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I tap twice on the door announcing my arrival, although I’ll let myself in, anyway. The room greets me with the harsh smell of closed windows and disinfectant. I’d thought I’d grow used to it. The nurses told me I would. It’s been a year and the scent still follows me out of the building when I leave.
“Livy, that you, lass?” He stares right at me, setting the tone for this visit.
“Hey, Pops, it’s Owen.” I act as if I didn’t hear his question, forcing extra effort into sounding cheery.
“Owen?”
“Yeah, Pops.” I step around the foot of his bed and meet him where he rests in his recliner, book in hand. I sink into the matching chair beside him and tilt the book so I can see the title. “Harry Potter?”
“Thought ye said yer name’s Owen.” His Scottish brogue hangs between us as the most startling difference between our two generations.
Despite his declining condition, his hair is still a rich, blackish brown like mine, and we share the same bright hazel eyes. Although shrunken now, especially when he sits in his overstuffed recliner, he once stood as tall and broad as I do. I always wondered what part of my mum I got because, physically, I’m so much like my father.
We rarely talked about her growing up, and now getting details is beyond my ability. It’s certainly not in his control. Nothing is in his control. Not when he eats, not when he bathes, and, unfortunately, not what he thinks.
Lucid moments that coincide with my visits are rare and coveted with an awareness that I might be about to experience something for the last time. Last week when I was telling Pops about my new project, something triggered him, and he explained how I earned my love of symmetry from Mum. He struggled to give me more details about this trait of hers—like how she applied it to her work, how it shaped her personality—still, I cling to this shard of information, this fragmented memory that connects me to a woman I barely remember. It led to the latest design on my pec. A bright Frank Stella geometric recreation that stands out amidst the chaos of the other images.
“Yeah, Pops. Your son, Owen.”
“Aye.” He gesticulates like he knows who I am, but today he doesn’t.
I hold on to the few days he remembers me because most days I’m some guy sitting in his room, taking a moment of his time that he doesn’t know he’s having.
“I’m waiting for my wife, Olivia,” he says in his thick accent that never faded.
“I’ll sit with you until she gets here.” There’s no point mentioning to him she died twenty-six years ago.
Like every other visit when his Alzheimer’s rules the day, I fill the air. “The first half of the semi-detached duplex is coming along.”
I tell him again about the latest building trends, as if he still understands where the market is heading.
Pops was the one who started Black Ladder Developments, the company I now own. He was my mentor long before I gave Black Ladder my weekends and school breaks, and still is, even though he doesn’t know it. Pops never once told me to find another job, one with shorter hours and fewer scraped knuckles. One that was recession-proof or guaranteed to pay the bills.
Ever since fixing the first house with Mum, he was hooked, and he was proud to pass on his self-taught craft. When he handed over the company reins as the memory slips became more apparent, he did it with a tear in his eye and a beaming smile on his face.
He left me big shoes to fill. I’m trying to be the man he taught me to be. I’m moving the company forward based on the tenets he set out: honour, trust, hard work. I want him to be proud, to know that his legacy will live on in me and the houses I build. But I need his guidance to make that happen. I’m not ready to do this alone.
“What am I going to do next?”
He always told me that choosing the lots to build on was the most important part of the process. I had to see beyond the structure and the history that currently occupied the land. To ignore the real estate agent’s reason for pricing high based on the owner’s attachments. I had to appraise it from a bottom-line perspective.
Pops has always been the one to walk me through the pros and cons of each possible site. Recently, he hasn’t been aware enough to do it. My buddies and colleagues, Scott, Brett, and Greg, are good, but they don’t have the experience Pops has. They don’t have the magic touch that he brought to each build.
“Remember I told you about the old lady in the house next-door?” He nods at me, but his vacant look tells me he doesn’t have a clue. “Her granddaughter is going to be a pain in my arse.” My Scottish ancestry sneaks out when I spend time with Pops.
“Word on the street is that she’s moving into the house. A dumpster was dropped off last week and she’s been steadily throwing things away. I can’t tell if it’s to put the house up for sale or to make room for her own belongings, so I’m keeping my options open. I have a plan for both scenarios.” Contingency plans are a must in our industry.
“Ha, lassies. They’re trouble, they are. My Livy’s always getting in the way of me building houses.”
What should be grief over the way he thinks my mother is still alive surfaces as hope that he’ll have a coherent moment and I’ll learn something new about their life together. About our lives together. I rely on him to remember because I was too young to do it myself, and we never took the time before his mind started to go. Now that I’m old enough to know her, I’m at the mercy of the disease robbing him of his life’s joy.
“She’s definitely in my way,” I say.
Pops gets a faraway look on his face, like he might be enjoying a memory of some kind. I stay quiet, not risking the interruption that would steal this occasion from him. They don’t come often anymore, and I imagine they bring great comfort in an otherwise unfamiliar world.
“Ye know the best way to get her out yer way?”
Yeah, move her to a different neighbourhood.
“Make her yer priority. Lassies get ornery when they’re being ignored. Tell her ye love her.” He pats my leg with his thick fingers, almost all of which he’s damaged over the years.
“I don’t want the girl. I want the house.” I repress the frustration in my words. Frustration that his intentions are good even though he can’t follow a conversation anymore. Frustration that my mentor is slipping away and that my father is leaving me too soon, like my mother did.
The worst part of all this is knowing that he’s been waiting for this. I heard him every night as a kid, sitting at the kitchen table sipping a Hot Toddy from one of Mum’s fancy teacups, telling her ghost about his day. Telling her how much he misses her and how he can’t wait to see her again. He lived my entire life with one foot in the grave.
Work and I were Pops’ priorities, but we weren’t his dream like Mum was. When she died, the dreams stopped. He never spoke of the future, never made plans beyond the next job. I don’t remember him asking what I saw for myself in ten, twenty, thirty years. As a way of protecting me, he never showed curiosity about my hopes and expectations. It was best not to have dreams, because dreams become nightmares.
“The lassie comes with the house, just like my Livy did. When we first moved to Calgary, she fell in love with a wee rundown farmhouse on the edge of the city. She told me if we didn’t buy the place, she was going to take herself right back to Scotland and I could find myself another wife to put up with my stinking arse.”
This thirty-five-year-old story he remembers with perfect clarity, but what he had for breakfast this morning is as mysterious as the fact that I’m his son.
“We saved every penny we earned for years till we could fix that old place. Livy insisted on doing the work ourselves although we didn’t have a clue what that meant.” He laughs at the memory. Although, I’m sure when he was living it for the first time, there was more than one fight on the topic.
“Wait for Livy to come home. She loves telling that story.”
“Okay, Pops.”