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Leather Jacket

One last gift, one last tall tale.

By Kristy Ockunzzi-KmitPublished 3 years ago 10 min read
1
Artwork by John Boylan, @spookyinkmonstr

The air in my parents’ attic carried the scent of our family, of decades spent in the house built on what had once been an orchard. It was the must of old books, the brightness of elderflower tonic, the funk of cucumbers pickling in the kitchen. It was the condensed aroma of our life together, and I would have bottled it if I could have. Sitting on the unfinished wooden floor, surrounded by my father’s possessions, I struggled to keep my mind from wandering through days gone past. Mementos from events I hadn’t thought about in years passed from their cardboard prisons into my hands and then to their assigned piles, sometimes with ease, sometimes only through the grace afforded me after several minutes of pondering.

“Did you find them yet?” came my mother’s voice, soft and fragile, winding its way up the stairwell.

“Not yet,” I replied, finding my own voice jarring against the stillness of the afternoon. “I did come across some things that Yuri will love, though.”

I rubbed my dust-stained hands against my face and sighed. It was hard to focus. My father had been gone from this world for almost two years, but sitting here made me feel like he had never left. I knew all his stories backwards and forwards, the rumble of his voice transposed into flowing script inside my head. They were all there, just waiting for me to find them: Item after item, each with a tall tale attached, and every one precious in its own way. There was the baseball he carried with him while working for Austin Powder Company, the one he claimed he had shot clear across a lake with an air blast while on a tunneling job. The crystal he brought home after going “on walkabout” out West, the one he said he’d found in the belly of a prairie chicken. And, of course, the leather jacket he had worn until the lining fell out, the one that traveled on his shoulders through every National Park, to every family vacation, up every moonlit hill to stargaze, and even on his many unsuccessful but somehow unbelievably eventful fishing trips in Canada.

Exaggerations, all, but we never questioned him as kids. He had always been such a sure and steady storyteller that it felt wrong to disbelieve, even in the face of extreme unlikelihood.

I glanced at my watch. 5:30. If I didn’t find my dad’s savings bonds soon, I’d have to come back first thing in the morning. “Maybe I should look somewhere else,” I thought, knowing deep down that they could be anywhere; nobody had ever accused my father of being too organized, after all. With a pained groan, I pulled myself to my feet and shuffled to the opposite side of the room, ducking under the triangular slant of the ceiling. As my hand moved towards yet another box, a familiar yellow hue buried under some dozen or so shoeboxes caught my eye. “That’s it,” rumbled in the back of my head, a thought that felt more like my dad’s voice than my own idea.

“Charles Chips,” I said to myself with a smirk as I unearthed the giant tin from its resting place. “Of course.” After a few minutes of wrestling with the lid, I was rewarded with a twine-bound stack of bonds, the red long-sleeved shirt my dad had used for a Superman cape as a child, a cracked vinyl photo album, several old postcards, and the fading smell of old, salty potato chips.

“Found it!” I yelled. “Down in a minute!”

Tucking the leather jacket under my arm, I made my way down the steps and found my mother in the kitchen. “Here you go,” I said, handing her the tin. “Should have known he’d put the things he cared about most in a chip canister.”

Mom popped it open, her face scrunching with feigned disgust. “Ach, it stinks like stale potatoes,” she said, laughing. “Your father, I swear. Man did everything like a child.”

“But that’s why we loved him,” I replied softly.

My mother nodded, then tilted her head slightly as she noticed my dad’s jacket in the crook of my arm. “I knew he never got rid of that old thing. Keep it, if you want it.”

“Yeah?” I said, holding it up to get a better look in the light. “Thanks, Mom. I started making piles for Yuri and Dima, but I’ll have to get back to them another day. Light’s getting dim up there.”

“That’s fine; don’t worry about it. Whenever you have time.”

“I should probably get going,” I said after a moment, watching my mother slowly retrieve everything from the tin. “Are those bonds going to be enough? I can write you a check if--”

“Nonsense, sweetie,” she replied, patting my arm affectionately. “I’ll be fine. I just need enough to cover the bills, and I’ll be set.”

I shifted uncomfortably where I stood, knowing full well those bills included more than one hospital stay, and there’d likely be another before long. “Alright, well, tally it all up and let me know, please? I love you, Mom.”

“I love you too, Anoushka,” she said, her lips curling into a rare smile.

“Call me. Don’t forget.” I gave my mother a kiss on the forehead and headed out the door.

The moment I stepped outside, the grey autumn evening greeted me with a bone-shivering gust of wind. Grumbling in protest, I immediately wrapped myself in my father’s coat. In my hurry, I felt something brush against my right arm within the sleeve -- a hidden pocket? With something in it? I fumbled gracelessly with the leather jacket as I hopped into my Datsun and sat in confusion, staring at what I’d retrieved from its hiding place: A tiny black notebook, tied with twine.

As I turned it over in my hands, I heard my father’s distinctive throat-clearing erupt from the passenger seat. An embarrassingly loud squeak escaped my lips and I dropped the notebook like a hot coal, flailing my arms in what could only be described as the most ridiculously startled moment of my life. “You’re gonna want to read that,” said my father, matter-of-factly.

In disbelief, I turned in my seat and stared at my father. He looked exactly as I remembered him, except younger somehow. Fewer wrinkles on his face, the slimmer figure of his twenties, but with the same silver hair he’d so often complimented himself on. Though I wanted to say a million things all at once, all I could manage to conjure up was one meek, quavering word. “Dad?”

“Hey, Noushie,” he replied. He smiled at me, which made his face lose a little bit of definition, solidity. “I need your help. That little book has everything you need to take care of your mom. You must read it and get the money to her. Don’t tell her, just do it. You know how much she fusses, and she’ll insist you take it instead. Okay, Anoushka? I won’t take no for an answer.”

I nodded eagerly, frozen in place save for my bobbing head. “Of course, Dad.”

“Good. Now pick it up and get going. I love you, solnyshko.”

Hearing his nickname for me, “little sun,” broke me from my reverie. With a quiet laugh, I reached down to retrieve the notebook from where it lay beneath the gas pedal, but when I sat back up my father was nowhere to be found. “I love you too, Dad,” I whispered, my throat suddenly tight around the words.

I turned the notebook over in my hands once more, admiring the soft leather cover, the worn edges, the thousand tiny creases in the spine. Part of me didn’t want to open it. I wanted to leave it just as it was: A perfect memento of my father, both mundane and mysterious. That was selfish, though, and I regretted the thought immediately. I pulled open the twine and began reading, blinking away tears.

Inside, my father had written things as they really had been -- the night Halley’s comet passed, all our birthdays, where he really found that crystal, what he saw in the sky and the Earth and our family. All stories without embellishments, each told in a sentence or two. It was the hidden part of my father, the part that knew living in the moment was real and beautiful and worth being truthful to.

Toward the end and almost as suddenly as he had left us, his hand began getting markedly shakier, the print growing larger in an attempt to remain legible. His sentences became shorter, but somehow dearer. “Yuri’s birthday. Anoushka made cake. Chocolate, my favorite,” read one. “Held Dima's puppy. Sweet thing. Smells of the field,” read another. Small events, meaningful flashes in a life grown frail. I skipped to the last entry and stared at it for several minutes before the words fully registered in my head.

“LIFE INSURANCE. $20,000. Elena doesn’t know. Time grows short. She worries much. (216) 555-0188 papers in telescope.”

Dad’s telescope, the one possession he had specifically named in his will, had been passed down to me at his request. I strapped in, silently kicking myself for letting it spend two years collecting dust, and hurried home.

My father had taken unusual pride in his telescope, having built it himself while he was in college, which of course meant we all had our fun teasing him about it. The size of a toddler, even taller on its crude mount made of two-by-fours and house paint, it had towered over me as a child. I adored it, though, and it was hard for me to keep myself from feeling guilty as I unscrewed the optical tube. Had I tried to use it right away, as my father surely would have wanted, I could have known something was amiss and found the papers on my own.

“But maybe you wanted it this way,” I said to myself as I reached inside and retrieved my prize. “Maybe you just wanted to be your enigmatic self, one last time. Leave one more story to tell.” I unrolled the twine-tied bundle with trembling hands, and sure enough, it was exactly as he had said. One life insurance policy, payable to my mother, or to me as the contingent beneficiary. I closed the telescope back up and curled myself under a blanket on the floor beside it, re-reading my father’s notebook until I eventually fell asleep.

Morning brought the trill of songbirds and more than one aching bone in my body, but I still found myself on the phone before I’d even had my coffee, anxiously curling the receiver wire around my fingers. “Yes, hello, I’m calling about an insurance policy for my father. It should have been paid out already, but... yes, I’ll hold.”

It took three months of processing, but it gave my mother renewed hope once everything was finally settled. When the check eventually arrived, I found her softly weeping at the kitchen table. “Anoushka,” she said to me, “this is too much.”

“It’s Dad’s last present to you,” I replied, my hands cradling hers. “Of course it’s too much.”

Over the next eight years, her spirit had been undeniably brighter -- a gift for which I would be forever grateful. That $20,000 lifted more worry from her heart than she would have ever admitted, bringing with it the easy laughter and gentle courage of a more carefree time. She quietly slipped away to join my father in the hushed spaces of the hereafter one serene November morning in 1999, exactly ten years after his death.

I never did tell her about the conversation I’d had with my father. But, if I had to guess, the most likely thing he said to her when she went to meet him was, “Elena, song of my life, have I got the most incredible story for you...”

grief
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About the Creator

Kristy Ockunzzi-Kmit

Kristy Ockunzzi-Kmit is a fiction, fantasy, and sci-fi author from Cleveland, OH. She is also an artist, spending her free time painting and sculpting. Happily married to composer Mark Kmit and mother to one very imaginative teenager.

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