Caela watched while he fished his phone out of his suit pocket, then the three of them huddled close to see the screen as he flipped through his photo reel, stopping on a recent shot of a wall with fresh graffiti on it.
Caela gasped. Bold black and silver paint formed the image of her dad’s motorcycle while huge royal-blue letters spelled outJONAHabove it.
“Grady …”
“You think he’d like it?” he asked. “I wasn’t sure about the motorcycle. Considering the … well, you know, how he …”
Caela shook her head as her eyes began to burn. “No. No, he’d love it.”
Her dad had cherished that motorcycle more than anything else he owned. It wasn’t the bike’s fault the truck driver had fallen asleep at the wheel and veered into the wrong lane that night.Grady’s art, especially considering her dad had been teaching him, felt to Caela like a more fitting tribute than this entire funeral.
She squinted, realizing that she recognized the gray bricks of the building Grady had tagged with this memorial. “Is that the art supply store?”
“Yeah. I got permission for this one. The owner thought customers would appreciate it. Said Jonah is gonna be missed.”
“Thank you, Grady.”
The three of them stayed like that, pressed close together despite their black clothes and the summer heat, until the door opened and Caela’s grandmother urged them all inside. “We’ll be starting soon,” she said.
The funeral home was packed. Everyone from their apartment building, from the art supply store where her dad worked, even the tellers from the bank he frequented and the cashiers from the local grocery showed up. And all of them wanted to tell Caela how sorry they were, how much they’d miss him.
Her dad would have hated it.
Caela hated it.
This wasn’t the celebration he’d wanted. Everyone was in fancy church clothes. Everyone was crying. The music was soft and melancholy and lacking the grungy guitar riffs he alwaystried to imitate on air guitar. And there was no whiskey in sight.
And then there was the casket.
She’d looked inside only once, at yesterday’s visitation, and it left her feeling sick. The man inside looked nothing like Jonah Conroy. With the makeup and the suit her grandparents chose for him, the body looked like a stranger wearing her dad’s face.
The only thing that had been done right was the art. Several of his paintings had been placed on the walls, each with a small handwritten note on an index card listing the date it was finished. Her grandparents had brought some of his childhood drawings, too, so the dates on the colorful pieces ranged from thirty years ago to last month.
Caela stopped in front of the most recent painting, a smiling portrait of a young girl. She let out a little sob, remembering how she’d watched him work on this piece.
She’d been sitting cross-legged on the living room floor, a geometry textbook open in her lap. She was meant to be studying for her upcoming final exams, but she hadn’t even looked down at the pages for at least ten minutes. She’d gotten distracted again watching him paint.
Ever since Caela could remember, she’d loved to just sit andobserve him while he worked. It was the most serious she ever saw him get, his mouth pressed into a thin line as he carefully placed each new color on the canvas. And that day he’d been working on something brand-new. That was the best part: getting to watch him slowly turn a blank canvas into a masterpiece of color.
Caela had reached for her phone. She’d tried to be quiet as she pulled up the camera app and started recording.
“Caela, are you filming me?”
She wasn’t quiet enough.
“No.”
“Liar.” Her dad had looked over his shoulder at her with a grin and winked at the camera. “Hey, if you post that online, maybe I’ll become the next Bob Ross.”
“Who’s Bob Ross?”
He’d looked at her with disgust and disappointment before he shook his head and sighed. “Kids these days.”
Caela sighed back. “Old men these days.”
“Who are you calling old?”
“You, obviously.”
