Is this all there is?
After the death of his parents, Calvin McShane returns to the house he grew up in to prepare it for sale. As he moves through each room, sorting through old possessions and fading memories, he reflects on the complicated family, friendships, and unfinished dreams that shaped his life.
A Pleasant Fiction is a literary, emotionally intimate novel that blends lived experience with reflective storytelling. Told in nonlinear fragments, it follows Calvin through the uneven terrain of grief—where meaning is elusive, and closure is never quite complete. The book revisits themes from The Wake of Expectations a generation later but stands entirely on its own.
Structured loosely around the five stages of grief, this is a raw and meditative story about death, love, memory, and the quiet struggle to move forward. It balances emotional weight with moments of warmth, dark humor, and philosophical insight.
Content Note: Marked “graphic” due to strong language and frank depictions of death and dying. The book contains no sexual content or violence.
For readers who appreciate character-driven fiction with thematic depth, A Pleasant Fiction offers an unflinching, resonant exploration of what it means to lose—and to keep going.
Is this all there is?
After the death of his parents, Calvin McShane returns to the house he grew up in to prepare it for sale. As he moves through each room, sorting through old possessions and fading memories, he reflects on the complicated family, friendships, and unfinished dreams that shaped his life.
A Pleasant Fiction is a literary, emotionally intimate novel that blends lived experience with reflective storytelling. Told in nonlinear fragments, it follows Calvin through the uneven terrain of grief—where meaning is elusive, and closure is never quite complete. The book revisits themes from The Wake of Expectations a generation later but stands entirely on its own.
Structured loosely around the five stages of grief, this is a raw and meditative story about death, love, memory, and the quiet struggle to move forward. It balances emotional weight with moments of warmth, dark humor, and philosophical insight.
Content Note: Marked “graphic” due to strong language and frank depictions of death and dying. The book contains no sexual content or violence.
For readers who appreciate character-driven fiction with thematic depth, A Pleasant Fiction offers an unflinching, resonant exploration of what it means to lose—and to keep going.
I’ve got to clean the fuckin’ pool.
For the entire month of June, it hung over me like a shadow. And I couldn’t motivate myself to get it done. I live out in Lichfield Hollow now, a rural town about an hour west of West Fairfield, where I spent most of the last month at my parents’ house.
Now, it’s the end of July and I still haven’t been in the goddamn pool even once this summer. I opened it on Memorial Day, and before it was warm enough to go in, it had problems. First, there wasn’t enough water in the fucker to clean it properly, then the main panel in the saltwater chlorinator failed. The goddamn pool guys wanted $2400 to fix it. I ordered the parts on Amazon for $300, and an hour of my time later, it works. All I had to do was risk electrocuting myself to death. Not that I even care anymore. Now it’s sprung a fucking leak, and losing a full dick length a week. And I’m not talking about a flaccid one either. Now I don’t have enough water in the pool to properly test for leaks. FML.
And it’s not just the pool. The goddamn dishwasher finally died last month. There was a problem with the latch about five years ago, and, to everyone’s surprise, I was able to fix it. I’m not especially handy, so it was one of my great household accomplishments. Something to make me look like a real man in front of my wife, y’know? I got an extra five years out of it, so it’s not so bad. And then the vacuum gave up the ghost, too. When it broke the first time, I ordered a new one, but the wife liked the old one better. It was a stupid plastic tab that broke off and made it impossible to use. No replacement part was available to order for it, but I was able to jury-rig something with an old screw and some duct tape. It worked for a couple of years longer. Again, I suppose it was worthwhile.
And, yeah, I can guess what you’re thinking. First world problems, asshole. Yeah, you’re right.
But it makes me think, you can’t really fix anything. Not permanently, anyway. Even your biggest successes eventually morph into failures. There’s nothing you can do about it. Eventually, the job requires more than you can reasonably put into it. Time always wins. It’s the second law of thermodynamics: everything tends toward entropy.
I thought things would get better after we sold Mom and Dad’s house. Mom passed last spring, and Dad in February of this year. In between, my brother Jared’s body finally gave up on him, and then Uncle Jerry dropped dead a few months later. It’s been a total shit show.
I have real problems, too.
My therapist says I’m suffering from an acute stress reaction. A series of acute stress reactions, in fact. It may or may not add up to PTSD. I’m not sure. He wrote me a doctor’s note that gets me out of work for a while. And that’s good, because I’m totally fucking useless right now. I mean, multitasking? I can barely walk and chew gum at the same time. Not to mention, my body is falling apart. Like the pool. Like the dishwasher. Like the vacuum. Fifty has been a real motherfucker. I haven’t been able to exercise for shit, since I’m apparently always injured. Having a procedure on my foot in a couple of weeks, then six more weeks on the shelf after that. I tell the therapist I don’t have thoughts of harming myself, but I don’t have to. The damage does itself, regardless of my participation. But I’m having fewer and fewer notions about preserving myself, too. I just don’t care anymore. I want to make sure the kid and the wife are taken care of. For me, I gotta be honest, it feels like I’m done. I’m not in a rush to the grave, but I don’t fear its icy embrace either.
I’m just not looking forward to anything anymore.
After the multiple mortgages Mom and Dad took out on their house, they still owed more than they had equity in it. They lived there for almost thirty-five years. They bought it for under $300k, and nearly four decades later owed more than $400k. How the fuck does that happen? I mean, had they kept it in good repair, the house would have been worth over a million. As it was, with 40-year-old wallpaper, broken bathroom tiles, water damage in the basement, holes in the walls, a leaky boiler, broken central air and a suspect underground oil tank, we could only clear a little more than half of that “as-is”. Most of that went to pay off the mortgage. Ryan and I did OK, after expenses and commissions. But it wasn’t the windfall everyone else expected it to be. I mean, of course they thought that. They don’t know the truth. Cleaning out that fucker was probably the hardest thing I’ve ever had to do.
Next to watching my family die, I guess.
I honestly don’t know what I would have done without my brother, Ryan. He lives a lot closer to my parents’ place. After Dad died, he spent a couple of weeks basically alone in the house, playing hacker with Dad’s computer, getting into all the accounts, identifying all their assets and assessing the overall situation. What did they own? What did they owe? Where the fuck was everything? He said to me, “I hate that I’m spending so much time here now. I should have done this when he was still here.” But he couldn’t have. We couldn’t. Dad didn’t ask us to. He didn’t invite us to. He didn’t want us to. He still wanted his privacy. I’m sure he knew we’d eventually find out everything he didn’t want us to know, and everything he did, but not yet. I’m sure he knew we’d need to. And I’m sure he’s OK with it. He was like that.
Fortunately, West Fairfield is a hot real estate market. Demand far outstrips supply, and available inventory is almost nonexistent. We had the house on the market for one day and got five offers. Which was good, because we had to take it off the market immediately when a family of squirrels moved in and made a mess of it. Of the five offers, one was pretty good, and after a bit of negotiating, we settled on a price. We had been holding the house for about three months, and because there was still a mortgage, it was costing us a not-insignificant amount to do so, so it was imperative to move quickly. So that was the good news. The bad news was it meant that we had to clean out the house in under two months. And we had to get rid of those fucking squirrels before that.
In the two weeks leading up to putting the house on the market, our realtor had encouraged us to clean it out first. She said we could get a lot more for an empty house. It would show better. But that would take time. We couldn’t just hire someone to clean it out for us. There were things we had to go through: papers, files, personal items. Sensitive information. Waiting until we could finish all that would have pushed us out of the lucrative spring market. Moreover, in the condition the house was in—no air conditioning, plumbing problems, underground oil tank—we knew our target market was investors and developers, not end users.
The realtor asked, “When can you have it cleaned out?” I told her it would help to have a deadline. “How about this Friday?” she said. Smart ass.
“No,” I explained, “I mean a closing date. Give me a date when we’ll be cashing out, and I will make it happen.”
Time to put my money where my mouth was.
Unfortunately, Mom and Dad, like most of their generation apparently, were hoarders. And to make matters worse, Uncle Dawson had moved in for a bit about five years before, carting over everything from Grandma’s house with him. So, we didn’t just have thirty-five years of shit—we had eighty-five years of shit piled up in the house. Uncle Dawson is dead now, too. For about five years. At least he got out before COVID. Uncle Dawson was my godfather. He’s the one who introduced Mom and Dad. He said I owed my existence to him. I guess that’s true. He wanted credit for it. He was like that.
And then, Mom had her home office. She owned and operated a respiratory supply company specializing in in-home care for nearly forty years. They kept every client and employee record, every payroll report, every check they ever wrote. They never threw anything away. From the same office, Dad ran several multi-level marketing businesses…plus his music management business, too. Besides the papers, he had thousands of cassette tapes in there, not to mention promotional materials for colloidal mineral supplements and New Age cleaning products—plus three large boxes full of Solitaire’s original demo tapes.
Over the span of four weeks, I had six different teams of junk haulers come to the house. Every single one of them had the same “holy shit” expression on his face. It was the most intimidating mess they had ever seen. Even the last crew, who showed up when five other crews had already hauled away a truckload or two, said it was the worst they had ever seen.
Uncle Dawson had left nearly 200 cans of paint and primer in the basement. He had filled half of the two-car garage with construction debris. It was impossible to see what was in there. I didn’t have the courage to move the pieces of the Jenga pile on top to see what was underneath; I didn’t want to risk a collapse. When the junk haulers peeled away the top layer, they discovered a shed. Literally, a full garden shed in the garage. Disassembled, but complete. A complete fucking garden shed!
In addition, Uncle Dawson had—in a manic episode of apparently monumental proportions—hauled three massive piles of garden pavers and keystone blocks into my parents’ backyard. He was going to build them a patio. One of many projects he started but never finished. It must have taken him weeks to move the stones. Either that, or he had a lot of help. Now I needed to get rid of them in a few days. Jake thought I could sell them. “That shit has value,” he said. Even the estate sale coordinator thought we could sell at least some of it. But those efforts failed miserably. I tried to get my landscaper to take them, but he said they had minimal value because they were discontinued. It seemed like enough stone to finish a job, but he couldn’t risk it. So, I put it all on Facebook Marketplace for free. Five people expressed interest. Only one showed up. She took about half of the smallest pile. The rest were left behind. I had to pay the junk guys to haul it away. 15,000 pounds, they told me. Seven and a half tons of stone. “I didn’t know there was a weight limit on the truck,” the foreman told me. “We exceeded it.”
But at least the stone and the debris in the garage were things I could simply pay someone to take away. The office was a different animal entirely. I had to go through that. It had to be me. Drawer by drawer, folder by folder, paper by paper. Most of it had to be disposed of securely. The upstairs bedroom—what used to be Ryan’s bedroom before he took over mine after I moved out…we called it the “Moon Room” because his old Warren Moon poster still hung on the wall. That was basically a second office, filled with papers in every nook and cranny. These two locations in the house would absorb the lion’s share of our time. The office, specifically, would take up mine.
The rest of the house was a treasure trove of memories. Simple things that had simply been in our lives for as long as Ryan and I could remember. “I spent a lot of time playing under that dining room table,” Ryan told me. Yeah, me too.
Honestly, it was just too much. Dani lives just up the street, and I invited her over to bear witness to the ordeal. She hadn’t been in the house in over twenty-five years. This was not the house she remembered. The look on her face told the story. “What are you going to do?” she asked, her hand covering her mouth. And, in typical Dani fashion, “What can I do to help?”
There was no way in hell we were going to clean this thing out ourselves, but I ordered an enormous dumpster so I could get rid of enough stuff to move. The thoughtless pricks at work would send me thoughtless emails asking me to do things, opening each discussion with, “I hope your summer is going well.” They seemed to think I was on vacation. No, my summer wasn’t going well. I was carrying my family memories out to a dumpster, one armful at a time.
Why is Javier’s protagonist making a big deal out of cleaning the pool? I asked myself when this book’s intro intrigued me. But then I opened a few more pages only to realize it was not just the pool but everything else around this man’s life orbit. It’s not just a ‘thoughtless’ colleague writing to him, beginning with: “I hope your summer is going well.” Not just his life as a father, son, brother and husband. Here, a series of tragedies plague one family. The protagonist carries ‘family memories out to a dumpster, one armful at a time.’ He shares his pain, telling a touching story about love, growing up, and death.
The book serves its purpose. It gives a window through which to see the narrator’s family, especially in their time of hardship. It tells a poignant story about the family that raised the protagonist and his siblings; we meet the parents, loving and caring people who sacrifice all they have for their children’s future. When the doctors reports that Jared, the protagonist's brother, will not make it, the family doesn’t give up and instead cares for Jared the best they can. At one point, the therapist shows the protagonist a video of a grieving woman, perhaps to remind him he’s not alone in his sufferings. Even so, his pain doesn’t compare.
Javier’s voice reaches out, further enriching the protagonist’s frustrations and sheer quest to soldier on. When the protagonist's father refuses to go to the hospital, thanks to Javier’s grip on the narration, the old man’s reason becomes even clearer.
Though the book is a work of fiction, how it’s presented reads like a nonfiction memoir. While this style adds to its strength, it might also confuse some readers. For instance, one can’t separate the author and the protagonist, especially as the story is written from the first-person point of view. I only found out the protagonist's name is Calvin McShane while reading the next book's blurb.
Though the narration moves back and forth, sometimes a deep dive into the narrator’s childhood and sometimes focusing on his adulthood, throughout it all, one wonders if there will ever be a time to look back and celebrate, a time to see the dark past left so far behind. This helps turn the page.
Lastly, because A Pleasant Fiction unfolds masterfully, and maintains a firm grip on family virtues and life’s cruelties, I feel compelled to recommend it to fans of stories—fiction or not—that explore family dynamics and life in general. One more thing, there’s another book coming: The Wake of Expectations.