🔹 PART 7 – The Garage and the Ghosts
Saturday came with the first real warmth of spring.
The kind that made the siding on the house crackle softly and carried the smell of grass cut somewhere down the block. Frank opened the kitchen window before noon, let the breeze sweep through the house. It smelled like Windex and wood dust and something else he couldn’t quite name — maybe hope.
By 1:00 p.m., Evan was pulling up the driveway in a rented black SUV with a trunk full of gloves, contractor bags, and deli sandwiches.
“Didn’t want to show up empty-handed,” he said, holding up the lunch like it was an offering. “And I brought the good mustard.”
Frank took the bag. “You’re learning.”
Waffles gave one polite bark from the porch, then settled under the table. His paw was still wrapped, but the limp had improved. Frank swore he could feel the dog getting stronger just from having Evan around more often.
They ate lunch without much talk. Just the scrape of wax paper, the pop of bottle caps, and the occasional crunch of chips.
Then Evan nodded toward the garage.
“You ready?”
Frank looked out at the dented roll-up door, rust nibbling the bottom edges like termites with patience.
“Ready as I’ll ever be.”
The garage had been shut for years.
Not abandoned — just… postponed.
Frank kept the lawnmower in there, and the shovel, but everything else sat behind the old curtain of time. He flicked the light switch — the bulb buzzed but didn’t light. So they worked by sunlight through the cracked window, beams slicing through the dust like stage lights.
First came the obvious things: Christmas decorations missing bulbs, a rusted-out fan, a box of cassette tapes from Evan’s middle school years. Frank held up one.
“You remember this?” he asked.
Evan laughed. “Oh man. That’s the one I used to record fake radio shows on. ‘DJ Ev’ and the ‘Midnight Mutts.’”
Frank chuckled. “You made me call in once and pretend to be a fan.”
“You were the only listener.”
They set that box aside — not to toss, just to remember.
Then they got to the real stuff. Maria’s boxes.
Frank opened one slowly. Inside were worn aprons, recipe cards in looping cursive, a perfume bottle nearly empty. The scent hit him like a sucker punch — lavender and sugar, exactly like she used to smell after baking.
Evan noticed his pause.
“You okay?”
Frank didn’t answer right away. Just picked up a faded photo tucked in the corner of the box. It was Maria holding Evan as a baby — both of them smeared in flour, laughing in the old kitchen.
“Your mother,” Frank finally said, “she never threw out anything with a heartbeat.”
Evan leaned over his shoulder.
“She was the heart of this place,” he said. “You were the spine.”
Frank swallowed the lump in his throat.
“Let’s keep this box,” he said quietly.
They worked for hours.
Some things they threw away without thinking — old tax forms from the ‘90s, a broken radio, a torn Mets pennant. But every so often, they’d stop to laugh or fall silent.
A shoebox of Evan’s kindergarten crafts. A small lockbox filled with Maria’s handwritten notes: grocery lists, reminders to call the doctor, little messages to herself like “tell Frank to rest.”
And then, in the far corner, they found the green trunk.
It took both of them to drag it into the center of the garage. Dust rose like breath when Frank opened it.
Inside were uniforms — sanitation-issued, neatly folded, labeled with his ID tags. Hard hats. Photos from city picnics. And buried beneath it all: a small, hand-painted plaque that read:
“To Frank DeSantis — For Thirty Years of Keeping Our City Clean. With Respect and Gratitude.”
Evan reached in and ran his fingers over the carved letters.
“Why wasn’t this hanging somewhere?”
Frank shrugged. “Didn’t feel like much back then. Just a thing they gave me after a slice of sheet cake.”
“But it’s something,” Evan said. “It mattered.”
Frank looked at his son — really looked.
Evan’s shirt was smudged with dust. His hair a mess. His hands rougher than he remembered. Not a boy anymore. Not just a banker.
A man.
Maybe even one worth knowing.
After they finished, they sat on the porch with beers in hand, Waffles sprawled beside them, head on Evan’s boot.
The sun was low, gold melting over the roofs across the street. Wind pushed through the trees with that soft whistling sound that makes you feel like the world’s about to share a secret.
“You know what I realized?” Evan said.
“What’s that?”
“You kept this place together with your hands. Not your mouth. Not your money. Just… work.”
Frank nodded. “That’s all I had.”
“That’s all I needed,” Evan replied.
They clinked bottles.
Frank leaned back, letting the old wood of the porch settle beneath him.
“Sometimes I think about what people’ll say when I’m gone,” he said quietly.
Evan didn’t answer at first.
Then: “I think they’ll say you were the man who showed up. For his job. For his kid. For a dog in a dumpster.”
Frank smiled. “That’d be enough.”
They sat in silence.
Not the heavy kind.
The kind that feels earned.
Later that night, Frank put the plaque on the living room shelf.
Waffles curled up beside it, as if approving the change.
And for the first time in years, Frank didn’t feel like a man winding down — like he was slowly shrinking into old age.
He felt like a man who’d just begun making space again.
Space for memory.
Space for his son.
Space for the kind of love you can’t say out loud — but still shows up every weekend with tools, mustard, and time.