SoMa Literary Review

Dust

By Jeffrey Kingman

The small cardboard box that was buried under a stack of junk mail contained Ben’s father’s ashes. Kenny didn’t know the contents at the time, but he wondered about it. The box sat there for over a week, and Kenny forgot to ask him.

Four months later, it turned up again. Kenny was rummaging around in the sideboard cabinet, a built-in unit originally intended for neat stacks of china and cups and silverware. But it was just the two bachelors living in the house so they used it for storing a wide variety of things, from beach towels and cans of tennis balls to WD-40.

Underneath a stack of magazines he found the box. He remembered it. “Deliver to James B. Milligan,” the label instructed. Nobody ever called his roommate James. He was Ben. The box had obviously been shuffled around a lot—one of the corners was crumpled—but it had never been opened. Kenny pulled it from the cupboard and stared at it, feeling the weight of it in his hands.

He heard the front door open and looked up to see Ben and his girlfriend entering. Ben carried a brown sack of fast food with grease stains on the bottom. As usual, his mouth was slightly open as if he were about to say something, though his eyes revealed he had nothing on his mind. His girlfriend, Lisa, wore a pink tank top that was too short to meet her jeans so her fat midriff bulged freely. They looked content and happy with themselves. Kenny found the sight of them vaguely irritating.

Kenny had his own girlfriend, Barbara, but the four of them never double dated. Barbara dressed very differently than Ben’s girlfriend. She wore blouses with frilly edges which pleased Kenny. But one time he’d found Barbara wearing a new pair of heavy, brown Doc Martens shoes. His jaw dropped and he told her he didn’t want to look at her wearing such things. She acquiesced.

Lisa went ahead into the kitchen to make coffee. Ben pulled a few French fries out of the greasy bag and was about to join her, but Kenny stopped him. He held out the small box he’d found in the cabinet.

“What’s in here?” he asked.

“Oh. Where’d you find that?” Ben seemed slightly embarrassed.

“The cupboard.”

“Yeah, I’ve been meaning to take care of that.”

“So what’s in it?”

“Heh,” he grinned. “That’s my dad.”

Kenny stared at him, bewildered.

“It’s his ashes,” he explained.

Kenny looked down at the box with wide eyes. Quickly but carefully, he set it down on the table and backed away.

“What’s he doing in the cupboard!”

“I was trying to decide what to do with him, but I guess I forgot.”

“Well, why don’t you put him somewhere decent—in an urn or something?”

“Yeah, I guess so. But it’s OK. I don’t think he much cares.”

“Jesus. You obviously didn’t like your dad much, did you.”

“Sure! Me and him got along real good—a lot better than anybody else in the family. ’Specially Mom. She hated him. That’s why she finally sent me the ashes. She didn’t want to deal with them.”

“Brother. What will you do with him?”

“I don’t know.” He chuckled, remembering. “Once, a long time ago, he told us that when he died he just wanted us to stick him in a sack and take him down to the dump. Said it was the practical thing to do. But then Mom told me he changed his mind and wanted to be burned up to save space.”

“But surely he said what he wanted done with the ashes.”

Ben shrugged, and then pulled two more French fries out of the bag.

“Just leave him there. I’ll figure something out over the weekend. Don’t worry.”

He munched the fries as he went to join his girlfriend.

The weekend came and went and the box didn’t move.

On Monday Kenny said, “Hey, what about that box, Ben? Come on!”

“Oh yeah. Shit. I don’t know. I gotta figure something out.”

“Well, do it already. It really upsets me having him lying around like that. You should have more respect for the dead. I thought you said you liked him.”

“Sure. Sure I did.” He seemed hurt. With a knit brow, he continued flipping through a magazine. Kenny thought he wanted to drop the subject, but a moment later Ben looked up suddenly and stared at him accusingly.

“We did stuff together. Me and my dad, we got along great. We used to go fishing a lot. Matter of fact, he came out here to California once, and me and him went fishing in the Mare Island River .” His tone softened as the memory presented itself. “We had a lot of fun, fishing. He said he liked looking out at Mare Island and seeing all the old stuff leftover from when the Navy was there—the old cranes and the broken down battleship still floating over there. He loved it.”

He looked fondly at the box of ashes and nodded.

Kenny tried to imagine what kind of person requests to be tossed in with the garbage. His own father, Captain Jonathan T. Milner of the Coast Guard, had made it very clear to his son that he wanted to be buried at sea—none of this ashes-flying-in-the-wind nonsense. He wanted his casket to slide smoothly off a plank and slip into the ocean.

Kenny shook his head. “If you and your dad were such great pals, then why don’t you take care of business?” He went into the kitchen.

“Hey, wait!” Ben came after him holding the box. “I have an idea. Yeah! He liked the river so much, I could put his ashes out there. In the river.”

He beamed, pleased with himself.

“I don’t know,” said Kenny. “In the river, huh?” He slowly warmed to the idea. While it was nothing his father would ever want, at least there was a certain convention to it—and that made it acceptable.

“OK, Ben. That sounds pretty good. I like that idea—the proper thing to do.”

Ben told him he’d take the ashes with him to work the next day and then, on the way home, he’d pick up Lisa and together they would walk onto the bridge and put his father’s ashes in the water. Kenny patted him on the back.

The next evening he asked Ben about it.

Ben seemed a bit distracted, but nodded and said he had done it.

“Good. Glad to hear it, Ben. It must have made you feel better to sprinkle his ashes there in the river.”

He wrinkled his nose.

“Naw, I didn’t like the idea of sprinkling them,” Ben told him. “I just tossed the whole box over the railing.”

Also by Jeffrey Kingman on SoMa Literary Review: Avengers