you ever just sit in a house that is finally too quiet and realize you are not even a little bit sad about it like you are supposed to be. you spend forty years swinging a hammer and breaking your knees for a pension and a little piece of property just to come home to a thirty five year old man sitting on your couch eating cereal and playing video games while the drywall you put up with your own two hands starts to yellow around him. i am sixty eight years old and i finally got him out and everyone at the diner or the hardware store asks me if i miss him or if the house feels empty and i just want to tell them it feels like i can finally breathe without someone else sucking up all the oxygen in the room. i do not miss the noise or the smell or the constant crushing weight of his failure just sitting there in the recliner looking like a younger version of my own mistakes. you know that specific sound of a bedroom door opening at noon when you have already been up since five am because old habits die hard and you have a midterm on the pelvic wars or something at nine. that slow creak that tells you he is finally awake and looking for what is for lunch even though he has not touched a shovel or a spreadsheet or a paycheck in three years. i would be sitting there at the kitchen table trying to wrap my head around herodotus or some other dense thing i never had time to read when i was hauling lumber and he would just shuffle past in those grey sweatpants that have seen better decades. it makes you feel like a failure but also like a prisoner in a jail you paid the mortgage on for thirty years straight and there is a certain kind of bitterness that just rots in your gut when you realize your retirement is being spent on extra milk and electric bills for a man who is soft. so last tuesday he finally packs the last of those plastic milk crates into that beat up honda i helped him buy back when i still thought he was actually going to make something of himself. he did not say much just yeah see ya dad and i just leaned against the doorframe watching him pull out of the driveway and i did not cry and i did not feel that tug in the chest people talk about in movies when the bird finally leaves the nest. i just felt my shoulders drop about three inches for the first time since the clinton administration and it was like a physical weight just evaporated off my spine right there on the porch. i stood there and watched the oil spots on the driveway and felt lighter than i did when i was twenty and i am not going to apologize for that to anyone. you walk back inside and the air is just different. it does not smell like stale weed and unwashed laundry and indifference anymore and i went into his room and ripped the curtains open so fast the rod almost came down. it is just dust and empty space now and it is the most beautiful thing i have seen in years. i stood there in the middle of the floor and realized i could turn this into a library or a study or just leave it completely empty and it would not matter because it belongs to me again.