One Last Gift

It had been several hours, and the room was beginning to look a little like a landfill. Lucille pulled another dress from the back of her closet. She examined the garment closely, not even recognizing it, until the memory suddenly came back to her. It had been five years ago; she’d found the thing on sale at J.C. Penny’s and convinced herself that she would wear it to an interview or a funeral. She’d never worn it. In fact--she reached in through the small neckline opening--yes, the tag was still on it. She tossed it onto the top of the ever-growing donation pile.

The next item she pulled out was far easier to place and far more difficult to part with. She hadn’t worn it in years--it likely didn’t even fit her anymore--but the day she got it came back to her in a series of snapshots the moment she laid eyes on it. The sweatshirt in question was off-white and zipped up the front with a hood. In brown letters across the chest, it read “Glacier National Park”. As Lucille ran her fingers over the embroidered lettering, she could see herself as she had been thirty-some years before, ambling around a small gift shop with her stepsister, pretending to be fascinated by every tacky magnet and shot glass, while their parents bickered just outside the door. All things considered, it had been an enjoyable trip, but that day had been one of a few notable exceptions. After a great deal of deliberation, Lucille tossed the sweatshirt onto the keep pile.

It took several hours--and several more glasses of wine--but eventually, every skirt, dress, blouse, and shoe had been sorted into one of Lucille’s carefully curated piles. Things she didn’t want or need, but that were still in good condition, went to the donation pile; things nobody in their right mind could want or need went to the trash pile; and things that she simply couldn’t bear to part with went to the keep pile. As always, her keep pile was at least twice as large as either of the others by the time she was finished, but Lucille was feeling particularly proud of the size of her donation pile today. Someone in need was going to be getting some real treasures, she gloated to herself.

When at last the closet was empty, she stood back to get a good look at it before refilling it with all the things she still hadn’t convinced herself to get rid of. As she peered into the dimly lit space, Lucille noticed something she hadn’t seen there before. It was hidden away in a far corner of the top shelf, and she could just see the very tip of it. Grabbing a stool to lend her some much-needed height, she climbed up to see what it was.

The thing, it turned out, was a box. It was small and plain, grey with silver lettering across the top, which Lucille could not make out due to the swooping nature of its script. The box reminded her of one she’d once received a stunning diamond necklace in. It was shallow and long, and when she shook it lightly, she could feel something shifting around from side to side. But she couldn’t remember having purchased or received such a piece of jewelry. She didn’t usually go for necklaces herself, as they had a tendency to become deeply tangled in her thick hair no matter what she did, and it had been years since she’d been intimate enough with anyone to warrant a gift of jewelry.

Curiously, carefully, she pulled the lid from the box. Inside was a scrap of velvet folded double over something. Lucille held her breath, expecting to find a lovely antique piece left behind by the last resident of the apartment and unnoticed until today. What she saw when she parted the soft fabric folds was something else entirely. A thin sheet of silver, roughly five inches by one, lay before her eyes. Engraved upon its otherwise unmarred surface was an inscription that brought tears to her eyes:

For my father--

My biggest fan and best critic.

Thank you for all the support and love.

Suddenly, a rush of memories, far more tangible and heartbreaking than those attached to a simple sweatshirt, flooded Lucille’s mind. She was eight years old, and she’d just found out about the previous owner of the home she’d grown up in. To her young mind, it had seemed simply extraordinary that a woman had had the funds and the wherewithal to commission the building of such a house. And so, Lucille had penned her very first story about a woman named Florence. In the story, Florence had built the house with her own bare hands, as the young author believed this would make a far more compelling story. When she was finished, she brought the double-sided paper to her father, who had read through it with a smile before sharing the tale with all his friends and sticking it to the front of the refrigerator.

Then, in an instant, her childhood was gone, and Lucille was a young adult, stuck somewhere between nineteen and twenty-five for what seemed like an eternity. She had begun, at the behest of a very dear friend, to compete in a number of writing challenges. Some of them were short stories, in which she excelled, particularly in the sci-fi and horror genres. Others were longer pieces, novels and novellas, which, though they never turned out the way she wanted them to, at least taught her some useful outlining strategies. The one thing all these challenges had in common was Lucille’s test audience. Everything she ever wrote, whether it was for a competition or a personal challenge, was fielded by her father. Sometimes, often, he would question the unorthodox paths her stories took; always, he would tell her that she had found what she was meant to do. And so, she had kept writing--even when she didn’t want to--for him.

Then, suddenly, she was thirty-eight, sitting in a small, silent hospital room, feeling like she might never breathe again. The one man she’d always loved, always relied on, lay on the bed looking smaller than she’d ever thought he could look. The doctors who came and went at regular intervals told them his organs had begun to shut down one by one, the result of a disease that would someday come for Lucille and her brother too, which had begun to manifest itself just a week after she’d purchased the engraved bookmark. Her father had wasted away for months before he finally let go, tenacious to the end, and his last words had been to his children, to say that he loved them more than anything and that he knew they would take care of each other. After that, Lucille had lost her inspiration. She’d shut the bookmark away and forgotten any literary dreams she’d ever had.

That evening, after she’d dropped her donations off at the senior center and deposited her trash in a nearby dumpster, Lucille took a detour on her way home. An old George Strait song played softly on the radio as she turned on to a gravel road that was nearly invisible in the fading light. She parked at the end of the road, waited for the only other visitor--a dusky-skinned gentleman in a suit and tie--to leave, and stepped out into the brisk fall air. 

The spot was as familiar to her as her own childhood home might have been, and she stepped carefully between headstones, stopping every few feet to greet relatives and old friends who had found their final resting places there. She paused briefly at the stones bearing her grandparents’ names, said a silent “thanks for everything” to them, and moved on. 

Finally, she arrived at her destination, a small, nondescript stone set into the ground bearing the name of Stephen Ward. Lucille was surprised to see that the stone was polished to a sheen, the grass around it was trimmed and free of weeds, and a small bouquet of early-autumn wildflowers was laid carefully beside it. It must have been her brother, she knew; Lucille herself hadn’t been to the cemetery since the day of her father’s funeral. She had tried; she had tried every year on his birthday and on the anniversary of his death. She would get into her car and start the short journey, but she would only make it halfway before she broke down in tears and had to pull over to avoid causing an accident. Eventually, she had stopped trying. Her brother had continued to invite her for several more years, but she had declined even his offers to pick her up and drive her there himself. She had honored their father from home--watched his favorite movies, listened to his favorite albums, cooked his favorite meals--but she had not been to visit him even once in the twenty years since the funeral. The sad fact had, eventually, become a rift between herself and her only sibling.

Lucille glanced around the cemetery and, seeing no one remaining in the near dark, sank to her knees on the grave. She cried for what felt like hours, letting go of all the tears she’d held in on the drive because this time, at least, she had to show up. When she had finished, her eyes felt swollen to twice their original size, and her lips were dry and cracked from the salinity. But she felt better. She felt as though the vice that had clenched around her heart twenty years ago was finally beginning to loosen its grip. When the tears were all gone, words began to fall from her instead. She told him about everything that had been happening in her life since he’d been gone. She told him about the man she’d nearly married a year after his passing and about how he’d left her for a younger woman. She told him about the teaching job she’d taken when she’d finally given up on becoming a best-selling author. She told him that she was happy, even though it had never been her dream. And when he was all caught up on her life without him, she apologized. She told him she was sorry she hadn’t visited, she was sorry she’d let her emotions come between herself and her brother, and she was sorry she’d stopped writing. 

The last apology was the hardest. For years, she’d been telling herself that it was for the best, that she’d quit because she wanted to, needed to, even. As it always is, it was difficult for Lucille to admit that she’d been lying to herself. She had never wanted to quit; it had simply become too difficult to carry on, and so she’d given up.

Having--at last--said everything she needed to say to him, Lucille stood and pulled the box from the closet out of her coat pocket. She opened it up to look once more at the inscription and pressed the cold metal to her lips. Then, replacing the lid, she laid the box down on top of the gravestone next to her brother’s flowers, turned, and walked away. Once she was back in her car, the tears began to fall again, and they didn’t stop until the first rays of light began to peek over the eastern horizon.

Hours later, after a long nap and a quick shower, Lucille filled her kettle with water and put it on the stove to boil. She retrieved her favorite mug and a satchel of her strongest tea. Her thoughts raced as she poured the steaming water into the mug and watched it turn to a bright amber almost instantly. She didn’t know where to start, but that was okay; her father’s favorite stories had always come from a place of not knowing, when she would just sit down and let her fingers drift over the keys. She put on an instrumental playlist, and, as tones of violin and piano mingled in the air above her head, she began to type.