Canton Writes 2016: Best in Show

The Canton Citizen, a sponsor of the annual Canton Writes contest, will once again publish the winning entries as space permits. The selection below, by Lucien Brodeur, was the winning entry in the adult short story category and was also named Best in Show for 2016.

Aftertext

By Lucien Brodeur

It was after football practice, and I was in the middle of an awkward texting exchange with soon-to-be-ex-girlfriend Jessica, when his text popped up on my phone.

“Need to talk.”

Unlike my buds, who sent an endless string of nonsense, when Dad texted me it was usually serious. Like I broke curfew or left the iron on or got a crappy grade.

I raced to our old yellow house on Pleasant Street and found him sitting on the living room sofa like a wounded wildcat.

“Sit down,” he said. I sat on the ottoman next to the sofa. The usual ruddiness had drained from his face leaving his skin bleached and papery.

He told me. The cancer was aggressive. Having steered clear of doctors for years, despite Mom’s nagging, the disease had remained unchecked and spread to the point of no return. Forty years of smoking and all. He had very little time. He would tell my brothers, Roger and Tony, who were away at college, next.

I could think of nothing to say.

My mind pulsed. Dad: gone. He had been a cop in town for two decades before retiring to take over his father’s shoe store. He taught me how to switch out a garbage disposal, install a ceiling fan, and build a deck from scratch, yet he often read Wordsworth to us, proclaiming there was nothing more beautiful than poetry.

Of course, he rode me about grades, doing my best at sports, and applying to BC even though I had no interest. Honestly, at times I did not like the man. But I couldn’t picture things without him.

It was my shift when he died at home in hospice. He watched through veiny eyes as I struggled to say something end-of-life appropriate.

“Don’t worry, Pete. Most of that stuff sounds cheesy anyways,” he said. He smiled weakly. “I’ll text you.” With that he took his last breath and his diseased body shut down.

He was buried on a grey November day in St. Joseph’s in West Roxbury. I looked up at the hovering clouds and felt nothing. My brothers’ eyes glistened with sadness but something froze in my head and no tears came out.

The next few nights I stayed up staring at my phone, rereading his obituary in the Canton Citizen and looking at his Facebook page. His last posting, from a few months back, was a throwback of him and Mom hiking Blue Hills, making goofy faces into the camera. It was a pre-selfie selfie. They looked so young.

One night, I awoke with my phone glowing as if someone had texted me, but the glow had an unfamiliar quality. When I looked at the screen there was a text from a contact labeled Dead Dad that read, “Hi Pete, Dad here. I’m in purgatory. It’s about what you’d expect. A lot of beige walls. Cantaloupe for breakfast.”

I thought back to what he said while dying. One thing about Dad: he was true to his word.

I replied, “What are you doing there? Thought you’d go straight to heaven.”

He wrote, “Pobody’s Nerfect! LOL, you’ll be here too one day. Gotta go. Calisthenics in a few and then we’re watching the The Golden Girls.”

“Sounds more like hell,” I wrote.

In the morning Roger, Tony and I sat at the kitchen table slurping Honey Nut Cheerios while Mom sat with us quietly writing notes.

“Dad texted me last night,” I said. Roger spread butter on a wedge of whole wheat toast. “He’s in purgatory. They have cantaloupe for breakfast.”

“Your father hates cantaloupe,” Mom said.

“Let me see that phone,” Tony barked. He was the oldest and sort of bossy, but I handed the phone to him, and he examined it with squinty eyes. “This looks like some Al Qaeda gibberish.”

Roger snatched the phone from Tony and looked at it. “Wow, calisthenics and eating cantaloupe. They’re really whipping him into shape up there.”

Mom ceased writing notes for a moment and gazed out the bay window at the front lawn. “He should have been doing that stuff down here,” she said.

For the next few weeks Dad kept texting me from purgatory. He complained about the music, a lot of Johnny Mathis, but reported that the chicken cacciatore was pretty good. I told him about how Jessica dumped me and how hockey was going. And then, just before Christmas, I got a letter in the mail.

“I got into Villanova,” I texted him. It seemed like an eternity as I watched the three dots on my phone indicating that he was writing back.

“Good for you,” he said. “You should go there.”

“I thought you wanted me to go to BC.”

“My circumstances have changed somewhat, Pete. Now I think you should go where you’ll be happy.”

After a pause, he wrote, “I have some good news too. I’m getting into heaven. Literally in line right now. The bad news is, no texting there. It’s totally off grid.”

“Glad for you,” I wrote, though selfishly I wasn’t.

“Seems you and I are as good as ever,” he texted.

I thought back to when he was dying and how I was at a loss for words. Then I texted, “I wish I told you this when you were here, but I could not have asked for a better father.”

But he didn’t respond. Maybe he was already strolling through those pearly gates. I hope he saw it.

The next morning I sat at the kitchen table by myself crunching toast, when Mom came down and put a picture in front of me. It was a faded photo of Dad playing basketball in high school, and I noticed something that hadn’t occurred to me before.

“You could be his twin you know,” she said.

Just as she had done since I was a child, Mom hugged me, and finally, mercifully, the thing inside my head thawed.

Short URL: https://www.thecantoncitizen.com/?p=33844

Posted by Guest on Jul 14 2016. Filed under Featured Content. Both comments and pings are currently closed.