The Smile

The trick to a funeral is the same as a power play. Keep moving. Stay in position. If you stop skating, you're just a body standing on ice, and bodies standing on ice get hit.

I'm nineteen. My father is in a box at the front of a room that smells like carpet cleaner and somebody's grandmother's perfume, and I am shaking hands with people whose names I should know. My mother is four feet to my left, which I know without looking because I've been tracking her position for three hours the way I track the puck during a cycle play. Peripheral. Automatic. If she wobbles, I'm there.

She hasn't wobbled. That should comfort me.

"Ben, honey. Your father was such a good man." This from a woman in a blue dress. She squeezes both my hands and I squeeze back, calibrated. Firm enough to say *thank you*, soft enough to say *I'm okay*. I've been running this handshake for three hours and the calibration is flawless.

"He really was. Thank you for coming."

"He was always smiling. Even last time I saw him at the hardware store, he was smiling. Helping Frank with the drywall order. Wouldn't let Frank carry a thing."

"Yeah." I smile. "That was Dad."

She moves on. The next one steps up. Different face, same sentence: *He was always smiling.*

Here's what I know. My father, Tomasz Kowalski, construction foreman, built things for thirty-one years. Framed houses. Poured foundations. Hung drywall for other people's living rooms while ours had a crack in the ceiling he kept meaning to get to. He lifted things that were too heavy and called it Tuesday. He ate lunch out of a cooler on job sites in January and called it fresh air. He worked six days a week and came home smelling like sawdust and joint compound, and when my mother asked how his day was, he said *good, good* and meant *I'm still standing, which is the same thing.*

He had chest pains for four months. Didn't tell anyone. Didn't slow down. Didn't sit in a waiting room or fill out a clipboard or let anyone see the hand pressed against his sternum at 5 AM when he thought the house was asleep.

I saw. Once. Through the bathroom door he forgot to close. He was leaning on the counter with both hands, head down, breathing through his mouth. His face in the mirror looked like a load-bearing wall with a crack running through it. I stood in the hallway for maybe ten seconds. Then I heard him straighten up, heard the faucet run, heard him whistle some Polish folk song my grandmother used to sing. By the time he came out, the face was repaired. Plaster over the crack. Good as new.

I went back to bed. I was seventeen.

I didn't say anything. He didn't say anything. The crack didn't exist if nobody pointed at it. That was the blueprint. That was always the blueprint.

Two years later, the wall came down.

Massive myocardial infarction. That's what the doctor said. Those three words instead of the one word, which is *dead*. My father was fifty-two. He was carrying a bundle of two-by-sixes up a flight of stairs on a job site in Mississauga, and his heart stopped, and the two-by-sixes hit the plywood subfloor before he did because his hands let go a half-second before his knees.

The foreman on the crew said he'd seemed fine that morning. Said he was smiling.

"Ben." This is my uncle. My father's brother. Same hands, same jaw, same way of standing like the floor might need holding up. "You're doing good. Your mother, she's doing good. He'd be proud."

"Thanks, Uncle Marek."

"You need anything, you call."

"I will."

I won't. He knows I won't. He won't call either. Kowalski men don't call. Kowalski men show up with casseroles and fix your furnace and refuse to sit down because sitting down means the visit has a purpose beyond *I happened to be in the area, which is forty minutes from my house.* We are a family of load-bearing walls. We hold the ceiling up and we don't discuss the cracks.

The reception is at Aunt Katarina's house. Her kitchen smells like bigos and boiled potatoes and the particular grief of Polish women who cook when they can't cry, or cook because they're crying, or cry into the bigos and serve it anyway because the living still need to eat.

I carry trays. I refill drinks. I tell the story about the time Dad tried to build a deck and forgot to check if the ground was level, so the whole thing tilted three degrees to the left. "We called it the Kowalski Lean," I say, and the kitchen laughs, and the laughter sounds like relief, like I've given them permission to breathe, and I realize with a sickness in my stomach that this is the same thing my father did.

The smile. The joke at the right moment. The exhale he gave other people so they didn't have to hold their breath.

I'm standing in my aunt's kitchen, doing my father's act, wearing my father's face.

My mother finds me outside twenty minutes later. I'm sitting on the back steps. November in Ontario, so the cold has teeth, but I'm in my dress shirt with the sleeves rolled to the elbows because the cold is doing something useful, which is reminding my body that it exists.

"Beniamin." She only uses the full name for serious things. She sits next to me. Doesn't ask if I'm okay. Doesn't touch me. Just sits, with her hands wrapped around a mug of tea that's probably gone cold, and waits.

"Mom."

"You don't have to do that."

"Do what?"

"His job." She takes a sip of the cold tea and doesn't flinch. "The smiling. The carrying. You have been doing it all day and you think no one sees, but I see. I saw him do it for thirty years."

The cold bites through my shirt. My hands are on my knees and they've gone still, which never happens. They're always moving. Drumming, fidgeting, taping sticks, finding something to hold. Right now they're just sitting there like two things that forgot what they're for.

"He was fine," I say, and my voice sounds like his voice, and that's the worst part. "Everyone keeps saying he was fine. He was smiling. He was helping. He was carrying things."

"Yes."

"And then he was dead."

She doesn't say anything for a while. The tea steams in the cold air, which means it's not as cold as I thought, or she made a fresh cup and I didn't notice. Behind us, through the kitchen window, I can hear my uncle telling a story and the room responding with the kind of laughter that lives next door to crying.

"Your father loved you very much," she says. "He was also wrong. About the smiling. About the carrying." She pauses. "About the chest."

"I know."

"Do you?"

I open my mouth. Close it. The answer is complicated and the complicated part is that I know he was wrong the way you know a wall is cracked. You can see it. You can point at it. You can hire someone to fix it. But if you grew up in that house, if the crack was always there, it just looks like the wall. It looks like how walls are supposed to be.

"I'll be fine, Mom."

She looks at me. She has this look that doesn't argue. Just holds. Like she's set a level against my sentence and she can see the bubble sitting off-center, but she's going to let me keep building anyway because the foundation isn't going to change tonight.

"Okay," she says. "Come inside when you're ready."

She goes in. The screen door closes behind her.

I sit on the steps for another ten minutes. The cold works its way through the dress shirt, through the undershirt, into the skin. My hands start moving again. Fingers drumming on my knee. Finding the rhythm. Getting back to work.

Inside, someone laughs. The sound carries through the window and I catalog it without meaning to: the pitch, the timing, the slight catch at the end where the laughter almost tipped into something else. My father's house. My father's people. My father's trick, passed down like a tape job or a recipe or a surname.

I stand up. Roll my sleeves down. Put the smile on.

It fits perfectly. It always has.