I always despised my father for being a motorbike mechanic rather than a doctor or lawyer like the parents of my friends. Every time he rode up to my high school on his antique Harley, leather vest covered with oil stains, gray beard wild in the wind, the humiliation seared in my breast.
In front of my friends, I wouldn’t even refer to him “Dad”; he was “Frank,” a purposeful distance I built between us.
I turned down a hug the last time I saw him alive. My classmates’ parents were in suits and pearls; it was my college graduation. Frank arrived in a button-up shirt that couldn’t disguise the worn tattoos on his forearms and his lone pair of good pants. I stepped back and gave a chilly handshake instead when he came to hug me following the event.
His eye pain now torments me.
Three weeks later, I received the call. On a wet mountain pass, a logging truck had crossed the middle line. When his bike slid under the wheels, they said Frank died immediately. I recall feeling… nothing after hanging up the phone. Just an empty void where sorrow ought to be.
