SHE DIED IN NOVEMBER BY MAX SPARBER

January, 2005

Steve did not like anybody touching his daughter. Once, at a bar, a stranger tried to move her from one stool to the next. Steve responded by breaking the man’s fingers.

Steve took his daughter everywhere, particularly to bars. He hadn’t been close with her while she was alive, and he had missed her funeral after the awful car accident that had killed her. He pleaded with his wife for the girl’s ashes, though, which he kept in a pink Hello Kitty backpack. He could often be seen in a corner booth, empty bottles lined up in front of him, cradling the backpack and talking to it. “Oh, you poor little fucker,” he would say. “My poor baby girl.”

Steve had rules about the backpack. He required his friends to say hello to it, or at least acknowledge its presence with a nod or a tip of their hats. When the backpack was present, Steve’s friends knew better than to talk about inappropriate topics, or even cuss too much. The backpack always sat in the seat next to Steve, even in his car. His friends never made the mistake of violating any of Steve’s rules.

Every Sunday Steve would clean the backpack with a sponge, and every Friday he would take it to a movie with him. Once, on a particularly busy night, an usher asked him to move his backpack, which sat in the seat next to Steve. The usher repeated his request several times, as Steve refused to respond, and then reached for the bag. It took five policemen to subdue Steve. From then on, if Steve wanted to watch a movie with the ashes of his daughter, he did so from a sofa with the film playing on a VCR.

At the end of the evening, Steve would lie in bed with the backpack next to him, and in a quiet voice he would tell it stories about his life. He would tell the backpack how he had met his ex-wife at a gun show in Lincoln, Nebraska. He would explain how she became a born-again Christian after they married, and suddenly she disapproved of all his friends and demanded that he stop drinking. For a while he did as she asked, working as a carpet layer and attending church with her every Sunday, but it got so that he couldn’t take it anymore. One afternoon he came home from work, showered, kissed his baby daughter goodbye, and climbed aboard his motorcycle.

Steve saw his daughter only three times after that day. Each time it was for short periods, the longest lasting half an hour. Steve’s ex-wife hovered over him, or stood at the doorway with her arms crossed, watching suspiciously as Steve held the tiny girl and spoke baby talk. “When you get old enough,” Steve promised his daughter, “you and me can take a bike trip across America.”

After the accident, Steve waited outside the funeral parlor, having missed the ceremony and not wanting to watch the cremation. When the mourners emerged, Steve demanded the ashes. “I never got to see her when she was alive,” he told his ex-wife. “You got to let me have the ashes for a little while, so I can mourn her in my own way.”

His ex-wife agreed, but insisted that he return the ashes to her after a few weeks. She gave Steve the urn, and he took it back to his motel room. There, he carefully scooped the ashes into a large baggie, which he sealed with rubber bands and placed inside the Hello Kitty backpack. He had purchased the bag as a gift for his daughter, intending to give it to her for Christmas, but she died in November.

Steve tried to drive cross country with the backpack, to provide the trip across America he had promised his daughter, but he only got as far as Denver before he ran out of money. He looked up some old friends, and they offered him a room in a house they were renting and told him where he could get work doing construction, and so Steve stayed a while. It took his ex-wife a year to find him, and she sued Steve to regain possession of their daughter. Steve did not even bother to show up to court. Instead, he went to a bar with his friends. “This is going to be the last day I have with my daughter,” he told them. “I want to make it special.” Steve’s friends knew better than to refuse him.

They sat in a booth and drank for several hours without speaking. Steve refused to look at any of them. Instead, he stared intently at the pink backpack. Several times he reached out and touched the bag, running his fingers along it.

“Do we order another round?” he asked his friends, and they nodded. Steve gestured for the waitress. She crossed to them, and Steve held up his backpack to show her.

“What is that?” the waitress asked.

“Ashes,” Steve answered. “I’ve had them for a year. It is my baby daughter. Tonight I have to give them back to my ex-wife. What do you think about that?”

The waitress shrugged.

“Do you want to know what I think?” Steve asked. “Fuck her. That’s what I think. Bring me five pitchers of water.”

Steve lined the pitchers up on the table, and then opened the backpack. He brought out the baggie and undid the rubber bands. Then, using his hand, he carefully scooped the ashes into the pitchers, making certain that the distribution was even.

The ashes turned the water in the pitchers into a thick, gray sludge. Steve poured this sludge into the empty beer glasses on the table, and then set the glasses in front of his friends. “Fuck her,” Steve told his friends. “My daughter is staying here with us.”

Steve brought his glass to his mouth and drank. His friends, knowing better than to do otherwise, lifted their glasses and likewise drank.

Max Sparber is a writer and typographer living in the French Quarter of New Orleans, just around the corner from the site of the J&M Studio, where Roy Brown recorded "Good Rockin' Tonight," Fats Domino recorded "The Fat Man," and Little Richard recorded "The Girl Can't Help It." Sparber's plays include "Cruelties," inspired by the dissolute final years of New Orleans-born writer Truman Capote, and "Minstrel Show," based on the real-life lynching of an African-American in Omaha in 1919.