Jon Fain
Pater Unfamilias
I didn’t know Brenda’s father very well before he moved in with us. I knew he had taken early retirement, but not from what, and it turned out to be pharmaceutical sales. Earl said he left the last company he worked for when they’d offered him a good package.
“Just as well. They wanted us to get too scientific.”
When I met Brenda, she had a rental nearby. Earl was there visiting. He and my father, who I was staying with after my mother died, had met on their respective early morning walks.
Earl and Brenda came over for dinner, and things started happening with me and her, and a little more than a year later, here we were. After my father went to Florida, I agreed to look after the house, and when her lease down the road ended, I asked Brenda if she wanted to move in.
She took a while to say yes, and when she did asked if her father could come too. She assured me Earl being there was going to be temporary. He’d sold his house in North Carolina and was building a new one down there, but it had been delayed so he’d come back to Massachusetts. Now he was staying in what had been my old room when I was a kid.
He had plenty of stories. He’d been a district manager at one drug place, Genfill Pharma. More money, he said, but you had to deal with all the sales reps and their issues. He preferred to focus on the craft of selling, although he didn’t exactly put it like that.
“Doctors mix cocktails, but they have no idea how anything works. They need a mixologist, and that was us. First therapy I sold at GP was a growth hormone. Targeted boys who’d be too little without it. If you could, you bonded with the parents, worked short man complex. Your kid’s going to be a megalomaniac with a tiny dick.”
“You told them that?”
“When I became manager, I got rid of the dead wood, hired more women, mostly ex-nurses because nurses have seen a lot of shit, been through it. Then our new drug was heart. The cardiologists are a harder nut to crack than pediatric endocrinologists but they’re all men so throwing women at them never hurt.”
One night a little over a week after he’d arrived, I was making home fries and he came into the kitchen. This was already happening a lot. He’d show up around dinner. With roommates, in college, or after, and at least at the beginning of my short-lived marriage, I’d learned to accommodate. This was something like that.
Brenda was away on another work trip. She wasn’t due back until the end of the week. She was sales too, like Earl, but she sold computer hardware, big company to big company.
My father was in Florida with Nancy Sistare, a local woman who he’d taken up with after my Mom died. I’d known her two kids a little, her daughter Becky had become a town cop. My father wanted someone to watch the house while he continued his new relationship and I would do as well as anyone since I was already there. I’d finally asked him about Brenda moving in after she already had. I was back in the house where I’d grown up since my mother’s final days with no real plan. And often no Brenda. Just Earl.
“What are you making? Besides that,” he said.
“Reheating some chicken from the other night.”
He had the TV going, in the family room that the kitchen area flowed into. It was strange seeing Earl in my dad’s favorite chair. He was smaller, not as bald, with a jauntiness I’d decided was a well-honed fake, part of his sales pitch, old muscles still twitching. I liked Brenda enough to try to make the best of it. Temporary, she had said.
“Want a beer, Earl?”
“Sometimes a man craves bottled water. Other times not so much.”
The next night he surprised me with an offer to take me out to dinner. They’d opened a new restaurant in the center of Hapford, the town I’d returned to. When I was a kid, the building had been a carpet and floor covering store.
We took seats at the half-filled bar. It had a curiously themed motif of framed photographs on the walls. Biplanes, Ballplayers, Big Bands. After the drinks arrived and the food ordered, we somehow started talking about my mother.
“Your father talked about her a lot. Must have been a special lady.”
“Yup.”
“She went hard, he said.”
The first guy found the cancer. The second opinionated off a bit as far as prognosis, but otherwise concurred. Treatments in the key of chemo commenced. Unexpectedly, she hit a positive plateau, got physically stronger, but her mind got stranger. On the phone, me far away in Texas, you never knew what she’d say next.
I didn’t need to hear what my father had said to Earl about it. Even when I’d come back to help out and we were in the middle of it he and I never talked about it, nor since.
“Hey listen…I’ve been meaning to ask. Brenda was vague. What is it you do exactly?”
“Exactly? Not much these days,” I admitted.
“Your father didn’t seem to know…but thought you’d done well for yourself down in Texas.”
I didn’t say anything, because I’d told my father, multiple times, what I did.
“You have what, a company? Like on the mug in the cabinet? ‘Better Call COS’? That’s you?”
“That’s old,” I said.
“Stands for what?”
“Corporate Organizational Safety.”
I’d sent the mug back home as a Christmas present to my mother; that and a book, some mystery probably.
“Not much of a name, you didn’t even get a good acronym out of it.”
Our food arrived, the woman bartender bringing the plates. While we were eating, the group of nurses that Earl had told me about on the drive over from the house came into the restaurant, eight of them. They carried gift bags and wrapped presents—celebrating a birthday or a baby or something. We watched them take over a group of tables in the back, re-arranging chairs as a young waitress stood by.
“Nurses see some shit,” Earl said, not for the first time. “They’re soldiers on the front lines. Come back the next day and do it again. ”
“No secrets, either,” I added.
“About what?”
“They see people naked.”
“Oh yeah. Familiar with the body, the ins and outs. They don’t judge, they just perform, get the job done. You can’t beat a good bedside manner.”
Earl said Tuesday was their regular night—the roster shifting week to week because of work shifts and the fact some were so-called “travelers”—and so it looked like because of his oft-stated shall we say respect for nurses, it was becoming Earl’s regular night too.
He wiped his mouth with his napkin, dropped it onto his plate, the remaining French fries. As he got off his stool he grabbed me on the upper arm.
“You’ve got to live like the future is a real thing, am I right?”
He didn’t get very far when he turned and came back.
“If any of them come over, your line is ‘We’re hiring.’”
After he left, I half-watched the game on the TV up above the end of the bar. When he’d been gone a while, I looked around and saw him sitting at the table of nurses in the back. If Earl thought he had needed me as a wingman, it didn’t seem like I’d have to work too hard at it.
The bartender, with dark hair cut high and tight on the sides, and blue and red tattoos on her hands and up her arms, started clearing plates, used napkins, and condiments, and it was while I was trying to determine what the symbols on her skin might mean the woman I’d soon find out liked to be called “Sully” came up on the other side of Earl’s vacated stool.
She was one of the blondes from the back table; up close, what looked like probably the oldest. She had a knowing smile.
“What are you, his protégé?”
“We’re hiring,” I said.
After she sat down beside me, I found out Sully was one of the travelers, filling in for a few weeks or sometimes months at a time at various hospitals or medical practices around the country. She was closer to home this time. Originally from south of Boston—the other side—she had fair skin and hazel eyes.
After she ordered a fresh drink—a Stinger, of all things, not for the faint-hearted—we got to talking. Sully had met “The Earl” as she called him, the Tuesday before. She’d dealt with plenty of guys like him in hospital corridors, waiting rooms, carrying coffee mugs, notepads, pens, t-shirts, and tote bags, all slapped with the name of their company’s latest hot new drug. They’d bring sandwiches or pizzas for the staff to get them to grease not just their hands but the skids to get The Earl and His Ilk in to see the doctors who could prescribe their latest hot new drug by name.
“So yeah I could see coming over to the dark side, work for an outfit like yours,” Sully said.
“We’re hiring!” I said with a smile, assuming she was in on the joke.
“You’re too quiet for a sales guy,” she said.
“So I’ve been told.”
“So how do you know him?”
“Girlfriend’s father,” I said, finally out with it.
“Oh…nepotism,” she said. “Where’s your lady tonight?”
I told her part of the story: Brenda, also in sales, but not pharma, on the road a lot, and that we’d just started living together.
“We have a cat,” I said, remembering I’d forgotten to feed him, addled enough by Earl’s surprise invitation to skew my routine.
“Oh, that’s nice, right?”
“He could turn on me any second. But he probably won’t. I’ve got about 200 pounds on him. They can be assholes though, in the right circumstances.”
I considered telling her how when Earl and Brenda came over together to eat dinner with me and my father, the first time I met her, Buzzy the cat had attacked Earl for no apparent reason. Not apparent at the time, anyway.
“You said we,” Sully said. “Who are we talking about here?” She nodded back toward The Earl, still carrying on with her compatriots. “Is Mr. Full-of-Himself part of your menagerie too?”
“I’m trying to figure that out,” I said.
***
Before Brenda came back, I got called away on business too. A previous petrochemical client needed their safety documentation updated, and I agreed to it because the interviews with the subject matter experts could be done in their New Jersey plant, not Texas. Texas, where I’d ended up for the work I had fallen into, that place I was trying to forget—with not just an ex-wife, but its highway fly overs, pea-soup humidity and harsh heat relieved not one bit by crackling afternoon thunderstorms with lightning veins scintillating the sky. The place where hidden away in thin-walled corporate condos I would drink like a Tokyo salaryman before, during, and after my doomed marriage.
I flew to Not-Texas that Wednesday. That weekend, after we’d both come back, Brenda and I had planned to head to a hotel in Southern Maine for a few days, a place we had gone to when things had started to click between us. But when it came down to it, and even though I would have preferred time with her without Earl in proximity, we decided we’d had enough travelling and bagged it.
What mattered to me was that we would be together again. I had gotten to a place after my dead marriage and my mother’s death where I’d decided to disconnect. There were too many bitter idiots out there, and I was one too, so what was the point?
Now, with Brenda, maybe there was some hope I wasn’t going to end up just another idiot puddling around the waist and pissing away the ever-shorter span of days. We were still learning about each other, which was cool. There are worse pastimes than evolving an intimacy with an attractive woman.
That Saturday evening, after she’d come into the kitchen while I was thinking about dinner, chicken and maybe some packaged parmesan risotto, she told me, “I got diagnosed with a plastics allergy when I was a kid. I won’t go into the hell I endured. Countless tests. To determine nuance, I guess. What do I know, I was six. A friend of my Dad’s diagnosed me finally.”
I was examining the fridge’s vegetative state, wondering if I was going to have to make enough for The Earl as well. He’d been gone since I’d returned from my trip and I didn’t know for how long. I did know from the open door and unmade bed in my parents’ old room that he’d used it at least once instead of my old one while I was away.
“What, a sales rep?”
“What! No, a doctor.”
“That Earl had sold to?”
“Earl?”
“You said your father.”
“Right. Not Earl. My father.”
I pondered this. Closed the door to the fridge, juggled various plastic bags of various vegetables at various points along their individual lifespans over to the counter. Sorted out what we had. Sorted out what I knew, or thought I knew, thought I had been told.
“You guys have the same eyes,” I said, looking at hers again: dark brown, almost black. Something I remembered from somewhere: you can’t hide your lies in your eyes, that’s where you can always find a person’s truth.
“No we don’t.”
“When you asked if he could move in too like every other time you called him your father, I’m pretty sure—”
“I did tell you…that my actual Dad died when I was eighteen in a car crash. Earl and his wife were my parents’ best friends and after they divorced he and my mother got together. You don’t remember?”
I didn’t have to remember, because it wasn’t true. Brenda had never told me about this Earl, who he really was. I wanted to keep trying to read those eyes, but I couldn’t hold the look she threw back at me. Like she was the one re-considering things.
“You told me your mother died that first night you came over,” I said. “It was something we had in common both lost our mothers you said.”
“Well they’re both gone now so it really doesn’t matter about the details.”
I didn’t know if she meant both of our mothers or both of her parents. All of the above?
“Jeezus,” she said, pulling at the t-shirt she had on, untucking it from her jeans. “I can barely fit into these!”
When she came back from her trip she’d complained about getting fat. There was the requisite eating and drinking with clients to blame. She had been on the scale in the bathroom the night before, naked.
“Maybe your brain got bigger while you were away,” I’d suggested from where I was also naked, in the bed in our room in the basement.
One thing I definitely could have done without was her frequent churning about her body, her issues with her weight. I had to be careful about where I took it.
“You look fine. If anything’s different it’s because you gained muscle. Gave it all a good workout. Not just your brain with all the planning, the trip, the presentations, the glad-handing—”
“The what?”
“All done on high heels, dancing backwards!”
“You’re crazy,” she said, and tits jiggling, shut the door.
She looked good, she always did. She didn’t eat much so doing meals wasn’t a big deal. She’d have a bit of whatever I served up, but didn’t seem to have preferred tastes, no favorites.
“Can I have this?” she asked in the kitchen, pointing at the single banana in the ceramic bowl.
I was going through the motions for dinner. I was still wondering why she’d lied to me about Earl. Why she was claiming she told me a story about her family that she never had.
“You’ll spoil your supper.”
“Should I eat this?”
There was something in the way she smiled along with how she’d said it that seemed invitational.
“Show me how you eat it,” I ventured.
“Show me how I eat it?”
A few minutes later, I heard Earl come into the house. I knew it was him because he always tossed his keys on the coatrack by the front door, an inherited piece from my mother’s side. It had a crack in its large mirror that faced the grandfather clock across the hall, also an heirloom, such as it was.
I quickly pulled out of Brenda’s mouth, tucked in, zipped up. When Earl came into the room, she was standing at the kitchen island, flipping through the local paper, delivered that day.
“Where’s that police log thing?” she asked me. “All the nefarious acts in the neighborhood. Like the one you showed me how the cops got called about a human torso on the side of the road and it turned out to be a brisket.”
“Hey kid,” Earl said.
“Hey yourself,” said Brenda, and I had to admit I’d never seen the two of them have any more an intimate exchange than that.
“What are we having?” he said to me, but then to his daughter-by-some-definition, “we eat a lot of chicken. I thought you said he was a good cook. Anybody can cook chicken.”
“Gee Earl, I didn’t know you felt that way,” I said. “How about tomorrow we have a nice brisket?”
***
It was a few days later, and Brenda’s schedule that week had her working at her company’s local sales office. After she left, I stayed in the new bed she’d gotten for us. As my mother’s illness progressed, my father had brought in his old crew to help him put in the bedroom suite in the basement. He’d had his office down there but gave that up for a new set-up that would accommodate a live-in nurse. My mother died before he’d found one.
I lay there and remembered how my Dad was always working. His main business was putting in wells and septic and the occasional swimming pool, and he’d come home covered in mud and who knew what. Sometimes he brought his crew home to eat, usually without telling my mother first. Although whenever it happened, she seemed able to deal with it.
Every spring, we hosted a pig roast. It was mostly those guys who worked for him, including a couple of good cooks, Dominicans, who always brought their extended families, and watching those guys piqued my own cooking interest. A game would start in the morning in our back field and go on until the food was ready. Then one year some guy went after another one with a bat and that was the end of that tradition.
I must have been dozing, some sort of banging startled me awake. It kept repeating, sounded like on the side door upstairs, which led from the kitchen out to the deck. It was the loud crack that got me hustling.
When I got up there, a foot with a black clog on it was sticking through the new hole in the bottom of the door.
“Hey! Hold on hold on!” I shouted.
The top of the door was windowed and I saw it was Sully, the nurse I’d talked to at the restaurant. I heard something behind me. Past the refrigerator, Earl, in a white t-shirt and low-riding white boxers, was in the hall that led back to the bedrooms.
He mouthed, “No” at me, motioning his right arm, waving it back and forth as if pushing something aside.
“My shoe,” Sully called and when I looked down she was pulling her socked foot back out of the hole she’d made.
I picked up the clog that was heavy, hard rubber. I opened the damaged door and stepped out onto the deck. Sully had sat down in one of the white chairs at the glass-topped table, under the mildew-stained beige umbrella.
She wasn’t dressed in scrubs, but I assumed she was coming or going from her shift in the ER of the nearby hospital. The one where I’d seen my mother for the last time, open-mouthed in a side room where they’d moved her after they’d tried unnecessarily, starting at the house, to keep her going. Sully took her shoe out of my grasp.
“If we really were hiring, this isn’t the way to go about it.”
“Left something when I was here when I guess you weren’t,” she said.
Now I got why the door to my parents’ old room was open when I got back from my trip, the bed in there used.
“Personal,” she added.
I saw Buzzy the white cat in the grass beside the deck, chomping on a chipmunk, his free-range daily supplement. Maybe the hole in the door could morph into a cat door.
I got some inkling of where Sully was at—if not exactly where she was coming from—from the scent of booze; I hoped this was a post, not pre-work lubrication. It sort of explained the predilection to kick at something. Back when we’d been at the bar together, she’d given off the scent of experience, not just by what she ordered but by how fast she finished it and moved on to the next.
“A recent purchase just so happened to have along at the time in question.”
“Can you describe it?”
“Oh, you’ll know it when you see it.” She stood up with the aid of the table edge that she kept a hold on. “You know what, forget it. Tell Mr. Fuck Hisself to do just that.”
Her car was parked in the driveway behind Earl’s. Her walk to it seemed straight line enough. I sat down in the chair she had been in, and when Buzzy came up the stairs from the driveway and onto the deck, I dropped my hand but he ignored it, went over to the new hole in the old door and stared into it. Sully backed out the driveway and got gone.
My father had left a sheet of paper on the fridge listing compatriots of his to call in case of needed repairs. He had told me before he went to Florida who was good at what but I hadn’t paid much attention. He had told me he’d give me “an allowance” both for house-sitting and for unforeseen expenses, and I hadn’t pushed him for that either.
I looked from the unforeseen expense in the door to the state of the deck, which needed a power wash and paint job. Half the stairs leading down to the yard needed to be replaced. And the yard itself was in a sorry state. It was dandelion fluff-centric and next year’s crop was being sown by the breeze. I wondered if I could persuade Earl to cut the grass the next time, which was past time to do so. I’d tell him I’d start giving him an allowance.
Through the window that was over the sink I could see him back in the kitchen. He’d gotten dressed at least.
Before I could go in and talk about what had happened, I heard the sound of a car coming into the driveway. When I saw the Hapford police cruiser I thought that Earl had called the cops because of Sully. That’s all we needed: written up in the local paper’s police log. With or without a brisket.
I stood up from the table and walked over to the railing of the deck, ready to tell them that there was a misunderstanding. I was more pissed at Earl than Sully. I wondered if they could take him away instead.
The morning sun had tucked behind the single fluffy cloud that was up there. As it emerged, and because of where I was standing, from the sudden bright light I couldn’t see the cop through the windshield, but before anyone got out of the front seat someone emerged from the back.
The cap he wore looked familiar, a dark blue one with yellow stitching, for the post of a VFW; I knew because my father had the same one, or at least one like it.
He struggled with a black rolling suitcase he pulled out after him. Finally the cop opened the driver’s side door. It had been a long time since I’d seen her, but before she put her hat on, I saw it was Becky Sistare, the daughter of the woman my father had taken up with. Five years older than me, Becky, one of the first females on the Hapford force, was a Lieutenant now.
She watched my father as he extended the handle of the suitcase, and then he started rolling it, bouncing over the cracks and holes in the driveway, me standing on the deck looking down at the pair of them. “She went through this with my Dad,” she said, “and I’m not going to let it happen again.”
Her father, Bob Sistare, had been my Little League coach one year. He favored his own kid, letting him pitch all the time, a little lefty the rest of us mocked as “Billy Baseball” but that type of favoritism was nothing unusual. Bob had a bad temper, would yell if you made an error or otherwise fucked up, but that was normal too. My father had a temper too, so did most of the dads back then.
Was that what she meant? My father had turned violent against her mother?
He took off his blue VFW cap and patted the top of his head, put the cap back on. His gray hair had grown out longer than usual along the sides and back, but he was bald on top. It was almost like he’d been making sure that was still the case.
He’d still been in Florida when we’d talked last on the phone. Six weeks before maybe. That was nothing unusual. In the years I’d lived in Texas, I almost never spoke with him, everything went through my mother. I’d be on the phone with her, she’d be in the same room, the kitchen, or family room with him and I could hear the TV, and she’d ask if he wanted to speak to me and sometimes I would hear something in the background.
“Maybe next time,” she’d translate to me.
“He’s got some more stuff but you’ll have to come get it,” Police Lieutenant Becky Sistare said, before she got back into her cruiser. She’d left it running, and the radio had been crackling voices back and forth, which muffled after she closed the door. She backed out of the driveway and drove away.
My father came up the steps of the deck. He’d left his rolling suitcase in the driveway and it had fallen over.
“You can’t let people walk all over you,” he said as he passed by, and I didn’t know what he was talking about. “You always have. Even your mother says that and she ought to know you got that from her.”
Anticipating his annoyance, I braced myself for what he was going to say about the hole in the door, but he just opened it and went in. I walked down off the deck and got his suitcase and brought it up and into the kitchen where Earl and he were getting reacquainted.
“Who’s this guy?” my father asked me.
My father never joked; that was one trait I’d acknowledge that I got from my Mom.
“Earl,” I said. “You watched the Red Sox—”
“Not the same guy,” my father said.
Not being recognized didn’t seem to faze Earl any. He said he had to go out for a few things, left the kitchen, and in the front hallway got his car keys off the coat stand and we heard him leave the house. There were a lot of comings and goings all of a sudden. Which brought me thinking about Brenda, what to do about that.
I rolled my father’s suitcase to his old room. Earl had gone in and made the bed in there while everything had been going on. Not the best job I’d ever seen, barely enough to cover his tracks. I wondered if there were any other Sullys out there who might come calling.
When I came back my father was in his chair in the family room. He still had his cap on. He was working the TV remote, scrolling through the station and program guide. I went down into the basement.
When she came back from trips, Brenda left most of her things in and around her suitcase and carry-on, taking stuff to the dry cleaner when she remembered. Because she was on the road so much—how I had accepted this habit anyway—she was in a perpetual state of between our here, and her next there.
“Sometimes I think you see me down to my soul,” I’d told her our first night back in the bed together after our respective trips. “Other times like you don’t know me at all.”
“Jeezus how long did you work on that one?” she’d said.
This is where I found myself when it came to her. She’d be gone, and I’d be left remembering pockets of our time together. Like trying to hold on to some rapidly dissolving dream.
And as in dreams, I now suspected a world with its own rules. How did I know she wasn’t lying to me still? That Earl was no more her stepfather than her father—someone else entirely that I didn’t want to speculate about.
In the basement bedroom I stuffed the clothes that were on a chair and the floor into her luggage, not caring what was dirty, didn’t worry about wrinkles, didn’t worry about color coordination. I zipped up the carry-on, buckled up the suitcase. As I carried them back upstairs, the volume of the television suddenly boomed, some game show crowd going wild. I wondered how much stuff my father still had over at his girlfriend’s.
As for me and mine, as I placed her luggage by the front door I hadn’t decided yet if I meant for her to get a clue and leave or whether I meant to go with her.
The room where the TV blared was empty, my father gone from his chair. I found him standing in his bedroom, holding the remote. The cap on his head. He never kept his cap on inside.
“Here,” I said, with my hand out. I returned to the family room, close enough to mute the TV with remote, and when my father called out I went back to his bedroom.
“There! Hear that?” he said.
He could have meant the birds outside, or the thrumming of the fridge in the nearby kitchen. Or maybe imagining things.
He moved closer to the door of the master bathroom. “Trouble with the pipes?”
I went over but didn’t hear anything. He must not have either because he went back to stand where he was before, near the bed.
“We had a hive of bees in our house…in the wall of my room. Daddy brought a man to smoke them out he took the bees and we got to keep the honey.”
Bees? I moved closer to the wall beside the bed, the night table there. Then I heard something too. It didn’t sound like it was coming from inside the wall and it wasn’t really buzzing, more like a hum.
I looked behind the headboard of the bed. It was too dark, so I turned on the lamp on the table. I didn’t see anything, got down on a knee and the sound was louder. I lifted the blanket and sheet that Earl had thrown too far on that side, and got a glimpse of it under the bed. It took me a moment to realize what it was.
“Dad, you want some lunch or something, when was the last time you ate?”
He looked like he may have been thinking, and shook his head, and it may have had some connection.
“Let’s go into the kitchen. What do you want?”
“Anything you want to get rid of.”
It was how he’d respond more often than not whenever my mother would ask him that question. She’d make a face in return, to either his predictability, or to just another character trait she was tired of.
“Why don’t you watch some TV and I’ll fix you something in a minute.”
I went back into his bedroom to confirm my dildo discovery. It was still humming. I’d brought some tongs from the kitchen, and used them to pull it out. At least it wasn’t one of those rubbery mock cocks complete with balls. It was a sleek, smooth indigo colored thing that I would henceforth think of as the “Sully Special.” I found the way to shut it off. I ducked out of my father’s room and went to the other bathroom down the hall, and found a place for it amongst all the crap in the cabinet under the sink.
I brought the tongs back to the kitchen and found a place for them in the dishwasher. I made my father a sandwich out of some leftover boneless skinless chicken thighs, and he came to the table. I sat in the chair at the other end and watched him for a while trying not to be obvious about it, then got up and started making coffee because unless something else had changed in the months he was away, he took it after every meal day or night.
“So that’s it then with Nancy?” I asked, standing at the counter, as the drip began.
Starting to eat, he either didn’t hear me or chose not to and I didn’t press it.
Not long after I found out about the two of them I wondered if there’d been something going on back decades before, when he and his crew had built the Sistares’ pool. I remembered a fight between my parents as the basement bedroom was being finished, my mother accusing my father that the plan to bring a nurse down there was for his benefit, not hers.
After my father returned to his chair, and in spite of the coffee fell asleep, I went and put fresh everything on his bed. I cleaned his bathroom, and was crossing through the kitchen to bring the dirty sheets and towels to the laundry area, when I heard and then saw Earl open the front door. He was carrying a pair of brown paper grocery bags by their handles. He glanced down at Brenda’s stuff on the floor, then came down to join me in the kitchen.
“Here you go,” he said, putting the bags down on the table.
“Earl,” I said, after taking a look at the groceries, “what’s with the three chickens?”
“Because forgive me if I’m wrong it’s the only goddamn thing you can cook.”
He took the paper bags after I’d finished emptying them and folded them, put them on kitchen table. He glanced over at my father, who was back playing with the volume of the TV again.
“Listen,” he said in a lowered voice, “whatever the situation turns out to be, let me know what they want to prescribe for him. Some dementia meds can have them on the bowl day and night, so you may want to find all the alternatives.”
“Okay.”
“I mean, it won’t be the beans talking.”
He reached over and squeezed my upper arm like he’d done at the bar that night. The Earl was many things no doubt, but he wasn’t bitter, and he wasn’t an idiot. He might even be of some use.
“And let me know about that door. Get three estimates, do it right.”
Over at the door in question, Buzzy’s white furred head appeared through the hole. The cat wriggled and squirmed and he managed to get in.
“That little fucker is crazy,” said Earl, who hadn’t forgotten the first time they’d met and the little fucker had attacked him.
Buzzy went over to his food bowl, which had remains from his last feeding, sniffed at it, and moved away. He didn’t meow much but he wasn’t beyond berating me vocally for not replenishing old vittles. But he ignored me, went over to Earl, and rubbed up against his leg.
“Guess he likes you after all,” I said.
My father, who’d been watching the new activity from his chair, got up and started our way, but his foot maybe had fallen asleep—something caused him to stumble. Buzzy shot across the kitchen, leapt and threw himself at his lower leg, claws out and engaged, and bit my Dad’s left knee.
“Hey! Hey! Hey!”
Earl grabbed a magazine off the counter, rolling it up as he hurried over. Buzzy saw him coming, sprung off my father and scampered out toward the front hall.
“I told you he’s got barn cat in him!” Earl said with a laugh. It was what my father had said to him the night he and Brenda came over for dinner and Buzzy went wild on him.
But my father didn’t get it, sat back down in his chair.
His look was more than a combination of confusion and surprise. I also saw his fear. Something that I’d never seen in him before.
No doubt I would see it again, would see it in all its variants—in both him and me—during the ever-shorter span of days. Because the future was definitely looking like a real thing.
And it was nothing I wanted to face alone.
I went out to the hallway to get Brenda’s stuff by the front door, to bring it back downstairs before Buzzy decided to fuck with it. Before she got home.
