My brother wanted Dad’s funeral to have a barbecue, a country band, and an open bar.

He said it at the funeral home while I was trying to choose a hymn. The director had given us a quiet room and a stack of paper forms. Dad had been gone for two days. I still expected his name to appear on my phone when I looked down.

“A party,” Mark said. “That’s what he would’ve wanted.”

“He would not have wanted a country band in a funeral home.”

“He hated this place. He said funerals were for the living.”

“He said that after Uncle Ray’s funeral.”

“And he meant it.”

Mark leaned back in his chair. He wore the same leather jacket he had worn to Dad’s last birthday, even though the funeral home was warm.

I was sixty-four. He was sixty. We had spent most of our lives agreeing about our father’s stubbornness and arguing about what it meant.

Dad had been a quiet man. He built cabinets, fixed radios, and kept a small garden behind his house in Fort Wayne. He never said much about what he wanted. When we asked if he wanted a big birthday dinner, he said, “I’ll be dead before I eat all that cake.” When we asked if he wanted a church funeral, he said, “Don’t make people drive if they don’t want to.”

He had spent thirty years at a cabinet shop, and the men there kept calling him long after he retired. If somebody had a door that would not hang straight or a drawer that stuck, Dad would show up with a level and a small paper bag of screws. He almost never charged. I thought of those visits as more work.

Mark thought they were Dad’s way of staying connected to people. Once, a young man from the shop came to our house after his father died. Dad listened while the boy sat at the kitchen table, then handed him a sandwich and drove him home. Mark had gone with him. I had been out buying groceries and only heard about it later.

We had each inherited a piece of Dad, and neither piece was the whole man.

Mark heard those remarks as permission to celebrate. I heard them as a request not to make a fuss.

“I have to pick a date,” I said. “The pastor can do Thursday afternoon.”

“Thursday? That gives people three days.”

“Dad asked for a simple service.”

“He didn’t ask you. He said whatever he said to get us to stop asking.”

“That doesn’t mean we should turn it into a concert.”

Mark’s face hardened. “You always do this.”

“Do what?”

“Act like you were the only one who knew him.”

I put the hymn sheet down. “I was the one driving him to appointments for the past six months.”

“And I called every week.”

“After I told you he was sick.”

“I offered to come.”

“You offered. Then you said you couldn’t miss work.”

“I had a crew counting on me.”

“And I had a father counting on me.”

The funeral director lowered her eyes to the paperwork. I hated that we were making her sit through the oldest argument in our family.

It had started when Mark left for college and I stayed home to help Dad after our mother died. For years, he had accused me of acting as if staying made me more loyal. For years, I had accused him of leaving the hard parts to me.

When Dad’s heart trouble got worse, Mark offered to drive him to a cardiology appointment. I told him I had already made arrangements. I had used my lunch break to book it, and the clinic was ten minutes from my work. Mark said he could take the day off. I answered that it wasn’t necessary. The truth was I didn’t want to ask my supervisor to change my schedule again, and I didn’t want Mark to see how much Dad had slowed down. I told myself I was protecting both of them. What I actually did was keep the routine in my hands and then resent him for not carrying it.

He had come over after Dad’s diagnosis and sat with him on the porch. I had gone inside to sort pill bottles and heard the two of them laughing at the television. It made me happy and jealous at the same time. I was grateful Dad still had those easy hours with Mark. I also wanted to be the one who could give them to him, and I couldn’t. I was too busy making sure the medication was right, the meals were soft enough, and the next appointment was on the calendar.

The director cleared her throat. “I can give you both a few minutes.”

“No,” I said. “Let’s finish the arrangements.”

Mark pushed his chair back. “Fine. You can have the church service. I’ll do the reception.”

“I didn’t say you couldn’t have a reception.”

“You said no to the band.”

“I said a country band in a funeral home wasn’t Dad.”

“Maybe that’s because you only remember him in that hospital bed.”

The words struck the place I had tried to keep closed. Dad had been in and out of the hospital since early spring. His lungs had weakened after pneumonia, and the doctor told us his heart was failing. The last time I saw him awake, he was propped up in a hospital bed and asked if I had watered the tomatoes. I had told him yes, though I had forgotten to check that morning.

Mark had seen him at home before the final hospital stay. They watched a baseball game and ate chili from the pot. I had not been there. Dad had laughed more that afternoon than he had in weeks. Mark had taken a picture, which he now kept on his phone.

I had always thought of the last months as proof of what I had carried. Mark thought of them as proof that Dad was still his father, not just a patient.

The director folded her hands on the desk. “Maybe it would help to talk about what you each want people to remember.”

Mark and I looked at her, then at each other.

“I want people to remember he was kind,” I said. “He never made a person feel stupid for not knowing how to fix something.”

Mark looked at the old carpet. “I want people to remember he could have fun. He didn’t always have to be the responsible one.”

I thought of the hospital bed again. “He was both.”

“Then let’s make room for both,” the director said.

We decided on a short service at Dad’s church, followed by a gathering at the VFW hall where he had played cards with his friends. No country band, but Mark could bring a guitar and play a few songs. The food would be barbecue from the place near the river Dad liked. We could invite the men from his workshop and the women from his church group. It sounded manageable. I still felt the pressure of being the person who would make sure it happened.

After the funeral home, Mark walked me to my car. He stood beside the passenger door with his hands in his jacket pockets.

“You could have called me more,” he said.

“I called.”

“You called when something was already wrong.”

“I didn’t know what else you wanted me to call about.”

“Not just bad news. I could’ve come over and sat with him.”

I was so tired that I nearly let the sentence pass. Then I turned to him. “I needed help. I didn’t know how to ask without feeling like I was begging you to be our son.”

His eyes narrowed. “I was his son.”

“I know.”

“No, I don’t think you do.”

I had an answer ready. It was about the medication chart, the groceries, the nights Dad called because he had spilled water beside the bed. It was about how I had canceled a weekend trip because the home aide had the flu. But I could hear how that answer would sound: a list presented as evidence that I loved him more.

“I’m sorry,” I said. “I did make it sound like there was no room for you. I was overwhelmed, and I thought I could manage it faster by doing everything myself.”

Mark’s shoulders loosened a little. “I’m sorry I kept saying I’d help later.”

We stood there for a moment. Neither of us hugged. We had never been a hugging family, though we had gotten better at trying since our mother died.

“I’ll bring Dad’s guitar to the hall,” Mark said.

“Can you also call his workshop friends? I don’t know all their numbers.”

“Yeah. I can do that.”

The next day, I went to Dad’s house to find his black suit. Mark arrived an hour later with a box of old photographs. He put it on the coffee table and said, “I found these in the top drawer. Some are from before you were born.”

We sat on the rug and sorted through them. There was Dad at twenty-one, standing beside a station wagon with a cigarette rolled in his sleeve. There was our mother laughing under a picnic shelter. There was Mark in a Halloween costume that looked like a homemade bear, and me with two missing front teeth, holding a fish too small to keep.

We stopped at a photo of Dad in the yard, holding a tomato that looked like a red fist.

“He gave me that one,” I said. “Told me it was the best one he’d ever grown.”

“He told me that too.”

I laughed. “He was a terrible liar.”

“He was a good gardener.”

The old rivalry loosened a little more. It did not disappear. When we reached the pictures from the last year, Mark picked up one of Dad sitting on the porch with a blanket over his knees. He was smiling at something beyond the frame.

“That was the day we watched the Tigers,” Mark said. “He fell asleep in the seventh inning.”

“He always did.”

“I should have come more.”

I put my hand over the edge of the photograph. “I should have asked you to.”

He sat back and looked at me. “You were there. You did a lot.”

I felt my eyes sting. “I don’t need a medal.”

“I know.”

“I just didn’t want to be angry at you at his funeral.”

“You still might be.”

“That’s true.”

We both smiled, not because it was funny but because it was honest.

The service was on Thursday afternoon. The church was not full, but nearly every row had someone in it. Dad’s workshop friends wore work boots and pressed shirts. The pastor spoke about his steady hands and his habit of fixing things without asking to be thanked. I read a short memory about the garden. My voice shook when I reached the line about the tomatoes, but I finished.

Mark played “Take Me Home, Country Roads” on his guitar. He sang softly, and the congregation joined him on the chorus. The song was not Dad’s favorite, but he had sung it on long drives with us when we were children. For once, I was glad Mark had insisted.

At the VFW hall, the barbecue arrived in foil pans. One of Dad’s friends brought a deck of cards and set it on a table by the coffee urn. Someone pinned the photograph of Dad with the tomato to a corkboard. Mark placed his guitar on a chair and played while people came through the line.

I had worried that the reception would feel too loud. It was noisy, but not in a way that erased Dad. It sounded like the people who had spent years sharing work, meals, and small favors with him.

After everyone had eaten, one of the workshop men told a story about Dad repairing a broken radio in the break room. The man had offered him twenty dollars. Dad had refused and said the repair was worth one slice of pie. The room laughed, and I could see him saying it in that dry voice of his.

Mark stood beside me, his guitar strap still over his shoulder. “That sounds like him,” he said.

“Yes.”

“Thank you for letting me play.”

“Thank you for choosing a song he knew.”

We started cleaning up after the last guests left. Mark carried the empty pans to the kitchen. I gathered the photographs and put them back in their box. The funeral director had lent us folding easels; we stacked them by the exit.

When we were done, the room was quiet except for the refrigerator humming behind the kitchen door. Mark stood with his hands on his hips, looking at the empty tables.

“I thought the band would make it easier,” he said.

“What?”

“The funeral. If it felt like a party, I wouldn’t have to think about the hospital.”

I put the last picture in the box. “I thought keeping it simple would make it easier.”

“Did it?”

“No.”

He nodded. “Me neither.”

Outside, he helped me put the photographs in the back seat of my car. Then he took my hand for a second and squeezed it. Neither of us said that everything was fine. It wasn’t. Dad was gone, and there were still months of calls and decisions we would have to make about his house and tools. But we had both learned something about how the other one had carried him.

On Sunday, Mark came to my house and helped me sort Dad’s workshop. He took the small radio he had repaired with Dad when he was twelve. I kept the tomato photo. We put the good tools in a box for his friends at the shop and left the rest on the workbench until we were ready.

We did not decide everything that day. We ate sandwiches on the porch and told the same stories twice. Mark asked whether I wanted the hand plane Dad had used to make our mother’s pantry shelves. I said he should take it; he had the space and knew how to use it. He offered me the small radio instead, but I told him I wanted the tomato picture and one of Dad’s old aprons. We did not divide his things by who had done more. Before Mark left, he asked when I wanted to come over for dinner.

“Next week,” I said. “Nothing fancy.”

“I can do barbecue.”

“Only if you bring the pie.”

He laughed. “Deal.”

I watched him drive away. The house looked the same as it had the day before, but the quiet inside it no longer felt like an argument we had left unfinished. Dad had not asked us to remember him the same way. He had given us enough life together to remember him differently and still sit at the same table.