Testament

Death is grim. Death is sad. Death is promised. Death is the mystery that cannot be solved. Death comes and goes, just like the days, the months, the years.

Death should be sad. It should be devastating. But for Tess, it was a relief.

It wasn’t her death. She prayed that was still some years away.

No, her father was dead. He was gone. Forever. And even after years of estrangement, years of spite, years of resent, his absence struck her deeply. It wasn’t mourning of what had been, only what could have been. Her father could have been a great man. He could have been missed. He could have been at the very least, a father.

He left nothing behind but the old RV. He lived there in his last years, that’s what her brother told her. He had a dog named Sally, his only friend, his only family. She was black with grey in her face. Her brother had taken her that morning. She was the only creature who felt the loss of the man as he was.

Tess opened the door. It creaked loudly and the stairs groaned under her feat. Inside, the small space was cold and stale. It smelled like cigarettes and fur. His death might not sadden her, but his existence did. An old bitter man living in a shell with nothing but his smokes and anger.

The bed was unmade, the faded plaid sleeping bag unzipped and wrinkled across the bottom of the thin mattress. Her dad hadn’t been a small man and she wondered how he had slept there. The table was chipped and an ashtray, still full of butts, sat by the edge with soot dusted around it. The pack of smokes was open and a lighter stuck out beside the long sticks.

A heart attack they said. That wasn’t a surprise. Memories of the vein in his head pulsing and his reddened cheeks made Tess shiver. She was only surprised there was a heart left to stop.

The walls were yellowed from his years of habit and the floors were unswept for his sloth. There was a shelf of carefully painted car models. Unlike those dismantled anH decaying vehicles in the lot, they were fully assembled. One day, he’d finish that Corvette… he had been promising to restore the old skeleton since Tess was a teen. Since before she’d gone away.

The closet folded open with a squeak. A framed poster from a sci-fi show peeked out between slumping boxes and a single suitcase. She took out each, filled with unopened mail and fraying novels. For his lack of decency, Tess admired her father’s love of reading. It was all she’d ever inherited from him.

At last, she pulled out the old leather suitcase and its scuffed straps dangled unbuckled as the tarnished clasp barely held it shut. She remembered the bag. Her grandfather had passed it down to her father. She hauled it onto the low sofa beneath the sliding window. She popped it open, the interior torn and sagging.

She picked up the velvet box that rested atop the panoply. She recognized the faded black case and looked inside. He still hadn’t sold the century-old pocket watch. She snapped the box shut and set it aside. She stirred through the contents of the bag; past the papers, crumpled and bent, and the broken figurines that used to stand in their family home. Amid the wreckage of a lonely man’s life, she found a worn black notebook.

She sat at the table with the book, tied closed with the single suede strap and a key strung along it. There were papers folded to fit inside the small pages of the journal. She unwound the tie and let the covers rest flat on the table, setting the old key beside it. Her stomach churned as the smell of the ashtray rose at the flutter of pages.

Tess slipped free the first folded sheet. It was stiff and as she opened it, flakes of paint fell away. She was startled by the picture. A shape barely discernible to any but the artist. She had painted the brown dog when she was barely five. Her father had barely glanced at it but her mother put it on the fridge. She always thought it had ended up in the trash.

She folded up the paper and exhaled. Still, she wasn’t sad. She was angry. She was insulted. Years! He had years to tell her. Years he wasted away here in this husk. Years to do what little a father could ever do and tell her he loved her.

Another page turned as she sniffed. Snapshots of his lifetime and blank pages for those memories they never made. The family trips they never took. The milestones they never shared. The regrets that would never go away.

The final page was the only in the journal stained with ink. The rest were merely dividers for the loose leafs between them. Her father’s writing was slanted and narrow. She bent and read it slowly.

‘To my children who needed better. You will find what you deserve at Garland Bank, deposit box #21.3a. I’ll never make up what I owed but it’s all I have. Your father.’

-

Tess waited silently as Timothy read the last page of the journal. Her brother swore to her that he’d rather burn the RV down and be done with it. He’d taken the dog, he’d done his part. Years ago, he told his father he was done with him, but like most of his life, his father found a way back in.

“What do you think it is?” Tim asked as he closed the book and turned the key in his fingers.

“You think he had anything to give us?” Tess grumbled. “Why would he wait? Why…”

“I don’t know, Tess,” he sighed. “I don’t know. And I don’t expect anything but an empty box in that bank.”

The older sister turned and looked through the car window at the thick pillars of the bank. She shook her head and tapped her fingers on her lip.

“Well, let’s get this over with.” She sighed. “Let’s be done with him. At last.”

She got out first and Timothy dragged his feet behind her. Just like when they were children. Inside, they joined the line facing the tellers and neither spoke. There would be no funeral, no eulogies, only a box in the ground. They would be the only ones to remember him as much as they wanted to forget.

Tess stepped up to the counter and set the key down. “We’re here to… open box 21.3a.” She had repeated the number over and over as they waited.

“Alright. And a piece of I.D.?” The man behind the window asked. Tess looked to Timothy.

“It’s, um, not ours,” she said as she reached for her wallet. She wiggled out her license and slid it under the glass. “It’s… our father’s.”

“Okay, just a second here.” The man typed and his eyes flicked across the screen. “Well, it’s in your name.”

Another look between the siblings. The teller took the key and handed Tess her license. He waved them to the end of the counter and waited for them. He led them down a hall and into a long room lined with lockers of varying sizes.

Timothy shifted on his feet and clutched the notebook in his hand. He was impatient. Tess was too. The banker turned the key and opened the locker. He slid out the metal box fit perfectly to the cubby’s dimensions and held it under one arm as he closed the door. He nodded them ahead to another room. It was a small office with a table and half a dozen chairs around it.

“When you’re done, I can return the box.” He dropped it on the table. “I’ll be just outside.”

“Thanks,” Timothy said as Tess stared at the hinged lid.

The door closed and the silence thickened between them. Timothy put the book down beside the box and rested his hand on the lid.

“Should I open it?” He asked.

“Just do it,” Tess breathed.

She watched as he lifted the metal and let it hang from the hinge. He reached inside and pulled out a large yellow envelope, then another. Each was labeled in that familiar slanted writing. Timothy handed her the one marked with her name and took his own. They sat and unwrapped their inheritance.

Tess dumped out the stack of bills, a thick elastic twisted around the bundle. She turned it over and held it up. She fluttered the end of the bills and set them down heavily on the table.

“Twenty thousand…” Timothy said in disbelief.

“Twenty thousand for what?” Tess hissed. She scoffed darkly and blinked away her tears. “Not a penny for tuition, not even a nickel when we were children for a piece of candy.”

She gasped and covered her mouth. She stared at the money and shook her head. She slapped her hand down and sobbed.

“We were children.” She said. “Tim--”

“I know,” he said softly. “I know.”

Tessa took the envelope and shoved the money inside. She folded it closed and pushed it across the table. “I don’t want it.”

Timothy watched her as he held his stack of bills. His thumb rubbed against the green ink and his gaze fell to the other envelope.

“What did you want from him?”

Tess was silent as she stood. She swallowed and searched for an answer. She wanted what she would never get. Her eyes were wet but still she wasn’t sad. She went to the door and looked back at her brother; the little boy cowering in his closet, her only friend.

“Nothing from him.” She said. “He never gave without wanting.”

She turned and pulled open the door. She passed the teller with a muttered courtesy and continued along the airy row of lockers. She swept through the lobby and out into the frigid winter sun.

Death was the end. Death was the beginning. Death was freedom.