Just then came the rumble of a heavy truck at the top of the hill, then the shrill beep beep beep as it reversed down the slope. It took several attempts and lots of time between the three men to direct the truck down the curving road, but eventually it deposited its load in the MacDougall driveway.

As the disposal company truck struggled back up the hill, Leith surveyed the giant Dumpster now sitting in his driveway, the one his contact had pulled through at the very last minute. He took a deep breath. Words still wouldn’t come out. He cleared his throat. “I need some help cleaning out my old man’s house. Do you mind?”

And there it was.

Though he didn’t look at his employee, he knew Chris’s face would be twisted in a confusion he’d never voice to his boss. But Duncan, in his trademark “Fuck it. Whatever” attitude, just clapped his hands and said, “Let’s do it.”

Yes, Leith thought. Let’s.

The keyhole was much stickier than he remembered, the doorway much tighter. He’d waved off the guys, telling them to wait in the driveway and give him a sec. If they saw his sorrow and his discomfort, so be it. It was time to stop hiding it anyway.

The door opened inward, throwing light into the tomb. He didn’t smell the must and dust, as he knew he should. Instead he smelled Da’s old pipe filtering in from the front stoop where he’d smoked every evening. He smelled Sunday morning bacon and the fresh Christmas tree they’d chopped themselves and that stood tilted in the corner every year. He heard Da’s old folk albums, played on that turntable still sitting on the coffee table, and the yap of the small mutt they’d had when Leith was a boy—the best dog neither of them had been able to replace because there simply was no replacement.

The world shifted and Leith sagged against the big hutch, a few unknown items rattling around inside. Without realizing it, he’d moved deep inside the living room, the light from the front door like a faraway mouth to a cave. Nothing had been changed, nothing moved, yet everything seemed different. Felt different. He was a man separate from the one who’d buried his beloved father, literally and figuratively, and he hated that he’d allowed himself to split apart like that.

He hated what he’d allowed this house and his memories to become.

Pushing off the hutch, he skirted around the coffee table, and edged along the kitchen counter pass-through. To the left stood the door leading into the garage, and as he went toward it, his thigh brushed the folded afghan crocheted by his mother long before he’d been born. A plume of dust shot up, tickling his nose and settling into his eyes. He rubbed them. Damn, the dust was making him tear up.

The garage was pitch-black, so he left the house door open to guide him as he went to the single-car rolling door, bent down, and heaved it up manually. The screech of metal on metal made him cringe, but not as much as what filled the garage floor.

Growing up, he’d watched Da lean back on that workout bench and do reps using those ancient black weights on that tarnished bar. When Leith was little, he used to sit on his bike and count while Da used the big dumbbells to do curls. And when he was old enough, when Da finally gave him the okay and taught him proper technique, Leith had learned how to lift.

And then Da had taught him how to throw the traditional Scottish events.

The old hammer still leaned against the back wall. So did the weight used for the height throw—a round metal ball topped with an attached ring for your hand. The weight for distance—its ball on the end of a short chain—sat in the corner. The caber, the one they’d used to practice with, was sitting pretty in the town park.

He remembered Da perched on the edge of the bench, the weight-for-height on the floor between his feet.

“Come ’ere, boy. Pick it up.”

So excited. At nine, Leith was so excited he didn’t recognize the teasing gleam in Da’s eyes as he braced his feet on either side of the weight and yanked. The ring didn’t budge. Leith stumbled.

Da chuckled, slapping his knee. A good-natured laugh, though Leith didn’t realize that at the time.

“Someday, boy. Someday, I can already tell, you’ll be a better man at this than I.”

Impossible, Leith had thought.

He still thought it.

Leith just stood there, looking at all the equipment. He could still feel the roughness of those bars in his palms, could still hear Da coaching him from the lawn chair when he’d gotten too weak to lift himself—though he often tried to lift anyway, covering up his disappointment over aging and illness with self-deprecating laughter.

“You ready for us?” Duncan called from where he’d taken to leaning against the landscaping truck.

“Not yet,” Leith said over his shoulder. “Just give me another moment.”

“Take your time.”

He’d already taken three years, but he only had his friends for today, and he needed to determine what would go and what he’d keep this week, before it came time to move away for good. Passing back through the living room, he headed down the creaking, claustrophobic hallway to the bedrooms, thinking how much longer the hall had seemed when he’d been a teenager.

He knew what Da had turned Leith’s old bedroom into after he’d moved out: a monument to their relationship. Documentation of pretty much every feat Leith had ever performed. That level of pride was still too much for now, so the door remained shut. Instead, Leith turned another doorknob and entered his father’s bedroom.

He didn’t remember making the bed the last time he’d been in here, but the blanket was pulled neat and tight over the mattress, the pillows still propped against the chipped headboard. If he’d sit down on the bed, he knew it would squeak something terrible, but that’s not why he’d come in here.

Why had he come exactly? What did he want from this room? The hat on the dresser and the cane still leaning by the door? Yes, definitely. His father to still be sleeping in here? Absolutely.

But instead Leith headed for the closet. He was drawn to it without explanation. As he cracked open the door, the smell of old wool and leather leaked out. Leith flicked on a flashlight and peered inside. All the sweaters and pants and coats he remembered, still in a neat line, waiting to be worn by a man who’d never come back.

Oh God. Oh God.

The stale air in the room—the whole house—caved in on him. Three years of loss that he’d buried somewhere outside under the new viburnum and roses slammed into him, knocking out his knees and collapsing his body to the floor. He sat there at the bottom of Da’s closet in a heap, gasping for breath and pounding a fist into the plaster. The loss was too great for tears. Crying simply wouldn’t be enough, although if Da were here, he would have clapped Leith on the back and told him to let it out, and to take his time doing it, because that’s what a real man did.

His eyes stung and burned, and his chest heaved with great effort, but the tears still wouldn’t come. Leith pressed his back to the closet wall and lifted his head to look at each article of Da’s clothing, recalling days and moments when the older MacDougall had worn them. Leith reached out and thumbed through them . . . until he got to one piece in particular, and stopped.

The MacDougall tartan, brought over from Scotland decades ago, the wool now thin and worn. It was a field of red crossed with thin white lines, thicker blue ones, and intermittent green and blue squares as accent.

And this was Da’s kilt, the one he used to throw in. The old man had been in his formal Highland dress for his memorial, but this kilt, the one he wore all the time with great love before it no longer fit him, still dangled from a hanger.

That’s when Leith cried, a slow leak of tears. He had no idea how long he sat there, a blurred tartan pattern dancing across his vision. Finally knuckling away the tears, he shoved to his feet and reached for the kilt. Unhooked it. This was why he’d come in here. Neatly draping the thing across his arm, he grabbed the hat and the cane and left.