I looked around the building my parents had built from nothing and the people who'd worked for them for years and depended on WadeHouse for their living. And right then I made the call my father couldn't.
“Cancel today's appointments. Reschedule any others for next week. Two if possible. I'll handle the contracts.” My voice came out steadier than I felt.
I got Pops conscious enough to walk him out and get him home, and spent the rest of the night going through paperwork I had no business going through, learning what was urgent and what could wait.
That was the day I began to understand he wasn't coming back from this anytime soon. Not really.
But the real breaking point came the next day. Simone fell off her bike in the driveway. Scraped her knees up bad with blood streamingdown both shins, gravel embedded in the skin. She came hobbling into the house wailing, calling for Pops.
I found him in the living room. Staring at a photo of Mama in his hands.
“Pops. Simone's hurt.”
He looked at me with the blank expression that had become too familiar. Like he was looking through me instead of at me.
“Simone fell. She's bleeding. She needs you.”
He stood up slowly, moving toward the kitchen where I had set her in a chair as she continued to cry for him. But when he got there, he just stopped. Stood over her like he didn't know what came next.
“Daddy, it hurts.” Simone held out her bloody knees.
He knelt down beside her and I handed him the first aid kit. He took it with trembling hands, pulled out a Band-Aid and tried to stick it directly over the dirt and the blood.
“Pops,” I said, carefully. “You have to clean it first.”
He stared at me like I was speaking a foreign language.
“The wound,” I said. “You have to clean it before the Band-Aid.”
He looked back at Simone's knees. At the Band-Aid in his hand. And I saw the exact moment he gave up. Shoulders sagging, hands dropping. He stepped back from her.
“I don't —“ he started. “I can't. Julian… you —“
So I did.
I cleaned her scrapes. Pulled the gravel out with tweezers while she sniffled against my shoulder. Antibiotic ointment. Pops stood in the doorway watching for a minute, then turned and walked away.
That night I sat in my bedroom with the same yellow legal pad I'd used to practice his signature, and made a list. Bills. Appointments. School forms. WadeHouse contracts, vendors, payroll. Simone's well-visit. Tre's varsity travel. Zion's college applications. Pops’s medication he'd stopped taking. Copies of Mama’s death certificate;order ten, everybody wants an original. Submit the life insurance claim that Pops couldn’t bring himself touch. Mama’s headstone, still not ordered, and overdue now that the ground had settled on her plot. The list went on.
Somewhere in the time since she’d died, I had a birthday. Nobody had said anything, and I only realized it later when a form asked my age. I had to pause to do the math.
I had just turned twenty, and I was making a list of how to be the man ofthe house.
Five monthsand some change after Mama's funeral, I came home from class and the house was eerily quiet in a way it had not been since the day she died.
I called for Pops throughout the house. In the basement studio that he had destroyed the day after Mama died. Upstairs in their bedroom. The bedroom was wrong. The rug he slept on was still there, bed still made up. But the closet was half-empty. The dresser where Mama's perfumes and his cologne had sat side by side was wiped clean. Drawers were open and emptied. The photos of the two of them over the years gone from the wall and dressers.
I went back downstairs and that's when I saw the envelope on the table with his handwriting
My Precious Babies.
I sat down and opened it.
My Dear Children,
I have failed you, each of you, in ways I can never undo.
Your mother was the light of my life. When she went, I went with her. I should be strong enough to stay. I am not. Every day gets harder to bear. I am nothing but a shell.
