Strict Diet

Though the doctors said no salt, salt was all my father craved. His body bloated, skin water-logged and gray, still he wanted potato chips, honey-baked ham, greasy slabs of Polish sausage from Piekutowski's. He begged for pepperoni pizza, garlic butter, ribs slathered in sauce. But when I did the shopping, I searched only for labels that saidlow sodium and no preservatives, instead bringing home heads of broccoli, turkey burgers, shredded wheat. And when he died anyway, guilt gnawed me like an ulcer— how could I have denied him his few final pleasures?— until I found Big Mac wrappers stuffed under the car seat, jars of pickles in the hall closet, and hidden among wads of tissues near the night stand, his stash— a half-used canister of salt. I sat down on his sagging mattress now stripped of stained sheets and studied that blue label with the girl in the yellow dress holding her umbrella against a rain of salt still falling from the sky.