Pop died last week. He’d been in the front room for three days before a neighbor found him. After getting his address from the police, my brother drove us up in his sports car to sort out his belongings. His house was in a small town in the Appalachians. It was shaped like a child’s cartoon: a square front base and a triangle on top with a circular window in the attic. The exterior brown paneling was ugly and worn, and the gravel driveway was muddy and grooved. The house needed care that he, in his typical fashion, hadn’t been diligent in providing. Still, the house had a nice view of the valley and the nearby mountains. One of my astronomy labs would have done well on the same lot.
We started cleaning by throwing out a long stretch of vintage bottles in the front room, all lined up like a set of toy soldiers. Everything smelled musty and choked. Neither of us knew when the house was last aired out. Pop hadn’t even upgraded his furniture since last we saw him. The first noteworthy thing I noticed sat on the mantle above the unswept fireplace. It was a gold tin box, bent and dented, that held an unopened bag of hard candies, long expired. A Christmas card was taped inside the lid and signed in children’s handwriting.
“Hey,” I called. “You remember this? We gave this to Pop when we were eight.”
My brother set down his work and looked over my shoulder. “So?”
“He never even opened the candy.”
“They still good?”
I handed him the candy while I opened and read the card. It was a note of appreciation guided by Mom, written in our hand; it made me faintly nostalgic for that final Christmas together. I put the tin in a recycle box and my brother threw the candies into a trashbag, spitting out an extra from his mouth.
I moved upstairs and entered Pop’s bedroom. Dozens of model cars and miniature rockets, all finely painted, sat on the poorly mounted handmade shelves. I recognized all the rockets and thought I recognized some of the cars, but I couldn’t place where I knew them. His bed had a large dip in the middle.
I left the bedroom and went to the door at the other end of the hall. Behind the door was the attic. It was stuffed with old trunks and boxes and covered in dust. At the back was a flat wood table with several dusty books, an old leather chair on castors, and a large white painter’s cloth draped over a large apparatus in front of the window. I pulled down the cloth, kicking up a cloud of dust in the process.
Underneath the cloth was a brown telescope, about eight feet tall and made from polished brass and wood. The eyepiece was well-worn from use. The telescope was hand-crafted, indisputably as beautiful as the ones I’d worked with at Lowell. I walked around it a few times, then sat in the old leather chair. The seat and the back were worn deep; Pop had sat here for a long time. I let my hands run over the beaten leather. Then I glanced at one of the dusty books and flipped it open.
It was a journal crammed full of stargazing entries: moon phases, galaxies, planets, even comets. I opened another. They were all journals. The sightings went back decades. Some comets I had studied at work were circled and marked with my initials. Behind me the door crept open and my brother whistled at the telescope.
“That’ll fetch a price,” he said.
“Did you know Pop stargazed?”
“No.”
“Look at this,” I said, getting up and turning a journal open. “September 9th, waning crescent. Neptune spotted. Resolved Saturn’s rings. The moon is fully sketched.”
“So?” said my brother. “Can’t sell old journals. Recycle them.”
“I can’t throw these away.”
“I can.” He grabbed a journal off the desk and threw it frisbee-style into the hallway. “Now you do it.”
“These are valuable,” I said. “We should save these and show them to the kids.”
My brother grabbed another journal from the desk, looked through it, looked at me, and threw it into the hallway.
“Stop it,” I said quietly.
“Or what?” he said, annoyed. “If there’s nothing in here we can sell, donate, or recycle, put it in a box for the trash guys.”
“These journals meant something to him.”
“And my poor heart bleeds for him. Poor old Pop, enjoying his life alone.”
“Stop it,” I said again, this time with a little more anger. My brother was surprised, then furious. He seized the journal in my hands and waved it in my face.
“Did you forget why Mom left him?” he said. “Do you not remember all those long weekend trips he took to the other side of the state ‘for work’? Forget the line of bottles we saw coming in here? I don’t care if he cured cancer in these journals. They’re worthless to me.” He threw the journal into the hall and walked out.
“They meant something to him,” I called.
He didn’t answer. I heard him kick one of the journals aside. I sighed and sat down in the old creaky chair. I felt the arm rests, rolled around on the wheels. The whole room smelled like Pop. I felt suddenly young and small and sick. Down the hall I heard my brother enter Pop’s bedroom, and then I heard him moving very slowly. I suddenly remembered why I recognized the model cars. They were all cars my brother had owned.
I heard him pick one up and spin a wheel. Then I heard the springs creaking as he sat slowly on the bed. The dust from the thrown canvas had settled in the room like a blanket. No birds chirped outside. No clocks ticked. I thought quietly about Pop.
The house was quiet.
Pop died last week. Or maybe it was last month, I don't know.