’d checked the screw holes.
“Your father couldn’t leave a loose hinge alone either,” Dad said. “That’s one thing you can write down.”
He meant Quentin. For a second I thought he meant somebody else, somebody attached to my own paperwork.
Dad corrected himself.
“Her father. Susanna’s.”
Quentin had read the appointment letter while Dad hunted for longer screws.
Then he’d taken the sugar bowl off it.
“What time do you have to be there?”
Dad told him he wasn’t going.
“Did they cancel?”
“No.”
“Then put your shoes on.”
Dad hadn’t needed a ride. His car was in the driveway. Quentin drove because Dad had already found reasons not to use it.
“He parked too close to the curb,” Dad said. “I had to climb out sideways. I was annoyed enough to go inside.”
When Dad came back, Quentin had the passenger window down and the radio off.
He didn’t ask whether Dad had impressed anybody. He asked when the next meeting was, then wrote the date on the appointment letter.
There were more meetings. Checks. Calls. Things Dad had to change about his plans. Quentin didn’t do those for him.
But he drove him to the first one.
“Was he your best friend?”
“We fixed things together.”
“That’s not an answer.”
“It’s the one I’ve got.”
Dad rubbed a spot on the arm of his chair with his thumb.
I knew the kitchen he’d described. I could put the sugar bowl in its place and see the corner of the letter beneath it.
I could also put myself at that table years later, pretending not to need help with homework until Dad asked why my pencil had no point.
The appointment had happened before any of those evenings. Before I could ask him to stay in the hall until I fell asleep.
I wanted the man in the parked car to belong in the photograph with us.
Dad reached toward my coat.
“The phone, Karl.”
I took it out and opened the message.
He didn’t ask me to hand it over. He waited for me to read.
The message on my phone
I had written more than I remembered.
“Your father helped give me a family. Mine is going to his funeral whether yours does or not. Please don’t make Curtis carry your shame as well.”
Dad kept his eyes on my phone.
“I didn’t know about the ride then,” I said. “I meant he was your friend.”
“Read the last part again.”
I didn’t.
My thumb covered the bottom of the screen. There was no use doing that. Dad had heard it.
“She was cruel to you.”
“That doesn’t make that yours to send.”
I put the phone on the hallway table.
The photograph from 1991 lay beside the bowl where Dad kept his keys. I’d brought it downstairs after finding it and hadn’t put it away.
My tie in the picture had little squares on it. One end was too short even after Dad helped. He’d let me leave it that way.
“I can apologize,” I said.
“Then apologize.”
I picked up the phone and typed that I’d been upset. I deleted it. I typed that she’d upset Dad and deleted that too.
The message I sent was shorter.
“I shouldn’t have sent that. I’m sorry. I won’t contact you about attending again.”
Dad read it when I held it out.
He didn’t tell me it was good.
The van pulled up before Susanna answered. I carried the packet outside and put it on the seat next to mine while the driver brought down the ramp.
Dad handled his chair until the driver asked him to stop. I kept my hands in my pockets.
Once we were secured, I checked my phone.
Susanna had written, “You already contacted the office.”
I had.
The evening before, I’d emailed Paulette to ask whether there could be a few words at the grave. I’d offered to speak if Dad couldn’t manage it.
I had also written that I wanted Quentin’s children mentioned, so anyone reading the record would know he hadn’t died without family.
At the time, that had felt like correcting something.
I showed Dad the email.
He read it twice.
“Did Paulette agree?”
“She said we’d discuss it before we went out.”
“Then we will.”
My phone rang. Susanna’s name filled the screen.
I answered without putting it on speaker.
“I got your apology,” she said. “I’m going to the office to make sure those names aren’t used.”
“You don’t have to come.”
“Apparently I do.”
“I can tell Paulette.”
“You already told Paulette something.”
The van hit a seam in the road. The packet slid against my leg.
Susanna said she’d bring the information the office needed about Quentin’s date of birth. Then she said she wasn’t going beyond the office.
I told her we would meet her there.
After she ended the call, Dad asked what she’d said.
I repeated it.
“She can give the date over the phone,” he said.
“She wants to talk about the service.”
“No. She wants to check what you do.”
The driver asked whether the temperature was all right. Dad said yes. I couldn’t have said what it was.
I put my phone away.
At the office, Paulette came to the door before the driver lowered the ramp. She held a clipboard against her chest.
“Before we go anywhere,” she said, “we need to straighten out this email.”
The empty family line
Paulette took us into the room where the forms were kept.
A dish of peppermints sat on a filing cabinet. One had escaped its wrapper.
She put my email on the table beside the packet Susanna had brought to the house two days earlier.
“Your father can say a few words,” she said. “You can help him. But I won’t put words in anybody else’s mouth.”
“I didn’t ask you to.”
Paulette turned the paper toward me.
My own sentence was there: His children should at least be acknowledged, even if they aren’t willing to acknowledge him.
Dad reached for the page. I gave it to him.
“That’s enough of that,” he said.
Paulette took a pen from her clipboard.
“The burial is arranged. Nobody here needs to take over the arrangements to attend. The attendance information is separate.”
“What about next of kin?”
“That question was for finding the people we needed to contact. We’ve contacted them.”
She put her pen beside the blank family line.
“You don’t have to fill every space.”
Susanna came in carrying a sheet folded into quarters. She placed it in front of Paulette and stayed standing.
“His date of birth. The spelling’s right.”
Paulette checked it against the packet.
Susanna looked at Dad’s tie, then at me.
“Did he tell you I knew about the driving?”
“Yes.”
“He drove Curtis more than once. I know.”
Dad set my email down.
“I told him about the first meeting.”
“Did you tell him where Binh was?”
Dad’s hands stayed on the paper.
“No.”
“Do you know?”
“No.”
She pulled out the chair opposite mine.
“We were grown by then,” she said. “You can start with that. I’m fifty-seven now. Binh’s fifty-four. We weren’t children waiting at a window.”
I opened my mouth, but she kept going.
“Binh was nineteen. He’d arranged to meet our father that morning. He wanted him to come to the place he was renting. Help him look at a ceiling that was leaking.”
Dad took his glasses off.
“Quentin told me he had nowhere he needed to be.”
“Yes,” Susanna said. “That sounds right.”
She rested her purse on the floor this time.
“Binh waited until noon. Then he called me. Our father didn’t have a phone where he was staying, so we spent the afternoon trying people who might know where he’d gone.”
I looked at Dad.
He was looking at Susanna.
“I didn’t know that,” he said.
“I know you didn’t. He liked you. He liked helping you.”
Her hand lay flat on the birth information.
“We heard about the adoption afterward. How much driving he’d done. How hard it was for a man on his own. He told Binh he ought to be happy for somebody.”
The room had no sound from the street. Paulette’s pen made a mark when she set it down.
I tried to hold the two mornings apart. Dad getting into the passenger seat. Binh in a rented room with a leaking ceiling.
They had the same hours in them.
“That was one morning,” Susanna said. “I could spend the whole burial time giving you mornings. I’m not going to.”
She looked at my email.
“You can say he helped your father. You can say whatever you actually know.”
Dad moved the page away from her.
She put two fingers on its edge before he could fold it.
“Just don’t use us to make the good part bigger.”
The folded sheet
I took Dad’s words out of my jacket.
The paper had warmed against my shirt. He’d folded it into a narrow rectangle so it would fit his pocket without sticking out.
“May I read it?”
“That’s why I gave it to you.”
There were seven lines in his handwriting. He’d left space between them.
Quentin had driven him to an appointment. He’d come back for the next one. He’d helped Dad move a bed into the room that became mine.
Then there was a sentence about the screwdriver.
I read it twice before I understood why it was there.
“He put it in the drawer so I’d have one when the bed needed tightening,” I said.
Dad nodded.
“I still have it.”
“The one with the yellow handle?”
“Yes.”
I’d used that screwdriver the week before to tighten Dad’s kitchen chair. It lived beside the tape measure. I’d never asked where it came from.
There was no sentence about Quentin’s children.
No claim that he’d always been there for people. Nothing about a life full of kindness.
At the bottom Dad had written, “I wanted to thank him for those things while I could still get here.”
Susanna pulled her purse back onto her lap.
“That’s what you’re reading?”
“If Karl will help me.”
She looked away from the sheet.
I held it out, but she shook her head.
“You’ve read it.”
Paulette moved my email to one side and put the attendance sheet in front of us.
“Would you like me to keep a copy of what Curtis has written?”
Dad said no. He wanted to keep it.
She pointed to the two spaces for our names.
“Attendees. That’s all this needs to be.”
I wrote Curtis first, then Karl.
There was a smaller space beside each name for a relationship to Quentin. I stopped with the pen above Dad’s.
“Friend?” I said.
Dad nodded.
Beside mine, I wrote “Friend’s son.”
The letters ran into the edge of the space. I kept them there.
I’d been ready to put “family” on anything Paulette handed me. I’d brought a photograph of my own adoption in my coat pocket without deciding what I meant to do with it.
Now I left it in the pocket.
Dad held out his hand for the pen.
Under my writing, he added a small mark where I’d missed the apostrophe.
Even then.
Susanna pushed her chair back.
“Then I can go.”
Paulette said she had the information she needed.
I put Dad’s sheet beside the clipboard and took out my phone.
“Wait.”
Susanna’s hand stopped on the strap of her purse.
I opened the email I’d sent Paulette. There was still a reply beneath it saying we’d discuss the wording before the burial.
I pressed reply.
“I need to withdraw what I wrote.”
Paulette’s table
Susanna sat down again, but kept her purse in her lap.
“You don’t have to perform an apology for me.”
“I’m correcting it.”
“Then correct it.”
I wrote that the children’s names weren’t to be included in any words spoken on our behalf. I said my earlier message had been mine alone, and Curtis hadn’t seen or approved it.
Paulette read it on my screen before I sent it.
“That will do,” she said.
Susanna leaned forward.
“And don’t put us in some account afterward. No post about the children who wouldn’t come. No picture of an empty chair with our names under it.”
“I won’t.”
“You say that now. You sent that message to a stranger after sitting with me for twenty minutes.”
Dad started to speak.
She put her hand up.
“I know he’s your son, Curtis. I know you love him. I’m talking to him.”
Dad closed his mouth.
I’d wanted him to defend me when Susanna came through the door. There wasn’t much left on the table he could defend.
She took her phone out.
“Binh needs to hear that the office has what it needs.”
Paulette nodded, and Susanna called him.
He answered on the third ring.
“We’re at the office,” she said. “The names aren’t being read. The information’s here.”
“Who’s there?”
She told him.
“Put me on.”
Susanna set the phone beside my email.
Binh said my name, as if checking it.
“Yes.”
“Did you write that to my sister?”
“Yes.”
“Did you tell her I should be ashamed?”
“I included you.”
“All right. Then you can tell me what you know about me.”
I looked at the phone.
“Nothing.”
“No. You know I didn’t want to arrange his funeral. You know I didn’t want another bill. That’s what you know.”
Susanna pressed the edge of the table with her thumb.
Binh kept going.
“I’ve had people call about him before. Places he stayed. People he’d borrowed from. Every time, somebody explains that he’s my father. Like that’s the part I’ve forgotten.”
Paulette moved the packet away from the phone so it wouldn’t cover the speaker.
“He could be good company,” Binh said. “He could spend a whole Saturday helping somebody. I’m not saying Curtis made it up.”
Dad leaned toward the table.
“I know you’re not.”
“So go. Say what he did for you. But don’t make my sister answer for the rest.”
“I won’t,” Dad said.
Binh asked whether there was anything left to sign.
Paulette said no.
Susanna picked up the phone and told him she’d call from outside. The call ended.
Nobody reached for the packet.
I had thought bringing Dad would be the difficult part. Booking a vehicle, getting him dressed, arranging my hours. I had done those things and still managed to bring another problem through the office door.
Susanna stood.
At the door she turned back toward Dad.
“I shouldn’t have said to put him wherever.”
Dad waited.
“I still don’t want to be there.”
“All right.”
“And I don’t want you calling afterward to tell me it was nice.”
“I won’t.”
She left the birth information on the table. Paulette put it with the other papers.
Dad asked me for his sheet.
I folded it along the creases he’d made and handed it back.
Paulette said we could go to the grave when we were ready. She left us a minute to put our coats on.
Dad didn’t reach for his.
“Are you still coming?”
The question hurt more than anything Susanna had said.
“Yes.”
“You don’t have to read.”
“I know.”
“You don’t have to thank him.”
“I know.”
Dad looked down at his tie.
“I wanted you with me. That’s what I should’ve said on the phone.”
I moved his coat onto my lap.
“You asked for a chair.”
“Well. I thought that would help.”
I laughed once, through my nose. Dad took the coat from me and put one arm in.
The van driver was waiting to move us to the burial ground. Our return booking was fixed, but there was time for the service Paulette had arranged.
I checked the time and put my phone away without showing Dad.
Outside, the driver secured his chair. I climbed into the seat next to him and kept the packet on my knees.
The $310 receipt was folded around my card. I put both in my wallet.
My lost day’s pay would show up the following week. I didn’t tell Dad what either amount was.
At the grave, Paulette had placed one chair beside the space for his.
Dad rolled himself as far as the ground allowed. I helped over the last uneven stretch when he asked.
He took out his paper.
The wind lifted the bottom edge before he’d finished the first line. I held that corner while he read.
He got through the appointment and the bed. At the screwdriver, he stopped to clear his throat.
I kept my finger on the page.
Then he read the rest himself.
Paulette gave him a minute after he finished. Nobody added a speech about the people who weren’t there.
Dad folded the paper and put it inside his coat.
I sat in the chair he’d asked for.
The drawer beside the bed
A week later, Dad had the gray tie across his knees when I came by.
He was under the hallway mirror again. The knot had stayed in it since the funeral, loosened enough to slip over his head.
“Can you get this out?” he said.
I set the groceries down.
“You want it left tied?”
“No. It’ll crease.”
I worked the narrow end back through. He held the other end so it wouldn’t fall between the wheel and the chair.
The knot resisted where I’d pulled it tight beneath his collar.
“Long end,” Dad said.
“I’ve got it.”
“I’m available for consultations.”
The fabric came free.
Dad smoothed it on his knee. I put the groceries away while he rolled toward the bedroom.
My payslip was on my phone. I’d checked it in the car. The missing hours meant the new tires would have to wait until the next check.
The van receipt was still in my wallet.
When I came back, Dad had opened the drawer where the photographs lived.
“That picture’s still downstairs,” he said.
“I brought it up.”
I handed him the envelope. He slid the photograph inside but didn’t close the flap.
“Do you want it?”
“I want a copy.”
“You know how to do that with your phone.”
“I do.”
He held the photograph flat on his knees while I took one. The light from the window made a stripe across the mirror behind him, so I shifted until it was gone.
On the screen, his hands were at my collar again.
Dad put the envelope away.
The folded funeral sheet lay beside it. He tucked the gray tie into the drawer without covering the paper.
I brought his coffee in the cup with the handle he liked.
He took it, had a sip, and set it on the table.
I reached toward the drawer to close it for him, then stopped.
He pushed it shut.
“Are you staying a minute?”
My phone was still in my hand. I put it facedown beside the cup.
Dad moved his chair away from the table to make room.
I pulled up the other chair.
If this stayed with you, send it to someone you’d like to sit beside for a while.
For more stories about showing up for family when it matters most, read “I Had Thirty Minutes Before My Shift Started”, “I Had Already Set Three Places For Our Graduation Dinner”, and “I Had Three Years Away To Explain On Dad’s Driveway”.
