“That, my girl, is a blaze of glory,” he said his gloved hands wrapped around the handle of a rake.
Mom snorted a laugh. “Ha, the only blaze of glory a man like you will ever have.”
My khaki-clad dad scowled. I turned back to the pile of leaves, a flaming pyre, breathing, living on the cast-offs of a hot summer. Smoky clouds drifted up, streaming across the darkening sky.
“You never know,” my dad whispered. We pulled chairs to the edge of the flames, dad and I. Mom declared the fire a fool’s game. I went to bed smelling of leaf smoke.
“This is your last chance,” she said the next morning.
“Last chance?” Dad said. “Gail, even a dying man gets more chances than you’ve given me.” I shuffled into the kitchen.
Dad kissed my head. “See you, baby.” That was the last time I saw him. The cops combed through the ash pit, seeking clues in his blaze of glory. The days were warm and hazy for November, strange.
“Indian summer,” the detective said, sipping mom’s warmed over coffee. “Nature’s last gasp before a long winter’s sleep.” They found no remnants of his crime, never a trace of him.
Much later, years, decades, lifetimes later a package came for me long after I stopped looking for one. A padded manila envelope just bigger than a dollar bill, the outside was addressed in stiff black Sharpie, inside it a key wrapped in notebook paper. On the paper an address, a box number. Taped below that, pressed between sheets of ancient waxed paper, a golden oak leaf, “blaze of glory” written across it in a tight, familiar script.
Days later I followed Google maps to the address on the paper. Inside the locked box was a bank book and a phone number. Dad had been dead three years, according to the woman who answered.
“His biggest regret was not taking you with him,” she said. “But he was proud to have something to leave for you. I hope you understand.”
Four million. Like a last gasp of love. I spent that night imagining my life with that kind of cushion. The next day I signed it all over to the hospital where mom died. But the leaf, that I still have.
***
Jessica Ciosek’s story “Aunt Ruth’s Purse” appeared in the “Mothers” issue of Minerva Rising.
