But on the twenty-fourth of January, a Friday, he passed away in a hospital bed with a window that looked at a parking lot.
I was eighteen.
My heart shattered into a thousand pieces.
I moved in with his younger sister, my Aunt Kaitlyn, in a narrow townhouse on Thistle Street.
Her spare room was too quiet, and I couldn't sleep.
In April, the other girls at school started posting pictures of their prom dresses.
Satin.
Sequins.
Price tags that were bigger than our old rent.
I scrolled and felt nothing.
Then, one rainy night, I opened the cardboard box with my father's belongings.
Twelve work shirts, folded the way he always folded them.
His smell rose out of the box so hard I had to sit down on the floor.
We used to joke about his closet.
Maybe that was the joke he had left me.
I decided to sew a dress from his shirts, in his honor.
