Scott Wrobel [2]Last week we played out the deathbed scene and it wasn’t a life-changing experience, but with Dad dead my tool collection tripled. I have enough power drills to arm a framing crew, which I do in fact arm, since I run a framing crew. We’re the guys who put up the outlines of houses—braces, trusses, etc.—and then other crews come in for the interior and surface work.

Today’s my last day off work. I took the week off for arrangements—ordering the box, funeral logistics, church reception, nodding at lawyers. Today’s my last day to get shit done around the house before going back to work, so I open the kitchen cabinet next to the dishwasher and extract all the food storage containers and pile them on the counter. I open another drawer and pull out all of the lids and pile them next to containers of various sizes from small transparent cubes to large oblong orange ones with vacuum-sealable lids for foods like brownies and nachos. Some of the containers seal in moisture while others preserve crispness.

“Where are all the goddamn lids?” my wife always yells. “I can’t find a lid to match a container.” That’s why I’m taking care of this problem.

I match lids to containers, and of 37 lids and 43 containers, I find only twelve matches of containers to lids, which makes my armpits suddenly burn like a gas grill and itch like mad. Just before I’m about to crash my fist into the refrigerator, my son Danny screams and I hear falling objects pound his closet floor upstairs.

“Hey, Dad,” says my other son Alan, walking into the kitchen. “I’m going over to Kimmy’s to play XBox.”

“Who’s Kimmy?” I say.

“Jimmy,” he says.

“I swear to God you said Kimmy.”

 

Last Friday when I got to the hospital after work, I knew Dad was dying because he had scared little-child eyes, except they weren’t white and clear like kids’ eyes. They were yellowed, almost brown, because his kidney was shutting down and shit was filling his blood, and I said, “You want the baseball game on? Santana’s pitching tonight.”

Dad mumbled through the mask that cupped his mouth and nose and pushed in and pulled out air. I couldn’t find the right TV station. Even the ICU, where terminal people went to die, had the deluxe cable package. The biggest lesson I learned from the deathbed scene: people about to die still care about what’s on TV.

“Norty tree,” Dad said, voice limp like a wrist through the incoming and outgoing air. At his house on the lake, he got the games on channel 43. The nurse came in and said, “Lift the back of his head. I’ll take this thing off so you two can talk. You’re his son?”

“Norty tree,” Dad said again, this time closing his eyes because of the effort.

I reached behind his head and lifted. The back of his neck felt like fish skin hardened by sun. Dad was a roofing contractor who had half the sun’s energy stored in his neck flesh. His skin still released heat. The nurse pulled off the mask. I let his head fall back. He panted for air.

“Santana’s pitching tonight,” I said.

“Get ice cream,” he said. “I got chocolate and vanilla. Where’s the kids?”

“They have chores tonight,” I said, lying. Bringing them to a deathbed scene was just too much work. I’d have to pay attention to Dad and watch the kids at the same time, make sure they didn’t start screwing with sensitive medical equipment. Also, my wife promised to watch some neighborhood kids because the parents were going to a church function and I’d worked sixty hours through Friday and was lucky to get off by five so I could see Dad, who’d been in the hospital since Wednesday. Long story short, I was tired and couldn’t deal with the kids.

I sat on a little metal chair in the corner off the foot of Dad’s bed. He was way up high and I could just barely see his head angling down at me, his cheek flesh scrunched up as he tried to make out my shape, and I laughed at a quick thought about the Hallmark Hall of Fame ending where a sensitive son would hold his dad’s hand and whisper, “What’s it like, Dad?” And then pause. “Dying, I mean? What it’s like?” And the dad would look his son in the eyes and say, “It just feels right, son. No more pain.”

But instead I said, as I fiddled with the remote for the TV, “You can’t get sick on me now. I have to finish that tile work behind the stove.”

“I got the glue and grout over there,” Dad said. He pointed limply at a wall of white cabinets full of medical supplies. He thought he was at home.

I didn’t hold his hand the way my sisters did when they came into the room later, one standing on each side of the bed and squeezing his leathery mitts over the bedrails. If I held his hand, he’d know he was dead.

I figured out the remote control and got the game, the Twins against Tampa Bay. I wanted a more historic rival like the White Sox or the Tigers for Dad’s last game, but we got the fucking Devil Rays. Life is bullshit, and so is death. That’s also a thing I learned.

 

Now that things have slowed—we’re done with the paperwork—I can get to projects. Before I organized the food storage containers, I’d been on the toilet reading an article in Better Homes and Gardens on how to build a backyard Japanese garden. I always read BHG, which my wife subscribes to, when I’m taking a dump. Though my next project is to wrap our two-tiered deck around the side of the house and install a recessed hot tub, I’m vacillating on putting a meditation garden there instead.Danny is still screaming and sitting on the floor holding his head when I walk into his closet, which is stuffed with toys. At the far end are four shelves packed with bins of Hot Wheels tracks and Legos and the top shelf is usually packed with board games, but not now. They lie on the floor around Danny, parts loose. I want to rearrange his closet, but first I need to determine the number and sizes of storage bins needed to hold his loose toys, the ones without boxes beyond the board games, which since most are rectangular fit nicely on the top shelf, until now, when he climbs up and pulls the stack down, including a Battleship game, on his head. He’s holding his head. The blood on his fingers looks like water paint.

Many storage bins now have latches. For some reason, though, Danny has trouble with spatial reasoning and fine motor skills. He can’t work latches. Once he got stuck on the deck in the back and pounded the glass. Instead of opening the sliding glass door for him, I yelled, “Press the button down, Danny, and push to the left.”

“It’s too hard.”

“It is not,” I said. “Just try it. I’m not going to open it for you. It’s inappropriate for you to keep pounding on the glass. One day you’re either going to crack the glass or put your hand through it, and I don’t have time to take you to the hospital.”

“It’s too hard.”

 

Dad didn’t open up or get reflective on me. Instead, he kept saying, “Get the chisel and the scissors.” I looked at the nurse, but she shrugged and drew some blood from his fingertips. Then she asked him if he wanted more morphine.

“You want more morphine, Chester?”

He nodded yes and then no. “In the drawer over there,” Dad said. “The chisel and the scissors.”

“What chisel and scissors?” I said loudly like a dumb guy addressing a retarded kid.

“In the drawer,” he said, breathing hard. He shut his eyes and winced.

The nurse grabbed my elbow and pulled me outside the room. At the main desk, she showed me numbers on a piece of yellow paper on a clipboard. I nodded when she said, “Understand?” His blood was filling with poison. Maybe he figured he could fix his guts himself if he had the chisel and the scissors. He always fixed his own shit.

When I walked back in the room, some cousins stood by the bed. They wore sweaters like they’d just come from church. Dad’s eyes were closed and his hands were bouncing at the wrists, drawing circles in the air.

“Is he seizing?” I asked the nurse.

“He’s cranking a winch,” said my cousin Tony. “Uncle Chet’s dreaming he’s cranking a winch.” Tony was forty, only a couple years younger than me, and he said something like that. Jesus. I shook my head. Whatever makes a guy feel better, I guess.

I shook Tony’s hand. “Good to see you again, Tony.”

“Me too. I just wish the circumstances were different.”

Tony and his wife and two kids stood between me and Dad. “Is Uncle Chet going to wake up?” one of the kids said. Another said, “He’s got good color” even though his skin was piss-yellow. Those kids were ten years old and they walked around the room straightening things up and making comments like they’d done this before, like professional deathbed participants.

 

I apply a cold washcloth to the back of Danny’s head as he whimpers into the bathroom mirror. “Read a book and hold this on your head,” I say, and then work on the yard. I push the mower at northwest-to-southeast angles, mulch bag attached. Next I put on my leather gloves and pace the lawn for outlaw leaves, bending and squinting down, parting the stubbly grass blades with a forefinger. When I spot a diced leaf-fragment, I snag it like an eagle spearing a trout and deposit it in a garbage bag in my left hand. Next, I move toward the three pine trees that flank the side of the house on the corner, the side that faces me. My three pine trees are rooted in circular rock gardens, which I cleanse of leaf fragments, and then I strain leaves from the gutter. I sit on the curb, ass on shaved lawn and boots in the street, reaching down between my legs to haul up sopping leaf clumps before they clog the street drain. A guy can never be too careful. The last time I let the gutters go, I had to have the basement floor drain snaked. The utility room flooded like a trailer park.

 

Dad had two of everything in his garage—lawn mowers, weed eaters, power washers, paint guns, air compressors. He had smaller junk, too, like tools and boat-parts, life cushions, depth finders, fishing pole, and spread stuff like bolts, wire spools, trailer hitches, out on workbenches and rusted metal shelves that he spray-painted gray. He liked to see his stuff without having to dig through shit, everything in plain view: nuts and bolts, trailer hitch balls, electrical outlets, plumbing pipes.

“You need storage bins,” I told him a week before he died when we were in the garage getting bungee cords to tie down the wood-chipper in the trailer I’d brought over to help him clear some brush and chip garden mulch.

“I hate digging through bins,” he said. “I don’t have time for that shit.”

“A lot of storage bins are transparent,” I said, while scanning a tool-wall covered with metal saws, screwdrivers, pliers, rolls of electrical, masking and duct tape.

“I know it,” he said, “but I’d rather see what I need without all that shit in the way.”

 

I’ve been remodeling our split-level rambler where we sit up on a rise and look almost straight out over into a cul-de-sac that’s called by all the folks who live there “The Sac.” Most of my containers are polyethylene. Right now I’m converting our basement into a playroom. I’m building a storage shelf system from one-by-twelve pine planks in order to accommodate the largest bins, one of which will house Danny’s Hot Wheels race track and another a Hot Wheels train set and a bin of Thomas the Tank Engine toys: cases of die-cast trains and track; wooden trains and track; a depot. He doesn’t play with these anymore so when we have time, my wife says she’ll set up an eBay account.

At the funeral home, I arranged for the funeral, and from the laminated three-ring binder that the funeral director handed me, I chose a pine casket stained almost red. This casket would then fit into a large rectangular cement container. The pine still smelled wet and fresh like it was just cut. I don’t like thinking about the tomb, but that’s what it is. Call it what it is. Instead of the body going into the earth, it liquifies. I don’t know what happens after that.

 

Since we moved in here six years ago, just before Danny was born, I replaced the door locks, installed a new garage door opener, dishwasher, garbage disposal and under-sink water filter, painted the kitchen, living room, dining room, both bathrooms; wallpapered both kids’ rooms and decorated both with wild jungle themes, complete with a rainforest mural of monkeys and curly green snakes that fills three full walls airbrushed by my wife’s friend who has a B.A. in fine arts and works as a receptionist at Land O’Lakes; replaced the kitchen counter tops with marble, replaced the linoleum kitchen floor with hardwood, laid new carpet in the dining room and living room and upstairs hallway that connects the bedrooms; painted the house exterior a darker beige; finished drywalling the garage interior, dug up a twelve-by-ten section of the lawn for a garden, which I later tilled, dug down further, walled with landscaping logs and poured in fifty bags of white sand for a kid’s sandbox; next I built a fire pit in the yard, and I’m just now finishing the basement playroom with wall-to-wall storage shelves.

 

After I get done with the lawn, I powerwash the deck and manage to clean the top portion. Then I clean up and take Danny to Dairy Queen. On the way we stop at Menards for a particular hose adapter so I can fix the leak in my power washer, and on the way home, pick up a pre-cooked rotisserie chicken from Rainbow Foods and eat the bird on the deck and look at the clouds for a minute. Danny goes off to his room to play PS2. My wife is at her sister’s scrapbooking. The boxes with the detachable lids are the best even though more elaborate models now exist with attached lids, the advantage of which is that they do not get detached and lost. However, I like the option of completely removing the lid should I choose to.

Five hours before he died, Dad said, “I need my teeth.” His lips curled over his gums, flapping in and out with the pressure from the breathing machine. He’d called an ambulance the day before after stomach pain made him fall off his deck and break four ribs on a retaining wall that I just put in last summer. “I need them for the morning,” he said, “or I can’t eat the toast.”

 

Since Dad was Catholic, we had the nurse call in a priest. The one on-call was a short fat guy with a high-pitched voice like Doogie Howser M.D. He stood on the other side of the bed and said, “Hi, Chester, I’m Father Lyle.” He yelled like Dad had a hearing problem.

At 11:21 p.m., the doctor called the front desk and asked for me. He asked if I wanted any “extra measures.” We pulled the tubes and gave him more morphine and turned down the lights and listened to him breathe. Then I kissed his cold forehead and heard a sound deep in his lungs, a long sandpapery breath like the white noise from a radio between stations. It came from somewhere deeper than the lungs. I held hands with my sister and the priest, each of whom held hands with Dad. When we hit the Lord’s Prayer, I moved my lips. The last thing Dad said was, “I’m nervous,” and the nurse said, “I can take care of that, Chester,” shaking a transparent vial of morphine like a dealer.

I sit on the deck and drink coffee. I can’t total it all. The clouds look like clouds. If Dad were looking down on me, which he’s not, he wouldn’t like to see me crying. It’s a safety issue. Wear your protective goggles, never drink before work, go easy on the coffee, get plenty of sleep, keep your personal life out of the house you’re working on. Since I’ve got a couple hours alone, I’m going to put the new attachment on the pressure washer and finish cleaning the deck before the sun goes down.

Scott Wrobel has published or has forthcoming stories and essays in Identity Theory, Night Train, Pindeldyboz, Great River Review, and Minnesota Monthly, among other publications; he is also the recipient of a 2006-7 Loft Mentor Series Award. "Storage" comes from the soon-to-be-completed book, Cul De Sac: Stories about Suburban Guys. Visit www.scottwrobel.com [9] for more information on the mysteries of power-washing stain off of decks.