he’ll leave behind all of his winter clothes, even his bulky khaki jacket that bends its metal hanger, making it look like a hollow, upside-down smile; his tie rack, screwed to the door of the closet, still holding most of his silky ties; he’ll leave the lawn overgrown and the lawn mower without gas; an empty hole in the basement wall, built for the TV he’ll put in the backseat of his pickup; an industrial-sized black trash bag, overly swollen with empty boxes and clear green bottles, leaning against the wall, the concrete floor around it littered with ridged aluminum caps once tossed casually over his shoulder; a gray hairbrush resting atop the bathroom cabinet, his not-so-secret hiding spot for protecting his brush from an invasion of stringy blonde hairs; a worn softball autographed by the members of his CYO softball team, the green signatures smudged; a navy blue baseball cap with a salty white residue of sweat staining its edges looking as though it could drip onto his ears; a two-dimensional, life-sized witch that he carved from a wooden panel and painted a glistening black that will sit in the front yard, illuminated by a spotlight during the Halloween season; he’ll leave behind a wife and three daughters; the empty corner of the dining room where he would set his briefcase after he came whistling through the door at 5 p.m.; two silver fifty-pound weights crammed beneath a shelving unit where his binders full of teaching materials still rest; a sense of guilt in his oldest daughter for being best friends with her mother; Friday-night, winter bonfires, and the challenge of eating a s’more full of a toasted marshmallow’s sticky goo while still wearing gloves; he’ll leave behind a half-finished bottle of his favorite Crystal wing sauce, its red cap visible over the other bottles that sit in the refrigerator’s door; an amplifier,which he will later return for, that allowed his music to drown out any other sound in the house; a coffee maker that his wife will throw away because she only drinks tea; a kitchen cabinet above the stove stocked with coffee mugs, except for the red one that will sit, half-full of day-old coffee, in the cup holder of his car as he drives away; he’ll leave behind the locks that he would check every night, the ax handle under his bed, and his promise that he was the only security system the house needed; a do-it-yourself handyman guide, its royal blue spine visible on the shelves he constructed using 2-by-4s and stained an almost black shade of brown; a twelve-year-old worried about saying anything wrong and a 19-year-old worried about helping her mother pay the mortgage; the cushioned racks on the ceiling of the garage where his bike was once suspended; a beer bottle opener screwed to the side of the makeshift countertop in the basement, his domain, otherwise known as the “Boys’ Room;” he’ll leave behind the wooden panels of the dining room floor that would squeak as his 225 pounds moved across them as he made his way upstairs at one a.m.; an empty half of a king-sized bed, bought only to accommodate his 6’3’’ stature; the thick wooden bench that his kids used to dance around while he played the guitar and sang: Amy, what you wanna do? I think I could stay with you for a while, maybe longer if I do…; the late night theological debates about who qualifies to get into heaven that would inevitably turn into arguments over the apparent stupidity that is Catholicism and the waste of money that is a Catholic education; he’ll leave behind a quieter atmosphere in the yard beyond the blooming yellow of the forsythia bush, and mere memories of the screaming and sobs that interrupted spring afternoons; the wife that he married “as a business deal to raise the kids” and the daughter who, he feels, “doesn’t know that the phone works both ways;” broken hearts and unanswered questions; suspicions, seen in tearful eyes, of his destination and the company he keeps; the house that was “no longer his home,” but merely a place where he began to feel overwhelmingly unhappy, like a prisoner amongst strangers; he’ll leave behind the life that didn’t exhilarate him like forty mile bike rides, a wife who didn’t satisfy him like a thirty-year-old, and daughters peering out of the bedroom window realizing that that man, the tired, unfamiliar man driving down the street in a pickup, left a few things in their house, but took much more.
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