I didn’t like it when my Dad gave his tools away. He did it when he and my mom moved to an assisted living community three years ago. For the first time in fifty years, he didn’t have a house to maintain. But shouldn’t a dad always have a cross-cut saw?
They left behind the last house at which my Dad would preside over Christmas present unwrapping, hamburgers on a Weber grill, and Kentucky bluegrass. They also left behind, for the new owners, a concrete angel – a lawn ornament that had watched over their house.
Three years later they found cancer in my dad’s neck. Last February a surgeon took out a chunk beneath his jaw. When we all gathered at an Irish pub a week later for a surprise birthday party for my mom, my Dad was not at her side. He was home, recovering from the surgery and gathering strength for a course of radiation.
The next morning I woke early at the Holiday Inn Express. It was six am, cold and dark. I left to get coffee, and was surprised to see my brother Rick already up, sitting in the lobby in jeans and a button-down dress shirt, puttering on his laptop. I drove to Starbucks, came back, and handed him a black coffee.
“Thanks,” he said. He peeled the lid off and blew on the coffee.
“We took the angel,” he said.
He told me the story: The night before, my four middle-aged brothers and sisters crept up to my parents’ old house – occupied for three years now by a new family – in my sister’s van. Tim and Ann pretended to be a strolling couple. They then dashed across the lawn, hoisted the angel, and lugged it to the van. Tires squealed, gravel flew. They brought it to Ann’s house, about a mile from the Holiday Inn.
After hearing this story, I smile on the elevator and down the hall to our hotel room. The children are still asleep. I get in bed in the dark with Rachel. I tell her about the angel. She sits up, taking her latte from my hand.
“But . . .that’s stealing,” she says.
I’m taken aback. I expected the heist to be celebrated, not questioned.
“Not really,” I counter. “It was my parents’ angel.”
She sips her latte in the dark.
“But they left it there,” she says. “The window blinds were theirs too, but not after the closing.”
She’s right. Of course it’s stealing. That’s the point. Kleptomania is a crime commmitted to get even with God for a crime he has committed against you. But I couldn’t expect Rachel to approve. She doesn’t lie, and she doesn’t steal.
We rouse the children, pack the car, and leave at dawn. The fields are stiff with frost. I swing by my sister’s house to say goodbye. The entire household is asleep. My brother-in- law unlocks the door grumpily in his pajamas, and goes back to bed. I turn around in the living room and see the angel sitting on a low shelf, its hands between its knees, it’s wings sprouting on either side of the chalk-white curls on it’s head.
The house is silent.
I bend at the waist, cradle the angel in my arms, and lift. It’s heavier than I thought. A pain stabs the small of my back. I stagger, brace my legs, and straighten up. “Open the door,” I grunt to Rachel. She does, and flattens herself against the wall so I can wrestle the angel past her.
Two hours later we are half way across the state, headed home on I-94. The angel is in the rear cargo space. I’ m not returning it. I’m stealing it myself.
One of my sisters calls. Rachel answers my cell.
“Where’s the angel?” my sister demands.
“The one you guys took?” Rachel asks.
“Yeah.”
“I don’t know,” Rachel lies. “We don’t have it.”
That was a really great action returning the angel in my opinion. I wonder if your siblings have/had considered asking the owners of the house if they could have the angel back? I assume they wanted it as a momento or memory for your father.
I better fess up. I didn’t return it. I just stole it from my brothers and sisters.