My father left on a Tuesday in March when I was seven years old, and the next time I heard his name spoken by anyone who was not my mother, it was a lawyer on the phone telling me he was dead.
I want to get the shape of it out of the way first, because people always want the shape.
His name was Gene Lundquist. He was a heating and air-conditioning engineer. He and my mother were married for nine years and separated when I was in second grade, and he moved out of our house in Fresno and did not come back. I saw him twice more that year, once at a Denny’s and once at a park where he pushed me on a swing and did not say very much, and then not again. Ever.
No birthday cards. No Christmas. No phone calls. Nothing, for thirty-one years.
My mother’s explanation never changed in all that time, and it was four words long: He didn’t want us. She said it without heat, the way you’d report the weather, and I believed it completely, because I was seven, and then because I was twelve, and then because by the time I was twenty-five there was no reason on earth to think otherwise.
You build a whole person out of a sentence like that. Not him — me. You build yourself out of it. I have spent a lot of money on therapy for a man I would not have recognised in a supermarket.
The lawyer’s name was Ms. Adeyemi and she was extremely kind and very businesslike, which is a combination I have come to appreciate.
He had died in February, in Bakersfield, of a heart thing that had been coming for a while. He was sixty-nine. There had been no funeral because there had been nobody to arrange one — he had no other children, his second marriage had ended in 2009, and his brother had died before him.
He had a will. It was four years old and it was very short. There was no money to speak of; the man had eleven thousand dollars, a 2004 truck, and a rented one-bedroom apartment full of furniture that was not worth moving.
And he had a storage unit, prepaid through the end of the following year, which he had left to me by name, along with the key and the gate code, and a handwritten note that Ms. Adeyemi read out over the phone and then, when I asked her to, read out again.
The note said: Nora — it’s all in the unit. I’m sorry it took this long. You don’t have to keep any of it. Dad.
I did not go for six weeks.
I want to be honest about that, because it doesn’t flatter me and because it’s the most truthful part of this. I did not go because I was furious.
It’s all in the unit. What was? What did he think was in there? Thirty-one years of nothing, and at the end of it a storage locker in Bakersfield and an apology addressed to a woman he had never met, signed with a word he had not earned in three decades.
I told my husband I wasn’t going. Marcus said okay. I told him again two days later, unprompted, and he said okay again. I told him a third time in the car on the way back from my daughter’s swimming lesson, and this time he pulled into the parking lot of a CVS and turned the engine off and said, very gently, “Nor, you’ve told me four times. People don’t tell you four times about things they’ve decided.”
I hate him a little bit for how often he’s right.
Bakersfield is two hours from us. I went on a Thursday, alone, and I did not tell my mother I was going.
That was deliberate too. My mother is seventy-four and lives forty minutes away and I speak to her three times a week, and I did not tell her, and I could not have explained to you at the time why. It just sat there in my chest the whole drive down, this small locked thing, and I didn’t look at it.
The facility was off Highway 99, one of those places that’s just rows of orange roller doors in the sun with nobody in sight. I put the gate code in twice because my hands were unsteady the first time.
Unit 114 was in the third row, at the end, one of the larger ones — ten by fifteen, which I know now, and which I remember thinking at the time was much bigger than a man with eleven thousand dollars to his name should have needed.
I stood in front of the door for a long time.
Here’s what I expected. I want to say this clearly, so you understand what actually happened. I expected junk. I expected tools and boxes of paperwork and a water heater he’d been meaning to sell, and I expected to spend a Saturday throwing my father’s life into a skip and feeling nothing, and I had planned that Saturday out in some detail as a way of getting through the drive.
I put the key in the padlock and rolled the door up.
And every single thing inside that unit was wrapped in birthday paper.