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It had been well over 30 years and Ennis was an old man. An old, dying man. His joints were stiff with arthritis, heart weakened by a recent near-fatal attack, lungs full of cancer and barely holding on. The hair on his head was white and thin, and his skin had wrinkled and drooped, face pale, eyes cloudy. His lungs wouldn't let him walk halfway across his trailer without feeling like he might collapse. He still refused to quit smoking, stubborn as a bull no matter how much his daughters begged him. Wasn't much point, not when death was already so close, he figured.
And the smoke that was killing him was also one of the only things he really lived for.
The smoke, his children and grandchildren, and the memories of a man he'd be seeing soon enough.
Worst part was, through all his physical ailments, Ennis' mind was fit as it always had been. No dementia, alzheimer's, nothing. He sometimes wished something would take away the memories. Let him forget, for once, how much of an astronomical fuck-up his life had been.
But deep down he was glad to hold on to everything. He'd already lost Jack once, and sure as hell didn't want to lose him -- what was left of him -- again. And the thought of Jack never again visiting him in his dreams made him sick.
So he kept on living, because Jack would've wanted him to be strong. He kept on remembering, kept on breathing in smoke and the fabric of those two faded shirts, kept on dreaming of blue eyes and even bluer skies, kept on waking up to see the cold, hard ceiling. There'd been enough time to think that he'd accepted everything there was to accept. Now all he could feel was regret.
Doctors had long since given up on trying to help Ennis -- he was the worst patient he could possibly be, refusing any sort of treatment for his cancer, and never taking any of his medication unless someone forced him to. He only saw a doctor in the first place because Junior and Kurt started showing up at his trailer once a month, practically wrestling him into the truck and down to the city hospital for a checkup.
July came, and so did Ennis' visit to the hospital he hated in the city he hated to talk to people who wanted to keep him alive, who he hated. They took his blood, checked his lungs, his heart, the usual. They asked him how many cigarettes he smoked each day. He exaggerated his answer in spite.
So when the doctor sat Alma Junior and Kurt down in the waiting room, solemn looks on their faces, and said that Ennis' lungs lit up like a cancer-coated Christmas tree and he wasn't likely to be around longer than another three months, nobody was surprised. Junior cried and Kurt held her, rocking her in his arms, feeling more bewilderment than sadness at Ennis' self-destruction.
"It's a shame," one of the nurses said to her coworker after the three left. "With the right treatment, he could've had another good 20 years in him."
"You know how these old folks can be," the coworker replied. "Stubborn old bastards."
Junior found the courage to tell Ennis halfway through the drive home.
"Daddy?" she said, twisting around in the passenger seat to look at him.
"What?"
Tears started to well up in Junior's eyes, and Ennis knew what was coming. "They told us... during your appointment..." Her voice made a choked noise and cut off her words.
Ennis' mouth hitched up in a sad smile. "I'm dyin'?"
She sniffled and wiped her eyes. Kurt looked away from the road to squeeze her shoulder.
"Yeah, Daddy. They said--" a tear escaped and ran down her cheek. "Three months, they said."
Ennis didn't say anything, just looked out the window and up towards the blue, blue sky.
Junior made some more sniffley choked noises, but when she had calmed her breathing enough to speak again, her voice was stern.
"You're coming to live with us."
Ennis' mouth opened automatically to protest. His daughter had tried to get him to move in with her countless times over the years, but he always declined. He told himself he liked living in his shitty little trailer. The solitude. The peace. The shirts hanging in the closet.
Kurt chimed in before he could say anything. "Yeah, Ennis." His voice had something broken behind it, too, like tears caught in his throat. "You are. No debate."
"No," Ennis shook his head. "No. You don't... you don't gotta do that. I've been living just fine on my own--"
"You haven't been living!" Junior cut him off. Her voice had something strong in it that Ennis hadn't heard since she was a teenager. "You've been dying! You've been dying, Daddy, for forty goddamn years out there, all alone, and now all that dying has caught up to you and I'm not letting it end in a cold box way out in the middle of nowhere."
Ennis tried to speak again, but she continued, growing more and more hysterical with each word. Something had finally snapped in her, something that had been pushed away for decades. "We've done nothing but try to help you, me and Kurt and Jenny and Phillip -- even Mom and Monroe, for Christ's sake. But you won't take it! For whatever reason, you can't stand it when someone tries to love you! You could've had a real good life after you retired, fuckin' real good life. Could've moved in with us, lived with your daughter and your grandkids like a lonely old man should. But you didn't want it, Daddy!"
She took a deep, shaky breath. Those words had been brewing for most of her life now, ever since she was a little girl, crying and wondering why her daddy didn't seem to love her as he ought to. And now the words were out, and she couldn't stop as more followed. They came straight from the heart of her younger self.
"There have been a damn few times you've ever let anyone really love you, and a damn fewer you've ever loved them back. We just want you in our lives, and you... and you won't stand for it! There are people that need you and have always needed you and hardly ever get to have you! You have no idea how hard it is, Daddy! For us, for your grandkids, for Mom, before..."
She stopped because she realized Ennis was crying. His shoulders heaved, shaking with heavy, silent sobs, his face looking at his feet, head resting against the window. Junior had never seen him cry before -- she hadn't thought he was capable.
He cried because she was right. He cried because he'd heard the same words before. He cried because even after all the time that had passed, after all the thinking and accepting and remembering he'd done, he still hadn't changed. And now it was far too late.
"Hey, it's all right," Junior soothed. "I'm sorry, Daddy. I shouldn't have yelled. I... I didn't mean it."
They both knew she did. Ennis breathed deep, tried to calm himself down, wiped away the few tears that had stained his cheeks. He said the only thing he could think of saying.
"I just can't stand this anymore, darlin'."
Junior nodded. She looked at her father differently now, like she was seeing him in a new light, a side of him she hadn't known existed. "I know. I'm sorry. It'll all be okay."
No, he wanted to say, It's not okay. It's not okay that I've pushed away everyone that ever loved me and now I'm dying before I can fix it. But he just nodded.
The drive back was quiet. Junior and Kurt dropped Ennis off at his trailer, and Junior told him she'd be back the next morning to help him pack. He accepted it with a hug, a kiss to the top of her head, and a silent promise to fix as much as he could in the last few months he had left. For himself, for his daughters, for the future generations of his family. For Jack.
Ennis stared at the shirts and postcard for an extra long time that night. He took the sacred fabric in his shaky hands and decided that he would wake up early, before Junior arrived, and pack the remnants of Jack away himself. He would keep them on his person until the moving was done, maybe tucked away in his jacket pocket. He vowed to find a safe corner for them in Kurt and Junior's house, where they could be securely private and hidden away from the world until the end of time.
So when he awoke the next morning to the sounds of footsteps clomping through his trailer, furniture scraping across the floor, and the rustling of cardboard boxes, he sat up in bed so quickly it sent lightning bolts of pain through his ribs and gasped so loudly his lungs felt like someone has drenched them in kerosene and dropped a lit match.
"Oh, you're awake!" Junior said from where she stood in the kitchen area, moving dishes from the cabinet into a box, casual like she hadn't shattered Ennis' vital plan with her presence. "Sorry. Didn't mean to scare you."
He blinked. He blinked again. The watch on his bedside table read 9:23 -- later than he thought he'd ever woken up before. His eyes shot straight to the closet, and saw that, thank God, it hadn't been disturbed. There were boxes under the kitchen table and outside the bathroom, holding utensils and medications respectively. She hadn't gotten to his clothes yet.
"You alright?" Junior asked, concerned over her father's silence and the look on his face, washed pale in realization.
"Yeah," he managed to say, his voice a weak, shaky thing. "Yeah. I jus'-- gotta--" he crawled out of bed and stumbled into the bathroom.
The door swung shut behind him and he leaned with his forehead against the splintery wood wall, breaths coming ragged, mind dizzy with apprehensive terror of what he knew was going to happen. It was as if he was standing off to the side of a railway track, where two massive, sprinting, screeching steam locomotives approached each other head-on, seconds away from a devastating crash that would surely destroy them both, and Ennis had no choice but to watch the chaotic tragedy ensue, helpless. He saw before him everything that would come crumbling down in this moment, steel and sparks flying from a collision of two mechanical beasts -- That faraway summer atop Brokeback. His failed marriage. His inadequate job as a father. Years and years of fishing trips. A postcard that read DECEASED. Two shirts hanging in a closet. Alma Junior. Jack. Two realms of his life that were never meant to come into contact. And now they were, in the worst nightmare scenario he could imagine, like a final fuck you from the universe just before his timely death.
He didn't know how long he stood there, hyperventilating as best as his clogged lungs allowed and seeing nothing but this impending doom. Eventually, a sound pulled him back into reality: Junior's voice, in a questioning tone -- "Daddy?"
He forced his legs to take him out of the bathroom, forced his eyes to open. Junior was hardly a foot away from the closet. His heart sank.
"I'm... I'm gonna start packing up your clothes now," she said, watching him strangely.
She took a step towards the closet door.
Her hand came up and grasped the wooden knob.
He tried to make a noise but nothing came out. He couldn't tear his eyes away from the train wreck.
And then she was opening the door, and her eyes went straight to the display inside. She stood there, looking at Jack, at Brokeback Mountain, at the history of love and loss and regret, at her father's failures, his secrets, the most private things of all, so fiercely guarded within himself and the closet.
She looked at it all for a long time, then looked up at him. He tried to compose himself. Tried to remember the promise he'd made about fixing things. Tried to think about what Jack had always wanted, all those years ago.
"What's this?" Her voice was small. She inspected the shirts closer. "Are these yours?"
She held the fabric of one of the sleeves, ran her finger over the blood stain. Ennis' heart wretched at that, the two people he loved most being so close, Junior and Jack.
"One of 'em." He didn't feel so scared anymore. Felt like Jack was there with him, and the air was warmer, kinder, thick with something like love.
She stared at him like he was a new man. Then she took the shirts off their hook, and the postcard, and brought them into the kitchen, where she laid everything carefully over the table.
"Come. Sit down."
Ennis did, taking a seat across from her at the tiny table. Her eyes were wide, watching him with wonder.
"Whose shirt is this, Daddy?" She spoke quietly and carefully, like she was trying not to spook him.
Ennis breathed in deep as he could. He remembered his promise. He remembered Jack's death. He thought of his own, rapidly approaching. Might as well get it all out there -- he didn't have much left to lose.
"Jack. Jack Twist." The name tasted weird in his mouth, not having been spoken aloud in decades.
"Jack Twist." Junior turned the name over in her mind. "I remember him. You were friends. Jenny and I met him, once."
Ennis nodded. Junior waited for an explanation of why Jack Twist's old shirt was in Ennis' closet, wrapped up in his own. Ennis didn't know what to say.
"We was nineteen when we first met," he started, and the words felt right, so he continued. "Herdin' sheep, up on this mountain." He pointed to the postcard. "Brokeback."
He told her about that first summer, about the sheep and the horses, about the freezing rivers and flickering campfires, about that mean old sonofabitch Aguirre. He told her about how he and Jack would spend all night in front of the fire, how they'd talk and watch the stars, smoking stale cigarettes and sharing a bottle of whiskey. He explained the blood on the shirts, from a fight they'd gotten into over nothing, really. Jack was a rodeo cowboy, he said. Hated his old man. Wanted to be some big star. Full of dreams.
The words tumbled out, stories upon stories, and something about telling them was so addicting he couldn't stop. A small voice in the back of his mind told him Jack would be proud.
He watched Junior's face, saw the gears turning as she put everything together. "So all those years, those fishing trips..."
He nodded and looked down, away from her eyes, guilt rising in his throat like bile.
Junior remembered her daddy running off every few months, promising to bring back fish and coming back empty-handed. She remembered fights she'd overheard between her parents, that one year on Thanksgiving, when he'd stormed out the house and left Mom sobbing. She remembered her mom's reaction when they'd seen on the television that gay marriage had been legalized across the nation. Nasty.
"Is Jack... still around?"
Ennis shook his head. He felt tears coming, pushing at the backs of his eyes, but he suppressed them. He wouldn't cry in front of Junior twice in two days, no way.
"No, he..." he wiped his eyes with his sleeve. "He died. Back in '82." His breaths started to come easier then, as if a great weight had been lifted off his shoulders.
Junior's eyes widened even further. She looked between the embrace of shirts and her father, clearly trying not to cry, and she realized that he'd loved Jack, loved him more than anything, all his life. She realized that he was not just cold and loveless, but suffering a heartbreak that was slowly killing him. And his suffering was silent. She felt the weight of being the first person with whom he'd ever shared his sorrow, just months before he was to die.
"I'm sorry," she said, stood up, and took her pained, grieving, dying father in her arms. He clutched onto her like a lifeline and cried, calm and silent, until there were no tears left.
Ennis died in his sleep two months later, in Junior and Kurt's spare bedroom. When Junior found him in the morning, he was curled up tight in the warm bed, with four pillows and three extra blankets, and she thought she saw a hint of a smile across his face.
She was sad, of course. If she let her self admit it, much sadder than she thought she would be. But Ennis' passing gave her the opportunity to do something he hadn't allowed when he was alive.
The two frames she bought online, custom, so everything would be perfect. They were both dark red mahogany wood, simple but nice-looking. She retrieved the shirts and postcard from the closet in the bedroom where Ennis had insisted on keeping them.
It was a pain in the ass to mount the shirts to the wall without damaging the paint, but she figured it out. They fit in the frame perfectly, just as Ennis had left them, his own enfolding Jack's since 1982 and for the rest of time. Next to them was the framed postcard of Brokeback. The whole ensemble sat in the hallway of the main foyer, so that everyone who entered the house would see them. If anyone asked, Junior would just tell them the items had been special to Ennis and she simply wanted to display them.
The love between Ennis and Jack had been a secret its entire life. But Junior thought the things her father had told her were too beautiful to be hidden away, so while the remnants existed in her household, she was proud to honor their story.