He remembered Da perched on the edge of the bench, the weight-for-height on the floor between his feet.
“Come ’ere, boy. Pick it up.”
So excited. At nine, Leith was so excited he didn’t recognize the teasing gleam in Da’s eyes as he braced his feet on either side of the weight and yanked. The ring didn’t budge. Leith stumbled.
Da chuckled, slapping his knee. A good-natured laugh, though Leith didn’t realize that at the time.
“Someday, boy. Someday, I can already tell, you’ll be a better man at this than I.”
Impossible, Leith had thought.
He still thought it.
Leith just stood there, looking at all the equipment. He could still feel the roughness of those bars in his palms, could still hear Da coaching him from the lawn chair when he’d gotten too weak to lift himself—though he often tried to lift anyway, covering up his disappointment over aging and illness with self-deprecating laughter.
“You ready for us?” Duncan called from where he’d taken to leaning against the landscaping truck.
“Not yet,” Leith said over his shoulder. “Just give me another moment.”
“Take your time.”
He’d already taken three years, but he only had his friends for today, and he needed to determine what would go and what he’d keep this week, before it came time to move away for good. Passing back through the living room, he headed down the creaking, claustrophobic hallway to the bedrooms, thinking how much longer the hall had seemed when he’d been a teenager.
He knew what Da had turned Leith’s old bedroom into after he’d moved out: a monument to their relationship. Documentation of pretty much every feat Leith had ever performed. That level of pride was still too much for now, so the door remained shut. Instead, Leith turned another doorknob and entered his father’s bedroom.
He didn’t remember making the bed the last time he’d been in here, but the blanket was pulled neat and tight over the mattress, the pillows still propped against the chipped headboard. If he’d sit down on the bed, he knew it would squeak something terrible, but that’s not why he’d come in here.
Why had he come exactly? What did he want from this room? The hat on the dresser and the cane still leaning by the door? Yes, definitely. His father to still be sleeping in here? Absolutely.
But instead Leith headed for the closet. He was drawn to it without explanation. As he cracked open the door, the smell of old wool and leather leaked out. Leith flicked on a flashlight and peered inside. All the sweaters and pants and coats he remembered, still in a neat line, waiting to be worn by a man who’d never come back.
Oh God. Oh God.
The stale air in the room—the whole house—caved in on him. Three years of loss that he’d buried somewhere outside under the new viburnum and roses slammed into him, knocking out his knees and collapsing his body to the floor. He sat there at the bottom of Da’s closet in a heap, gasping for breath and pounding a fist into the plaster. The loss was too great for tears. Crying simply wouldn’t be enough, although if Da were here, he would have clapped Leith on the back and told him to let it out, and to take his time doing it, because that’s what a real man did.
His eyes stung and burned, and his chest heaved with great effort, but the tears still wouldn’t come. Leith pressed his back to the closet wall and lifted his head to look at each article of Da’s clothing, recalling days and moments when the older MacDougall had worn them. Leith reached out and thumbed through them . . . until he got to one piece in particular, and stopped.
The MacDougall tartan, brought over from Scotland decades ago, the wool now thin and worn. It was a field of red crossed with thin white lines, thicker blue ones, and intermittent green and blue squares as accent.
And this was Da’s kilt, the one he used to throw in. The old man had been in his formal Highland dress for his memorial, but this kilt, the one he wore all the time with great love before it no longer fit him, still dangled from a hanger.
That’s when Leith cried, a slow leak of tears. He had no idea how long he sat there, a blurred tartan pattern dancing across his vision. Finally knuckling away the tears, he shoved to his feet and reached for the kilt. Unhooked it. This was why he’d come in here. Neatly draping the thing across his arm, he grabbed the hat and the cane and left.
Across the hall stood his old bedroom door, and he looked at it only for a moment before opening it and stepping inside. Jen had come in here. He could see a fresh set of footprints in the dust coating the carpet. She’d already known that Leith and his father were more brothers than father and son, and that Da had been Leith’s hero, but her seeing this, finally realizing all that Leith had shut away, she would know how bad he’d been hurting in order to do that.
He needed to stop ignoring the hurt.
There was a laundry basket still sitting at the bottom of his old, empty closet. Dragging it out, he took down all the photos of him and Da and placed them carefully in the bottom. He laid the cane and hat and kilt on top, then went to the living room and took the afghan of his mother’s. Then he carried it all out into the bright sunshine.
“Now?” Duncan asked.
Leith slid the basket onto the truck bed. “Leave the hutch in the living room, I still have to go through it. But everything else can go.”
Chris slapped a pair of work gloves into Leith’s hand. As he pulled them on, Duncan walked into the open garage and flipped on the old boom box Da had kept there to listen to baseball games, and that Leith had used when he worked out. How about that? The damn batteries still worked, as though Da had changed them yesterday. The blare of guitar-heavy rock filled the once silent house and yard. Duncan cracked some joke Leith couldn’t hear and Chris laughed, and the whole place was washed in a light atmosphere Leith hadn’t expected to feel here again.
Leith reached into his truck and pulled down the cooler. Snatching three beers from the pile of ice inside, he snapped off the caps and handed them to the other guys. They clinked bottle necks.
“Thanks,” he told them.
“To old man MacDougall,” said Duncan.
As the cold beer slid down his throat, Leith turned to look again at the house, its doors and windows thrown open, all saying good-bye.
To old man MacDougall indeed.
Eight hours later, the shitty furniture and worthless household goods mounded over the lip of the Dumpster. The garage was stacked with other things to be donated. The men lounged on lawn chairs in the gravel drive as the sun finally disappeared, the last of the beers in their hands.
Leith glanced up at Da’s kilt peeking out of the laundry basket. He realized that none of this would have happened without Jen, if she hadn’t come here, if she hadn’t unknowingly given him this final push.
“Hey, Duncan?” he asked.
“Yeah?”
“You, ah, need an announcer for Saturday?”
Duncan finished his beer with a smack of his lips and grinned, showing a missing tooth on one side. “Fuck yeah, man.”
Leith still wasn’t sure he could throw—out of practice and still some lingering ghosts—but he could still participate in the games. Still honor Da’s memory in that way and give one final good-bye to Gleann.
Leith whipped out his phone and dialed. She answered on the second ring. “Jen? I have some news I think you’re going to like.”
Chapter
19
Jen stood in the middle of heaven. The sun speared the last of its gold light through the trees on the western hills, a warm breeze blew across what used to be Hemmertex’s side lawn, and everywhere mingled smiling, laughing people, come to enjoy Gleann’s opening party before tomorrow’s Highland Games.