My Sister Announced Dad’s Death While He Sat Across From Me Alive

seconds, neither of us spoke.

I stared at him.

He stared at the phone.

Finally I asked the obvious question.

“Why are they so certain you’re dead?”

Dad pushed his plate away.

“That’s what I’d like to know.”

There was a reason he had been at my house.

Two days earlier, Dad called and said his furnace had started making a strange noise.

He was seventy-three, stubborn, independent, and convinced that paying a professional for anything he could possibly repair himself was a moral failure.

I told him not to