My father was not a man who talked about his feelings. He was seventy-nine years old, a former electrician, a man of routines and silences and strong coffee and the evening news. He called me every Sunday at six o’clock and we talked about baseball and the weather and my daughter’s school and nothing that required either of us to go anywhere difficult.
When he was diagnosed with congestive heart failure, he called me on a Sunday at six o’clock and told me in the same tone he used to tell me about the weather forecast. I drove to his house the following morning and moved into his guest room and we began the business of what the doctors called his final chapter.
For eight months I cooked his meals and drove him to appointments and watched baseball games with him in the evenings. He was grateful in the way of men his age – indirectly, obliquely, through small gestures and the fact of my company. He did not say much about the past. He did not revisit old conversations or offer deathbed confessions.
I had accepted this. I thought I knew who my father was.
Then came a Tuesday morning in November, three days before he died. He asked me to bring him the metal box from the top shelf of his bedroom closet. He had the key on a chain around his neck that he had never once removed in the eight months I had been living with him.
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