End

We packed up and cleaned out my dad’s office, ending his legal career and small business ownership of 47 years, the people in and out of the doors were his children, family friends, and a colleague of 40 years, and a wife, and an ex-wife.

All my life dad’s office existed, a third place where you might go to ask to have a speeding ticket reduced to a nonmoving violation (I only did that once, thank you), or go ask for help with a financial crisis (I did more than once).

Dad’s office was, at first, in downtown Kansas City. It acquainted me with valet parking. I was sheepish about leaving my old beater cars with the valets. I’m sure they mostly got to drive nice cars. It acquainted me with downtown, which then was a ghostly place. The 1980s and 1990s in downtown Kansas City were populated with the unhoused and the secretaries who held down theirs skirts as they crossed streets with packets to deliver. Panty hose was required. Lunch places existed solely to feed a workday crowd. My dad regularly got lunch at an Italian deli where they had Ott’s salad dressing (horseradish, mmm). Dad had the kingdom of home, but he also had the kingdom of work. At work there was a bit of profanity and scrappiness and awe, these are legal documents.

The summer I worked in his office, I was in high school, and his secretary had brought in an anatomy book. It was 1993. The secretary and the receptionist were giggling over sexual anatomy and information in the book, and giggled about how maybe I shouldn’t be allowed to see it.

I had no personal knowledge of sex, but felt I had done my research. If I had further questions, I would read Dan Savage’s column in The Pitch.

We lived in a prestigious suburb, so at work was where I realized other people lived in other suburbs, some more rural, and some more working class. I met some people in that category at dad’s work, and many more when I was temping, between colleges.

Dad had an enormous desk in his office, and an enormous credenza. He’s a fan of Titanic-sized furniture. (My mother, on the other hand, loves furniture so light and small that she can move it herself. They are divorced.) Let’s say you went in for financial and legal help, perhaps you had been served with papers on a debt you had no way of paying (JUST AS AN EXAMPLE), you would sit across from dad, on a leather chair, and he would indeed help you. But you would sweat it. He isn’t a coddler.

There was some “Godfather” content as well.

He might have had a cat, but he is allergic.

Dad’s office wasn’t mom’s house, or dad and stepmom’s house, either.

He was sometimes concerned about us being spoiled “princesses.” The only way I felt princess-like was when I walked straight past the receptionist to his office, like, “He’s my dad.” (In the years the receptionist didn’t know me.) (I have this thing about being a behind-the-scenes person that makes me quiver when I set up the communion things at church, or boop my badge at work, getting through ever door.)

My dad and I have some extreme differences of opinion.

And some identical passions.

We are writers and teachers. He says a lawyer is primarily a teacher, teaching clients what the law is and how they can work within it. He was also a writer much more than a litigator, writing contracts, bond deals.

I was assigned to try to protect him from side issues while he went through boxes of papers. I put a Beatles playlist on my phone, stuck it in one of the remaining coffee cups for amplification, and sang along a bit.

I know how to soothe him.

Sometimes.

And myself.

Some things had to be shredded.

Some taken home for a bit more work.

Some were three-year-old issues of Smithsonian magazine, or bar association publications.

One of my stepsisters had flown in to help with the books and the finances. I was deeply grateful, as I don’t know shit about any of that, and she has her own small business. She steadily worked through accounting software. My brother was lifting heavy things and repairing a sink, a door. My sisters were hauling pictures from the walls and going through cassette tapes.

Before arriving at the move out, I was depressed. I didn’t want to go. Once I was there, I remembered how well our family works together, and how satisfying it is to do physical work. I briefly stopped my brother, then my sister, for a dance in the hall. My stepmom brought doughnuts and then lunches. Family friends hauled box after box and vacuumed empty rooms.

I found a piece of a long-lost printer that had written on it: Good OK. We found old billing slips, with carbons, a coffee mug advertising a whorehouse in Vegas (definitely a gag gift), a box of orphaned keys that turned out to fit nothing at all, a handbook for a property management company he’d worked with for decades, including a page on dress codes that directed women to “wear a camisole” with a see-through blouse, and not to wear “slacks.” In the same book were the names of my stepmom and her mother. They met through work.

We packed up the office dishes, and I took the cream and sugar vessels.

We navigated “maybe she wants that” and “I told him he could have that” and “oh no thanks” and the various triangles of miscommunication and diverse viewpoints.

I hauled out six or seven coffee carafes, three clocks, a dozen pictures no one wanted.

I kept an ashtray, and an inkwell my stepmom had bought my dad a long time ago. “You should have this,” she said. We both love old things, and the inkwell is glass, and antique, I’m sure. Though it is quite plain.

People packed up boxes and boxes of outdated law books, best now for insulation or raising small children to table height. I remembered another 20something job, when I worked in a local law library, and a big part of my tasks was reading directions on how to pull and add pages from law books. This was on the brink of an all-online world. We still pulled pages, and added pages as laws changed around the country and the world.

One time at that job, a man came in and asked him to help him get divorced. I said I was not able to do that.

What I cared most about (other than my brother taking home the whorehouse cup) was the Damnit Doll. I don’t know who brought the Damnit Doll in, but ever since I could remember (at least 30 years ago), a cheerful voodoo-like doll made of calico had been pinned to a bulletin board, and next to it, there was a little ditty about how you should take the Damnit Doll and bang its head on something when you were frustrated.

My sister, the only one of us who worked in the office long-term, has taken custody of the Damnit Doll, and I am quite relieved.

The last night before the office was fully gutted, my sister brought cake and balloons and we sang “For He’s a Jolly Good Fellow.” It’s a song that is still known in our culture, but how much is it sung now that television characters can legally sing “Happy Birthday”?

My dad told a few stories about his work, including one about how he had once left a big closing meeting for a bond deal in New York City because he had another crucial appointment, taking one of his daughters to a father/daughter event. I don’t think I was that daughter, but I remember he stayed at the Waldorf Astoria and brought me back soaps and baby shampoo bottles, and I swooned.

So the final leaving of the work, the Damnit Doll relocated, and my Sunday of sore muscles and musings. How to be a good-enough daughter, my gratitude at being part of a family that helps and celebrates, and catches some shrimp thrown by a hibachi chef. You know I don’t catch any.