1.
I was a few weeks shy of nineteen when I saw my father’s wreckage for the first time. The pickup truck had been towed to a junkyard storage lot, its contorted front end rippled like the bellows of an accordion. His was the only vehicle not covered in snow, if my memory can be trusted. The driver’s door that bore the name of his business, DeBoer Painting & Wallpapering, was twisted and misshapen. Only half of the letters and the 312 prefix of his phone number were legible. His dried blood had hardened on the chrome door sill and frame, transformed by its exposure to the elements into a dark and dusty crimson.
There are moments like today, some forty years later—before I’ve had the chance to put my damn feet on the floor or think about not having a drink—when an image of him in that truck comes to mind: he’s sitting upright at the wheel in the middle of the intersection, motionless, as if waiting for the light to turn green.
They were driving home from somewhere. Slid into oncoming traffic, according to the police. It took my father five months to die. How my sister survived, I can’t explain.
As a first-year college student at the time, I was on my way to being someone else. An engineer, maybe, or a pilot. I’d be the first in our immigrant family to have a degree. It didn’t go that way.
I dropped out of school while he was in a coma and took over what was left of his business, my chronic back pain a daily reminder of my work and age now. Hard to believe I’m older than he was when he died, with grown kids of my own who would surely say they don’t know their father either. My daughter, she lives west in Oregon, my son outside of Pittsburgh, where his mother made her way after her second divorce. I’m still in Illinois—in my parents’ old house, in fact—living in a place called Normal. Irony noted.
2.
My daughter called me on Father’s Day a few months ago and suggested I visit her sometime. I told her I’d like that, but neither of us put much prospect behind our words. It was enough to speak with her now and then after more years of being out of touch than I would like to admit. Lately, we’ve taken to writing to each other. Actual handwritten letters that require some effort, not to mention postage. Easier than phoning. No awkward silences or voicemails, no trying to remember the time out there and if she’s at work or still asleep. I’ve written to my son a few times, but I don’t know if he’s read anything I’ve sent. The truth is there isn’t much in my letters. Updates on the weather and the garden I started in the patch where my mother used to grow her tomatoes, or maybe what Finn, my golden retriever puppy, has chewed up. I haven’t been able to tell them the hard things yet.
I saw them at my mother’s funeral last winter. My son drove out with his wife and my ex, no small thing. My daughter was there with her latest girlfriend. She’s a lawyer for some women’s nonprofit in Portland. I had seen something on the news—protests, police in riot gear—and told her I hoped she was staying safe. She half-smiled at me and touched her girlfriend’s forearm as if to signal it was time for them to go.
3.
I used to measure time by the type of alcohol I drank. Morning meant a wake-me-up beer on the way to a job or the paint store for supplies. Daytime was vodka in a plastic Sprite bottle, always subtle. Evening? Wine. I could usually persuade my wife to join me.
When the kids were young, I wrecked my truck one snowy spring after work and wound up covered in potting soil from the Easter lily I had purchased, unaware my arm was broken until I was home and saw the cast. There was the time my son, maybe seven or eight, was hurt at one of his pee-wee soccer games, and I stomped onto the field yelling at the referee—a boy himself—to call a fucking foul. And this: my wife showing me the purple outline of my fingers on her upper arms the morning she asked me to leave.
They had all seen the worst of me, no question. I’m sober again. I wish I could say I no longer felt anger.
4.
We’d visit him in the hospital, my mother, younger sister, and me. Other than a broken collarbone, my sister was mostly unscathed by the accident. “Luck of the draw.” That’s how a nurse explained it to us—one family member able to walk away, the other irreparably injured.
My sister was fifteen. She smelled of smoke, wore dark makeup and skimpy clothes like some of the girls I had seen in college, and seemed annoyed that our father was putting us through this ordeal. It was a long time ago, but I don’t think she cried more than once the entire stretch he was in the hospital—unlike my mother, who always seemed to be dabbing at her eyes and nose with a balled-up tissue. This was our routine, the three of us going to the hospital almost every day. “Deathwatch,” was how my sister referred to it.
My mother paid close attention to his care and refused to believe he wouldn’t wake up. She’d rearrange his hair with her brush if it looked out of place after a nurse had shampooed it. She spoke to him in Dutch, narrating her day or describing a change in the weather. She insisted on having the TV on when we weren’t there. “He might be able to hear it,” she said. “Someone told me that.”
His breathing was controlled by a ventilator that made his chest artificially rise and fall in perfect rhythm, each breath evenly spaced, one after the next, day and night, as if it might go on forever, even in the grave. Billows of mist would escape from his tracheostomy tube and hang above him. His hands were contracted around small, rolled towels, the muscles, tendons, and ligaments in his arms flexing like he was lifting something heavy, his knees bent on an angle, pushing up the white sheet that covered him. His jaw was askew—he’d broken it in the accident—and once, there was a small patch of whiskers above his lip, apparently missed by the nurse who had shaved him that morning.
Funny, the things you remember.
5.
I’m not from this place. We emigrated from the Netherlands when I was three, a year before my sister was born— “a real American,” my father would call her. The morning of our citizenship interview, my mother had me do another read-through of an official-looking pamphlet, half-eaten toast still on my plate, my sister—maybe six years old—working on a bowl of cereal. My mother bounced around the kitchen, asking me rapid-fire questions like what the pursuit of happiness meant, and what the names of our senators were.
“Put some pants on, walking around like that,” she told my father when he wandered in worse for wear in his white T-shirt and white briefs, tufts of dark hair on his skinny legs.
“What?” he said. He had propped himself against the counter, smoking his first Chesterfield King of the day. “No one can see.” He looked down at himself and spread his arms like wings as if to prove my mother was making a fuss over nothing, ash falling to the floor before he erased it with his bare foot.
My mother was tending to an oversized metal washing tub on the stove, stirring its contents with long tongs meant for grilling. The container spanned all four burners, each on high. Inside, multiple pairs of painter’s pants and shirts, covered in multicolored specks and splotches, were on the boil. Once a month, like clockwork, she took on the impossible task of attempting to churn away weeks of paint and stains.
“Your daughter, she can see,” my mother said, her back to him, poking and stirring the bubbling contents on the stove.
My father waved dismissively behind her, his face reddening.
My sister sat next to me in her nightgown, milk outlining her mouth, feet dangling above the vinyl floor. “See what?” she asked.
6.
I met my wife—ex-wife—in an Intro to Physics class. It was a large lecture hall, half-empty most days because the class started at eight o’clock. The professor was a central casting type, with unkempt graying hair, thick glasses, and the same navy food-crumbed V-neck sweater. When he wasn’t writing on the blackboard, he had a habit of puffing on the stick of chalk in his hand.
“I thought we couldn’t smoke here.” Those were the first words I said to my future wife, who laughed through her nose. I began bringing her coffee, the two of us in the same seats each class, high up and near the back of the hall.
Halfway through the semester, the professor gave a lecture on the concept of time. He asked us if we believed it was an absolute, if it existed independent of our perceptions, white chalk visible on his lips. “Absolutely,” I called out, desperate to impress this girl next to me—she had the darkest eyes—with my particular brand of smart-ass humor.
At one point, the professor said that time could be measured by a change in something physical, like the position of the sun in the sky or the space between the beats of your heart. I pressed two of my fingers against her smooth, exposed neck, looking at the wristwatch on my other hand as if counting the pulses.
“Feel anything?” she asked me, her lips parted.
I pulled my hand away, a red trace around her skin. “Rapid heart rate,” I said. “Usually a sign of arousal.”
She looked at me without turning her head. “Maybe just too much coffee.”
My father’s car accident was a few months after we began dating. Even before then—before I dropped out, before she’d routinely make the near-two-hour drive from school to visit us at the hospital in Normal on weekends, before I watched her stay up late with my little sister listening to music and brushing her hair—I knew I wanted to marry her.
I didn’t expect it all those years later, but when my son let me help him move his first year at Ohio State, it all came back to me: college, the accident, the life I could have had. I had to pull over on the drive home and give myself a minute.
7.
In the summer of last year, I took my mother to see my sister and her family at their home near the Alabama Gulf Coast. On the drive down, my mother kept talking about my father as if he hadn’t been gone for decades. He was a hard worker, came from nothing. He was proud I had gone to college. She wanted to make sure I knew. “I’m sorry,” she finally said, staring out the windshield at the flat landscape.
One night on that trip, my mother fell asleep on the couch while knitting. My sister and I stayed up late drinking coffee at her kitchen table and eating zoute drop, the salty Dutch licorice we had grown up with. I brought up the time our father had dressed as Santa on Christmas Eve. Somehow, he had lost the white beard that came with the outfit, so he pulled one of our mother’s nylon stockings over his face like a mask. I knew right away it was him, but my sister was young and ran screaming to her room.
“Scared the shit out of you,” I said, laughing at the memory.
Her hands were wrapped around her half-filled mug. They trembled, agitating the milky brown coffee as if a passing train were causing the house to shudder.
“I have something hard to tell you,” she said, holding a breath in her chest, hesitating like she wanted me to have one more moment before the next one came.
“He was a monster,” she said.
I squinted at her.
“Don’t you remember?”
That’s when she told me our father had abused her when she was a little girl and that it had gone on for years. She didn’t have any memory of it until a half-dozen years earlier when she was home recovering from surgery, and my mother had gone to stay with her.
I couldn’t believe it. How was I supposed to believe something like that when I was fifty-nine and had just about lived most of my life? I had mourned him, for Christ’s sake. Called my mother every year on his birthday.
“Don’t you remember?” she asked me again, her voice catching. “That one night I woke you up and told you.”
I stood and held her, my chest muffling her sobs, our mother deep asleep in the recliner, head slouched to the side.
Fuck if I didn’t remember it then. I was maybe eleven or twelve. “Dad makes me touch him,” my sister had said. I didn’t know what she meant. I told her to tell our mother, and I went back to sleep.
8.
My father spent his fifty-second and last birthday in the hospital. I remember family and friends visiting. There was food and cake in a conference room down the hall. Later, after everyone had left and it was just us, a young nurse wheeled a machine into the room and told my father she was going to suction him. The device made a loud whirring noise as she inserted a clear hose into the tracheostomy tube, sucking up phlegm with a crude noise like water draining from a sink.
His eyes opened, which often happened after physical stimulation. “There you are,” my mother said. She told him about the party and who had visited, showed him cards people had brought. “Your son, he’s a character. Forget about the past; you can’t change it. Forget about the future; you can’t predict it. Forget about the present; I didn’t get you one.” She held up my card for him to see—a cartoon drawing of a drunk man wearing a birthday hat and holding a martini glass.
“He blinked,” I said, pointing like it was some kind of sign. What did I know then?
My sister crossed her arms. “Jesus. It’s not like he can see anything.”
9.
Two things happened after that trip to Alabama: I started drinking again, and my mother had a stroke. She couldn’t live on her own after her release from the hospital, and home care was too expensive, so I moved out of my apartment and in with her.
She had a hard time with her speech. She mixed up things easily, sometimes saying cow if she meant coffee or pen when she needed to pee. She looked confused, as if she knew she’d gotten it wrong but couldn’t fix it for the life of her, the truth bouncing around in her head like popping corn. Yet she still knew the phone number of our first home in America and the address in The Hague where she lived as a girl.
She liked to look through photo albums. I’d hold them in her lap, turn the thick pages between swigs of beer. She’d point and call out names and places or stop at old photos of her and my father together, young and laughing before they had children. A crooked half-smile would form on the side of her face that wasn’t frozen. Her eyes briefly had warmth behind them during those moments, and I wondered if that was all she remembered.
One night, my mother wanted to take a shower. She needed a chair in the tub and my help getting in and out. She was upset about something but couldn’t express it.
I’d had enough and pushed the shower curtain open, clouds of steam rising above her. I thought of my sister—the little girl eating cereal, the angry teenager dressed in black, the adult who discovered a life her brain kept from her until it didn’t. “Did you know?” I yelled.
My mother covered herself with her arms, and her jaw began to quiver.
Warm water splattered my face.
“Out,” she said. She looked confused.
I shut off the water and turned away, helping her into a towel.
I felt bad and apologized, pulling a nightgown over her head. She grasped at my forearms and mumbled something that sounded like Dutch. Her eyes had that warmth again, and she called me Karl.
My father’s name.
10.
My sister and I call each other every week or so. We’ve had some long conversations in the past year, but it’s mostly small talk now. She likes to tell me about her granddaughter, and I enjoy hearing her voice. There is a stillness to it that wasn’t there before.
I can’t help but wonder what my life would have been like if my father hadn’t been driving through that intersection at that moment. Would I have stayed in college? Would I have been a better person? What if I had done something the night my sister woke me when we were kids?
I spend a lot of time thinking about it.
The air has a bite to it today. Leaves have begun to drop, a sure sign of fall. It’s morning, and I’m driving east on the interstate with a suitcase in the trunk and a panting puppy belted in the backseat. I pass a Welcome to Indiana sign and pick up my phone, one eye on the road. “Guess where I’m headed?” I say to my sister.
A day earlier, I received a letter from my son telling me I’m going to be a grandfather. I thought about the day we found out we were having a boy—my daughter on my knee, my fingers touching the top of my wife’s wrist as the ultrasound technician gave us the news. “The ideal family,” the woman told us, and I believed her.
Neal Lulofs’ award-winning fiction has appeared in more than a dozen literary magazines, including the Swannanoa Review, Willow Review, Euphemism, and Other Voices. An excerpt from a recently completed novel was nominated for the 2025 Best of the Net anthology, and another was a finalist for the Sycamore Review's Wabash Prize for Fiction.
Lulofs graduated from the MFA Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College. Born and raised in Illinois, he lives in Bend, Oregon. Visit neallulofs.com and check out his Instagram @neal_lulofs.
Photo by: Veronica Kaiser on Pixabay