Molly began her prosecution before our father’s body was in the ground.

       We were at Jackson Hole in Queens, the burger place where they shot a Goodfellas scene. When we were kids, eating here made us feel glamorous, as if the laminated menus and vinyl booths made us adjacent to Hollywood. Now our father was dead, and Molly was building her case like a lawyer who already knew the jury’s verdict.

      “He was a pervert,” she said, pouring pursed Jack Daniel’s into her Diet Coke. “You know he was. His endless stories about prostitutes spoken like fairy tales. Hitting on all my friends. And I’m supposed to marry a decent man after being raised like that?”

       “Can we just pick a coffin,” I said.

       I slid her the brochure from NT Walker Funeral Home. Jesus stood with his eyes skyward, a halo glowing faintly over the words full procession available. Everything felt like an upsell.

       Molly turned pages with the focus of someone sorting through evidence. When she landed on a 72-inch Eco-Friendly Woven Willow Wicker Casket priced at $988, she jabbed a finger at it.

       “This one. It’s biodegradable. Better for the Earth. He can finally do some good.”

       “That one’s for animals,” I said.

       “It’s made of bamboo!”

       “Plus, it’s a casket,” I said. “We need a coffin.”

       “What’s the difference?”

       I didn’t know. I looked it up on my phone. Coffins taper at the feet and widen at the top. Caskets are rectangular. I explained.

       “So we’re choosing based on his giant Polish head?”

       “Uncle Staus said we should get the same kind Dziadek had.”

       “Dziadek was a pig too,” she said of our grandfather and closed the brochure.

       The waitress dropped off her burger, stacked with sizzling bacon. My veggie burger sat next to a salad that looked more deceased than our father.

       “I told Uncle Staus we’d decide together,” I said.

       I pointed to the marked-down mahogany coffin with the red velvet interior that priced at $5,999.99 was half-off. The price tag made me feel like I was bargaining for a used car, not my father’s final resting box.

       Molly shrugged. “Whatever.”

       She bit into her burger. The juices flooded her fries. Outside, cars droned toward LaGuardia. I remembered picking our father up after his last trip to St. Barts, when he was banned from American Airlines for urinating all over the plane’s bathroom. He had flown there with his second ex-wife, Sandy, and her alcoholic boyfriend, Vojtěch, bored and convinced of his own mortality. When I met him at arrivals, he’d called it the best trip of his life.

       “If you don’t go crazy, you slide into normal,” he once told me. “Normal’s worse than death.” Classic him meaning it was partial philosophy but mostly an excuse.

       “So what else do we have to do?” Molly asked, already sounding bored by grief.

       I hesitated. I’d invited her to lunch to break the news Uncle Staus had given me the night before.

       “Listen,” I began.

       But the waitress interrupted.

       “How’s the healthy table doing?” she asked. Her elevated name tag read Amy, and Amy stared at my order like it was a foreign entity, glancing pityingly at my vegetarian option.

       “Great,” I lied.

       When she walked away, I tried again. “I talked to Uncle Staus yesterday.”

       Molly sipped her soda, the whiskey in it making the ice clink.

       “He said Dad had a fourth wife,” I blurted.

       I expected a dramatic response to add a blowtorch to the pyre. Further proof of her prosecutorial stance that our old man was an unmistakable sex addict. Instead, she plucked a fry and eyed the window.

       “Who was she?”

       “Apparently, she was related,” I said. “To the sister of Uncle Staus’s wife.”

       “Oh God,” she said. “Isn’t she dead?”

       “Yeah, they had a kid, too,” I said. “It died shortly after birth.”

       “All this while mom was dying?”

       “Yeah,” I said.

       Molly poured more Jack D into her soda and stirred it with a straw. Blinked. Crunched. Sipped.

       “He was such a pig,” she said finally. “We really should get the animal casket.”

 

***

 

The next day Uncle Staus asked about funeral arrangements. I told him we put down a deposit for the coffin and were coordinating a full procession package with NF Walker Funeral Home. He sounded hungover from his beer-guzzling Monday Night Football ritual.                     

       “Did you tell her?”

       “Yes,” I said.

       “And about your half-sister,” he said.

       “My what?”

       “Zofia,” he said.

       “Who is Zofia?”

       I then heard a sigh on the other end of the line like he forgot what he forgot to tell me.

 

***

 

The next day I drove to West Hill Lake where Uncle Staus lived in a converted camp house. When I arrived, he led me to a basement crowded with fishing rods, paddles, tackle boxes, nets, and a tiny skiff. I could see fish guts staining the concrete, and a smell of brothy mildew filled the air.

       He popped open a refrigerator filled with Styrofoamed worms, jars of salmon eggs and boxes of beer and pulled out two cans and placed them on the table centering the room. Above it a single light bulb swung over two barstools. Then he took a box of cigars and put it in my hands.

       “Pick your poison,” he said.

       I chose the darkest cigar, something called Onyx.  He clipped it with a guillotine suited for thick fingers and fired it up with a small torch, then lit his own.

       We sat on the barstools, elbows on a warped pine slab, under the swinging light.

       “This is complicated,” he said, smoke curling out of his nose.

       “Everything with him was,” I said.

       “You know how I told you about Adam,” he said. “Their first baby. Died at birth. I didn’t tell you they tried again.”

       “Okay,” I said.

       As I sat, I started counting the fishing rods and webby paddles and noticed a painting of West Hill Lake, the large pond outside the basement walls, trying to prepare myself for what was next.

       “Well, he had a kid with Wanda,” he said. “And Wanda, who had cancer in her blood, died giving birth.”

       “Another kid?”

       “They had a daughter named Zofia,” he said. “And she had cancer as a young child, too. It was leukemia, and they had to do all these surgeries to remove it, and then chemo and radiation. She barely survived all of that.”

       Uncle Staus dragged on his cigar as I caught up to his words. A jumble of thoughts surfaced – none of them clear. I stopped counting the rods and paddles.

        “She survived but she had side effects from all the radiation, and they had to monitor her for years, and they thought the cancer came back when she was older,” he said. “But it was her thyroid. Your father was very involved with her recovery.”

       I tried to picture it. My father. Hospitals. Gingerly holding a child with tubes. It clashed with every version of him I knew.

       “Where is she?”

       “In Connecticut, too,” he said. “Hartford. She works in insurance and paints the lake whenever she comes.”

Uncle Staus pointed.

       “That’s hers,” he said.

       It looked strikingly like West Hill Lake on a cloudy day. The brush strokes were tiny, almost obsessive. Careful. Controlled. Everything my sister and I never were.

       “Cool,” I said casually. I had a secret half-sibling-cancer-survivor in my life who did Bob Ross-styled lake paintings. Cool.

       “So, you’re okay with that,” he said.

       I did not know what to say. I thought maybe I was not dealing with this the right way. Maybe I was supposed to be hysterical or shocked. Maybe I was supposed to stand up so I could slap him and ask why he didn’t tell me sooner.

       “Do I have a choice?”

       “She also wanted to attend the funeral,” he said.

       I took a drag of cigar and coughed so much I spat tobacco onto the floor.

       Uncle Staus had no reaction. He just sat there looking at the painting and took another puff. I knew Molly wouldn’t want this scene to play out at the funeral since it would take attention away from her, but I told him fine with a puff of smoke.

​

***

 

Molly and I had to finish emptying our father’s home in Broad Channel. The house was a cedar two-story balanced on salt-faded stilts, the bay pushing at its edges for decades like it wanted to pull it into the sea for good.

       We spent all morning clearing his rooms and with it, parts of his life appeared. An unmarked envelope with a photo of him having sex with a woman while another woman laughed made Molly barf into the kitchen sink.  Everyone in the photo appeared hairy, happy, and spaced-out. When she returned from vomiting, I angled the photo to see how big my father was and she pulled the picture from my hands to rip it apart.

       “Oh my God,” Molly said. “This is so gross.”

       Another dusty bin contained dozens of hand-drawn pamphlets advertising a $5 “boob cruise” around Cape Cod with a crude drawing of a naked woman. The old man lived on this poor man’s ship one summer in the 60s’ and – in his telling – made love to countless coeds throughout those months.

       More pictures of his family during World War II were found sticky from the ’92 Nor’easter that flooded the whole first floor of the house. I unstuck one of my grandparents posing miserably with the maid Dziadek cheated on our Babcia with.  Molly saw the picture and pulled a wine glass from a cabinet and hurled it against the wall, exploding shards over the floor.

       Another box held old blueprints. Our father always told us he was an architect, but it turned out he was merely a draftsman who quit when CAD took over. He ended up driving a forklift, drinking his way through the rest of his career, but still talking about plans he made for several Manhattan skyscrapers.

       I moved the hand-drawn building plans, rolled-up and grimy, to store in a moving box when a picture of a woman in a black dress fell out. She had high cheek bones and big teeth. I flipped the picture around as Molly looked on in horror.

​​

       I love you dearly and look forward to creating our family.

       Yours forever,

       Wanda

​

       The combination of the photo and the feelings it generated gave Molly a panic attack, and she took a shot of her purse bar JD and walked out to the dock. I found a bottle of potato vodka in the fridge and followed her out. We sat, letting our feet dangle over the mud. It was low-tide, and the sulphury odor stuck in our noses as it always did. Fishermen dipped out in the distant waters past the Jamaica Bay Wildlife Refuge, jet skis rocketed across the horizontal blue lines, and seagulls dive-bombed the waters.

       “This place could be beautiful,” she said. “But it’s wasted on people like him.”

       I hated the parts of Molly that were most like me. Her casual nihilism, fragile self-pity, and continual troubles that gave her reasons to be difficult. Even though I realized those traits in myself, it was insufferable to be around. 

I cracked open the Warsaw vodka and took a sip that burned in my chest.

       I looked out over the bay and wondered how long this island we grew up on would exist. I looked out at the folks fishing and realized how little of this majestic natural world I enjoyed as a kid. I realized how little of it I could see.

       “They just looked so happy in that disgusting photo,” Molly said. “I never saw mom and dad look like that. Not once. They always looked tan and maybe good looking but not happy.”

       “I don’t know,” I said. “Pictures lie a lot.”

       Molly took another sip of her JD. I pulled from the nasty vodka.

       “I just wish we had different parents,” she said. “I just feel like we got a raw deal. Like we could have lives like hers but instead we were set up for failure.”

       “We know nothing about her,” I said of Zofia, thinking of the cancer, her dead mother, and her sad lake paintings.       

       “She wanted to come to the funeral by the way.”

       “Who cares?” Molly said.

       I was not sure if she meant who cares if she attended the funeral or who cares if she wanted to attend, but I did not press any further.

       We then went back inside and straightened the rest of the boxes, securing whatever was worth saving (a few cow hides and anything made of leather, mostly) and set aside all that would be donated to Goodwill. We packed everything in labelled cardboard and put them in my Camry. I watched Molly while I yanked the car out of the yard and it looked like she might cry, but she just stared out the window and slurred, “fuck, this is heavy.”

 

***

 

At the funeral, I delivered a eulogy at the small congregation describing my father’s path from Poland to Broad Channel. I skipped the affairs, the yelling, the fear. What was the point of exposing a cadaver? I kept it clean. Sun worshipper. Loved boats. Told us to kick him in the balls and throw a party when he died because he lived life on his own terms. People laughed politely.

       When I finished my remarks, I stepped outside the funeral home. I treaded past Molly who sat in the front row with aviators ignoring the successful family around her. The famous artist, the surgeon, even Uncle Staus who owned his own painting business. Our father’s noble brothers and sisters who survived the horrors of World War II through seven forced labor camps never liked Molly or me because we were never motivated to be great. We never could get past ourselves.

       Outside the funeral home’s awning, I smoked a cigarette.

       Behind me, I heard a voice.

       “Petr?”

       I turned to see a woman dressed in all black. Her cheekbones were carved like sculpture. A white glove extended out.

       “I’m Zofia,” she said. “Do you have another one of those?”

       I shook her hand awkwardly and handed her a cigarette and my Zippo.

       With her smoke lit, she filled the silence talking about our father. The way he would travel to Connecticut every weekend to drive her to chemo. She described how he helped nurse her to health by reading Goodnight Moon and making her ginger tea for the nausea. While she spoke, I wondered who this man was. Everyone assumed he was cheating on our mother throughout this time. This was the not the father who drank and demanded my sister and I be grateful for our unhappy lives.

       “He saved me,” she said.

       It was as if a stranger took over my father’s identity.

       “I hope this isn’t weird,” she said. “I just wanted to be a part of it.”

       “No,” I said. “I mean, he was a weird guy. It’s par for the course.”

       We strolled back inside silently.

       The priest mumbled last rites, and I looked at my father’s ex-wife Sandy and her boyfriend Vojtěch, chatting with my famous artist aunt. Uncle Staus wore wayfarer sunglasses too small for his head. Molly had disappeared. Everyone else was about to leave for the waiting cars, so I decided to get there before the others.

       As I made my way out the doors, I saw Molly outside, her middle finger waving behind her halfway down the block, not even looking at me. “Fuck off,” she called back preemptively. “Not gonna do it. Don’t care about any of this.” I knew she was furious we didn’t play Only the Good Die Young at the funeral.

       Before I entered the waiting car, I felt a tap on my shoulder. When I turned around, I saw Zofia. She put her hand on mine and said nothing. I looked into her eyes and told her to keep in touch, but we both knew we wouldn’t. Outside, the bay wind rose and rustled the funeral brochures in my pocket. For a moment I imagined all three of us — Molly, me, Zofia — floating in the same wide lake of our father. Some parts murky, other parts clear, none of it making sense. But still water holding us, whether we wanted it to or not.