“Did you know that if the sun exploded we wouldn’t know for eight minutes?” I asked my father. It was September, one of those quiet days in late summer when it’s still warm outside, but you feel a gradual change in the weather.

He’d stopped by to help me fix the kitchen faucet, which had been leaking for days.

“We wouldn’t know for a full eight minutes that our lives were all about to be over,” I said.

I’d read an article where the author said that people underestimated all they could get done when push came to shove. He compared the amount of time it would take for the earth and all of life as we know it to become extinct to the same amount of time one needs to vacuum their home, answer some work messages, and start a load of laundry. It in no way made me want to turn on my computer or start the washing machine. I did call my father, though, and told him about the dripping I had heard coming from my kitchen the past few days.

“I’m not your handyman,” he said, but then told me he would drop by later in the week. That was our dynamic: him complaining about taking care of me, his grown daughter, but doing it just the same; me, knowing I was old enough to care for myself, but asking for his help, nonetheless.

“What would you do if you only had eight minutes left to live?”

Talking had always been our sticking point, and for most of my life was facilitated by my mother. Throughout my childhood she placed us into carefully orchestrated situations where she saw commonality, or at least opportunity for connection: walks to the public library, fishing lessons, tomato and butter sandwiches shared alone on the porch so the two of us could chat.

“Hand me that,” my father said, pointing to his wrench.

I passed him the wrench, its weight unexpectedly heavy in my hand.

My father said, “I’d tell you to come over. Then I’d sit with your mother.”

My mother was dead; she’d been gone a year already. Ovarian cancer, which was discovered almost accidentally at a routine exam but too late to do much of anything, took her from us. Aggressive, was the word the doctor had used. My father and I both still struggled using the past tense when talking about her.

“Why would I have to come to you?”

I heard my father’s breathing intensify as he strained to tighten the errand bolt that was supposedly causing the leak.

“Children are supposed to come to their parents when we get old.”

I’d heard this argument before. I was thirty-five when I bought the single-story house in the same town as my parents. My mother was ecstatic. She popped over frequently to check in or drop something off that she thought I might need, and then find an excuse to stay for hours.

“I’m making up for lost time,” she would say.

Then she got sick and didn’t have the energy to come. That’s when I started walking to their house every day.

I sat by my father, thinking about those last days, and how slowly I walked to my parent’s home, not wanting to face reality. The excruciating final steps up their driveway, only to always find them sitting in the backyard, talking quietly. I would approach them as if I was still a child, having been taught not to interrupt adults, and waited for them to look at me, the silent invitation to speak. I never had anything to say, even knowing the conversation could be our last.

My father rarely came with my mother during her visits unless she mentioned to him that something needed tending to around the house, which had morphed into her new form of connection for us.

He would do the chore he’d been assigned, albeit almost never without first saying, “Isn’t she old enough to do this herself?”

When I think of my father, I almost always picture the back of his head, or his hunched shoulders, or the way his hands look when he’s working on something tedious. It’s harder for me to picture his face, although I can still see my mother’s clearly.

I stared at my father’s knees as he worked underneath my sink. It had been quiet for a few minutes.

I watched him wrap the tape around the pipe. “What do you think we’d talk about?”

I waited for a moment, but he said nothing.

“I guess we wouldn’t have to talk.”

My father slid out from beneath the sink and stood up. He turned on the tap, which made a questionable gurgling noise, before spurting a few times and then running perfectly normal.

“Fixed.”

I helped gather his tools and poured him a glass of water, which he drank steadily. He refilled his glass, pointing to the water running in a perfect stream from the faucet.

My mother and I would often eat together before she went home, usually leftovers from her lunches with my father from earlier in the day, which she would wrap up to eat a second time with me. Never anything exciting but satisfying all the same; classics from my childhood: pierogies sauteed in butter with applesauce, a bowl of rice with pickled vegetables from my parents’ garden.

“Do you want to stay for dinner?”

My father glanced at the clock above the sink. “How long is it going to take?”
“Not long.”
“I don’t want you putting yourself out and making some elaborate nonsense that is going to have us eating in the middle of the night.”

It was five in the afternoon.

“I can do something quick.”

My father rubbed his neck. “Okay,” he said, setting his toolbox down on the counter, “I’ll be outside.”

My father was a picky eater in his rigid simplicity. Nothing could be too fussy, or too healthy, or too different, or take too long, but also had to live up to his standards. No generic brands, for instance, but nothing too frilly or organic. I had eggs, and potatoes as well, and some bread. Breakfast for dinner had been one of my father’s few culinary contributions when I was growing up. He could have happily eaten pancakes and eggs and just about any skillet meat every day if it hadn’t been for my mother’s careful watch over our cholesterol. I put a pot of water on to boil and pre-heated a skillet. I brewed some coffee as well, which he would ask for and then complain that it was going to keep him up all night.

My father was sitting on the steps of the front porch. George sat next to him, his tail wagging as he licked my father’s face. “Stop that,” I heard him say, before petting the dog’s head.

“You need to trim your azalea,” he said, glancing over his shoulder.

I looked at the water, which hadn’t yet boiled, and then joined him on the porch.

“I would do it soon if it were me. You can see they’re too big already. They’re suffocating everything underneath them.”

For years, my father owned property in the Shenandoah Valley. It was an old farmhouse on a good bit of land he had fought unsuccessfully to get legally protected as a designated conservation area to ward off development. He spent five years there with my mother before they moved back north and had me. He kept the property, entrusting its upkeep to Mr. Fitzpatrick, a local environmental lawyer and angler my father fished with during the weeks he spent down there each year. As a child, my mother and I would make the trip during the summer as a sort of vacation. It was long days of yard work followed by playing alone while my parents read. The only decent part that stood out in my mind was cherry popsicles, which my mother and I would get at the town’s lone convenience store, a place called Z&J’s that was owned by a Syrian couple, Houssam and Maram, who were fond of my mother and called her habibi. It was always hot and terribly humid during those weeks, and the popsicle would run down my wrist making my hands, which were always caked in dirt from my morning chores, sticky. More than once, Mr. Fitzpatrick and his wife LuAnn were at the store when we were there, and I can remember them saying it looked like I had been gutting fish all afternoon. “You’re just like your father,” they would say. I didn’t have the heart to tell him I hated fishing, and gardening, and basically everything I did with my father during those trips.

“You want to help me trim them?” I asked.

“I do not.”

“But look at how good you did with the sink.”

I was teasing, but my father didn’t join in. “You need to get yourself a partner. What are you going to do when I’m not here?”

Coming from my father, who knew my history well, this comment hurt. He was the one who came to see me when my relationship of fifteen years ended. I had been unhappy for quite some time, we both were, but it was still jarring the day I came home from work and discovered that Marshall was gone. No goodbye, no note. It was very him, calculating and distant until the end. I called my mother, who feigned disappointment, although I had long known she didn’t like him.

In those days I was living a good six-hour drive from my parents and my mother insisted that it was time to come back. I was miserable, but not ready to resign myself to the fact that I needed to live close to her. So instead, I moved to a small one-bedroom apartment on the other side of town.

I had only recently moved in when I opened the door one Saturday morning to find my father standing on the other side. I knew immediately that my mother had sent him, despite his insistence that he was on his way down south to spend time at his property and had decided to drop by to see me.

“I thought you were selling?” My mother had told me not long before that my father had accepted, although begrudgingly, that there was nothing more that he could do to protect the land, and he would likely give up the property.

“I still need to take care of it.”

“Isn’t Mr. Fitzpatrick helping you out still?”

“Why don’t we go for a cup of coffee?” My father suggested, ignoring the question.

I stepped outside, pulling the door closed behind me. My father was waiting on the sidewalk, and only then did I notice the blue sweater in his hands.

“Is that Mom’s?” I asked.

My father looked down at his hands, “Oh right,” and he held it out to me, “your mother asked me to give you this.”

It was an old favorite; something my mother had worn for years. A smell, so distinctly her, had long been baked into the fabric: garlic and onions simmering in a pan, wet soil, her Elizabeth Arden cream.

I took the sweater and slipped it over my head, pressing my nose to the sleeve.

“That’s your mother, huh?” My father asked, and I didn’t know if he meant the gesture of her giving me something that she instinctively knew would help, or the smell, but either way it was true, so I nodded.

We walked to a diner a few blocks away where we avoided talking about anything related to my relationship or its ending. My father instead asked about work, which I wasn’t interested in talking about, so I said it was fine. He told me my mother had taken up Polish lessons to connect to her ancestry and was painting again.

“Your mother is always up to something,” he said. Having just gotten out of a relationship in which I was frequently reminded that any activity that didn’t help pay our bills was frivolous, my father’s praise of my mother’s hobbies compounded my feelings of resentment. I passively agreed with him, while staring out the window. It wasn’t a pretty place where I lived at that time. Cold concrete is how my father had described it the first time, and I knew what he meant.

“So,” my father eventually said, “what’s going on with you?”

I knew what he was trying to ask, but after years of strained conversations I didn’t know how to explain to him that the predominant feeling I was experiencing those days was regret at the amount of time I had seemingly wasted in a relationship my mother had told me was wrong years before. Maybe I was too stubborn to admit she was right, or embarrassed that my relationship had failed, or at least that’s how it felt at the time. Whatever the reason, all I chose to tell him was that I was okay, which was clearly a lie from the dark circles under my eyes and my pallid skin, but he didn’t push the matter.

We looked at our coffees, both too uncomfortable to make eye contact.

“You know,” my father said, pausing to clear his throat, “You can come with me if you want. I’ll be at the house for a few weeks, and then back up with your mother. She’d like to see you.”

“That’s okay,” I said without giving the offer much thought, “but thank you.”

“Or if it’s easier on you, I can come pick you up on my way back up.”

“I have a car. You don’t need to come and get me.”

My father thought about this for a moment, “How many miles do you have on that car?”

“Around 190,000, I think.”

“You should know. When did you last get the oil changed?”

“I can’t remember.”

“I’ll come get you. Just give me a ring whenever you’re ready to come home.”

I wondered how long one referred to where their parents lived as home. I smiled so he knew I appreciated his offer and told him I would, but I didn’t call him over the coming weeks, and he didn’t call me. My mother called, but she always did and nothing she said changed the fact that I wasn’t ready to move back yet. I didn’t go back for another three years. At that point my car had died, and I needed my father to come collect me, which he did without hesitation.

I dropped a few eggs in the boiling water and watched them roll around in the bubbles before settling on the bottom of the pot. I roughly peeled a potato into the frying pan, now hot and slick with oil. I thought about setting the table but decided against it. My father would enjoy staying outside, surveying the yard and making further observations about all that needed tending to beyond the azalea.

I forgot to set a timer for the eggs. Shit. How long had it been? Maybe four minutes. My father and I shared a love of soft-boiled eggs, ones where the yolk is beautifully orange and pools out when you dunk toast into the fragile membrane. A hard-boiled egg, with its tennis ball texture, is such a letdown when faced with its alternative. Timing was everything. The potatoes were browning nicely so that was something. I cut two slices of bread and put them in the toaster. The meal felt suddenly too brown and heavy and in need of something fresh. I cut an orange into quarters. It looked dry, not surprising given the season and where we lived. The color was vibrant though and would add to the plate.

The eggs survived.

“Looks like you got them just right,” my father said, tapping his spoon on the shell.

“Six minutes to cook. That means our last meal could be soft boiled eggs.”

“What?”

“The sun exploding.”

“Oh.”

“What would be your ideal last meal?”

“One of your mother’s roasts. That would be the way to go.”

I didn’t like my mother’s roasts, but would have given anything to have one again, so I agreed.

My father set down his utensils on his plate. He took a sip of coffee and looked out at the yard. “It’s a nice patch of earth you have here. Nothing all that interesting to be honest in terms of variety, but nice nonetheless.”

I remembered my mother’s reaction the day I closed on the house and how she walked around raving about every nook and cranny. “Your books finally have a home,” she said, resting her hand on one of the built-in shelves, and “If it were me, I would put your bed against that wall so you can look out the window in the morning.”

I couldn’t remember if my father was there that day. I do recall him coming over shortly after I moved in with a bag of apples. It was his first time also meeting George, who howled when my father approached the house. “You’ve got yourself a hound,” he said. “That’s good. You’ll be safe with a hound.” He handed me the apples, explaining they were from my mother, and that she wanted him to cut the grass before going home.

After dinner, I went inside and came back with some pistachios, another shared favorite, in a small porcelain bowl.

“Strange dessert,” he said.

We sat quietly, sucking on the salty discarded shells long after the nuts were gone.

“If you get the garden shears,” my father eventually said, “I can trim the azalea before I head home. We don’t have much light left, though, so go quick.”

“No really, I can handle it. You were right that I need to start doing this stuff myself.”
“That’s not what I meant,” he said.

My father was still sitting on the porch when I came back around. He went to stand but lost his balance, tripping forward before catching himself on the porch railing.

“Are you alright?” I asked, reaching out to help steady him.

He waved me off, “I just wasn’t paying attention to my footing.” Then he looked out at the yard once more, “Maybe you’re right, though, about waiting. It’s too dark to do the job right. I’ll come back next week if that’s alright.”

“Of course.”

We sat back down. My father had kicked the bowl of pistachios when he stumbled, and the shells were strewn across the porch. He set the bowl upright, only then noticing the design. It had my birth month written in gold lettering along the side. It was part of a set my mother had used for our birthdays and other special occasions when I was growing up. “Did your mother give you this?”

“Yes. She gave it to me and some others when I moved in.”

My father didn’t say anything in response. He rested the bowl in his lap, rubbing his fingers along its edge.

“You know,” he eventually said, and he paused and stared down at the bowl, “your mom was really, what” and he thought about it for a moment, “special. There’s no other way to say it.”

“She was,” and I thought about my mother. All my life I’d wanted to be like her. Cooking for the sake of tasting a different flavor, pottery lessons for the sensation of holding cold clay in her hands, watercolors so she could make her own interpretation of the sunrise. My mother saw beauty in the world. She looked for it in the everyday, the ordinary. When I pictured her face, when I pressed my nose to her sweater, still hanging on the back of me door, I could see and smell her and every one of her experiences. She was alive, until she wasn’t.

I rested my head on the wooden porch beam, looking out at the road. How long does grief last, I thought, and calculated how long I had left to my miss my mother.

“I was thinking about what you asked me,” my father said, interrupting my thoughts. “About the sun exploding and all that nonsense.”

“What about it?”

“Well, I was thinking that it was never supposed to be just the two of us together. At the end that is. Do you know what I mean?”

And I thought of all those days I spent with my mother, watching my father walk away from us before we carried on with our day.

“I always just assumed it would be the two of you.”

“Me too,” I said. “If I’m being honest.”

We looked at one another, and I was surprised by how calm my father’s face seemed.

“But it’s not,” he said.

“It’s just us,” I said.

“Yeah, just us. So, I guess we’re figuring out our last eight minutes together, huh?”

“I guess so.”

“That’s okay,” he said, putting his hand on mine.

“It’s okay,” I agreed.

And for the first time in a long time my father stayed with me until the sun went down.