Raising the Dad Read online

  Eddie shrugged as he lit a cigarette. “Throw a stick in any direction in New York, you’ll hit a better rhythm guitar than him.”

  The slight to his bandmate knifed through Mike’s fog. “Fuck, man,” he flinched. “Him and Taggert, they’re tight. Like Izzy and Slash, or Perry and Whitford. You pull him out, we’re a whole other band.”

  “Maybe,” Eddie said. “But you and Taggert are the franchise. You write all the songs. If we get a record into the stores, you two are going to see all the publishing money. It’s not like splitting a grand five ways from Al’s Bar on a Saturday night. You make the majors, things change.”

  “We’re a band,” Mike insisted weakly. He hated the air of big business that was pressing in on his rock-and-roll party.

  Eddie cocked his head with a grin to lighten the mood. “Don’t sweat it. But I know the label is considering some things. I mean, it’s their money, right? So just promise me, you’ll hear them out if they come at you with some ideas. Promise?”

  “I guess.”

  “You trust me, right? I don’t do business with people who don’t trust me.”

  “I trust you,” Mike grinned. He had no choice but to put his faith in Eddie. Despite his swagger and the years he had invested in his music career, Mike didn’t have a clue what he was doing. If they offered him a contract, he knew he’d have to find a lawyer and he had no idea how to go about that. His mother was useless, and the adults he knew through his parents were all doctors. Like any of them would help Larry Husted’s fuck-up son, anyway.

  Eddie said he’d find him someone to look over the deal, and Mike figured that would be good enough. What mattered was that everything felt within reach.

  “It’s really gonna happen?” Mike asked, fighting the giddiness that strained to seep through. Big money was being teased for his ability to pose like an outlaw, so it wouldn’t help to show that he was feeling like a little kid doubting the arrival of Santa Claus the next morning.

  “It’s happening now,” Eddie said cockily through a swirl of smoke. “Believe it, it’s happening.”

  Twenty-five

  A deadline loomed for a grant John took on, knowing that getting it turned around in time was going to be tough. First True Home, a nonprofit that provided emergency housing for battered women, teetered on insolvency, and they were paying John five thousand dollars to quickly get a complicated federal proposal out in time. In his effort to prove to Robin that his commitment to supplementing the cost of Larry’s care, John was glad to pick up the job. That would cover half a week of Larry’s care right there.

  He put his feet up, his laptop resting on his legs. He withdrew to “the zone,” that fertile, fuzzy-edged place where his mind was set free to roam, and he considered the plight of a battered woman in need of a bed. In no time, his brain obediently dealt the words. Sometimes, his typing just felt like taking transcription:

  “When a home becomes unsafe,” he began, “shelter becomes critical. For a night, for a week, or as a first comforting way station en route to a healthier, happier life.”

  John shrugged. Grant proposals compete against scores of worthy causes, trying to sway a foundation manager or government drone charged with slogging through dozens of such appeals each day. The bad economy had gutted charitable giving at precisely the moment when nonprofits that served the most vulnerable needed the most help. The money was still there—sometimes in the hundreds of thousands for the right cause—but the odds of grabbing it were horrible.

  The trick was to write right up to the line of compassion without crossing into schmaltz. John always started thick with mawkishness, but then pulled it back word by word. His job was ultimately to reduce human despair to a kind of strategic rhetorical exercise. His knack for emotional distancing was a plus.

  John stretched contentedly. The proposal would be good, eventually. He felt the welcome call to really dig in when the winsome peal of “Over the Rainbow” broke the silence. As John reached for his phone, he regretted how the song now instinctively made him set his jaw before taking a deep, calming breath.

  He used to love “Over the Rainbow.”

  “Hi, Mom,” he said softly. Rose didn’t understand caller ID, let alone custom ringtones. It was some kind of magic trick, her son always knowing it was her on the other end.

  “Can’t sleep?” John asked.

  “Did you remember to…? Shoot!” Rose cursed with frustration.

  The words stopped coming to her early on, the first sign that something was wrong. Rose could maintain a conversation with her usual verve, but then would skid to a halt as a trapdoor opened and the words fell away. In the beginning, she’d recover and carry on, but over the past year the occasional lost word became entire thoughts. She would embark upon a sentence, then have no idea where she was headed.

  The abrupt silences that came to complicate John’s relationship with his mother were clumsy and strained. If he tried to help her by guessing at the word, she’d bristle. If he didn’t try to help, she’d bristle. He came to let the silences stretch on until she chose how she wanted to proceed. It was important for her to maintain as much control over her life as she could.

  “Why did I call you?” she finally said impatiently.

  John took another deep breath. “I got you in with Dr. Kelly in a couple weeks. Was that it? I put it on your calendar last time I was over, remember?”

  John heard the rustling on the other end and knew she was surprised to find it written right where he said it would be. Her defeated tone told John she knew that this thing she forgot was another thing she once knew.

  “No, that wasn’t it.”

  John rubbed his eyes. “Did it have anything to do with Mike?”

  “Is he there?” she asked eagerly.

  He looked around the room, as if it was remotely possible. “He’s got one of his band things. You won’t see him until morning, remember? Mom, he’s forty-five years old. You can’t stay up all night worrying about him.”

  “It wasn’t that. I remember now. It had something to do with … Shoot!”

  “Mom, you need to go to bed and stop stressing about these things. If it’s important, you’ll remember it.” This was an expression Rose used throughout her life, whenever anyone had a harmless lapse of memory. John in turn came to employ it, but he realized for the first time what an awful thing it was to say to someone with dementia.

  “You sound tired,” Rose said. “Everyone else in bed?”

  John squirmed in his chair and stared past his feet, propped up on Larry’s bed.

  “Yep,” John said to his mother, despairing at his deceit. He put in regular work hours at the hospital between his father’s overnight treatments. Cell phone reception was acceptable in the dead wing, but the lack of even an old school dial-up connection freed John from the time-wasting lure of the internet. It was actually the ideal place to get serious work done.

  “Why are you working so hard all of a sudden?” Rose asked. “Are you and Robin having trouble with…? Shoot!”

  “Our money is fine, Mom,” John sighed. “We’ve just got some expenses, and we need to start thinking of Katie’s college fund.”

  “You know I’m going to help you with that, when the time comes.”

  “I know. We appreciate it,” he said, knowing that there was no guarantee that Rose’s money would sustain herself, let alone her granddaughter’s education.

  No one anticipated Larry dying so young, so John’s parents failed to pay into premiums for long-term health care back when they would’ve been a bargain. The plan Rose paid into now was okay, but she was as physically strong as she was mentally frail. Her body could soldier on for years after her mind gave up the fight, and that would get expensive. Sometimes at night, John wondered how this would all work out.

  “It’s late,” he said quietly. “Promise me you’ll get some sleep.”

  “You, too.”

  “I will,” he said. “I have some things to finish up here, then
I’m turning in. Goodnight, I love you.”

  “Love you.”

  He looked at Larry, sleeping in the shadows. His father’s breathing remained ragged and labored, but Walt said that was normal. He told John to be alert for any changes in the sound and to inform Gloria immediately if he had concerns.

  The vital signs monitor kept track of Larry’s status with a hypnotic sameness. But as Walt warned early on, it was not uncommon for Larry’s heart rate or oxygen level to shoot high or dip low for a moment, causing the unit to beep and the display to go from green to red before normalcy was returned.

  “Your vitals would do the same if we hooked you up to that thing,” Walt explained. “That’s just being alive.”

  For the first several nights, John fixated on Larry’s every breath, anxiously noting the slightest variation until he realized that such intense scrutiny would quickly drain him. He had to keep reminding himself that ceasing to breathe—one of these days; maybe tomorrow—was the only obligation Larry had left.

  Twenty-six

  John could handle the new obligations in his life only because his days were his to schedule however he wanted. Next Step required his presence at development meetings and to sit in with the staff often enough to stay in touch with the nonprofit’s mission, but he did his grant writing from home and as he chose to attend to it. This is why, despite the fact that there was work due for both Next Step and his freelance clients, he was asleep on the couch at four o’clock on a Thursday afternoon when the phone rang.

  “Is she there?” Robin asked sharply when he answered.

  John’s heart raced, his mind sludgy from sleep. Wandering away is a serious concern for Alzheimer’s patients.

  “Who? Mom?” he asked.

  “Katie!”

  He sat up on the couch and shook off the fog. This was the time of day when he’d normally be keeping an eye on their daughter. Unless something special was going on, she was supposed to be home every day after school.

  John looked at his watch; he’d been asleep since 2:30. As the napping became a regular thing, he came to count on Katie coming through the back door to wake him up. He always shot right up and composed himself, not wishing his daughter to know he snoozed while the rest of the world was at work.

  John went to the kitchen: no backpack, no homework spread across the table. He called up from the bottom of the stairs hopefully.

  “Katie? You home?”

  Nothing. He cursed his carelessness, and girded himself for Robin’s displeasure.

  “I guess she’s not here. Did you try her cell?”

  “She’s not answering,” Robin said. “You need to come over to school.”

  John looked at his idled laptop and the pile of neglected work. “I really need to—”

  “Now, John. Leave a note for her and tell her she is not to go anywhere until we get home.”

  Robin hung up. John had been considering a custom ringtone for his wife, just so he’d always know it was her calling. Something she’d find funny, like maybe the B-52’s “Love Shack,” which they flailed about to at their wedding. Robin knew that he already used this trick to screen his mother’s calls and she’d be pissed to know he did the same to her, but John figured she would never find out because she’d always be on the other end when the phone rang.

  It felt like the perfect plan, but John still tested it for flaws. He didn’t need to push Robin’s tolerance any further.

  * * *

  As clumsy a strain as the Larry situation brought to their marriage, things really became awkward after John brought Robin to see his father.

  It wasn’t a move he was eager to make, wondering if Robin would find the invitation ghoulishly inappropriate but impossible to turn down if she thought it important to him. On the other hand, this was the father-in-law Robin never met. She was complicit in putting their family’s finances at risk to keep him alive, and she had been placed in the horrible position of saying nothing about it when around Rose or Mike. Or their daughter.

  John recognized Robin as a partner in this whether she was enthusiastic about it or not. If letting her see for herself what he was committed to helped, he wanted to bring her in. If she preferred to keep her distance, that was fine, too. But it felt like he needed to make the offer.

  “What would we do?” she asked when he clumsily brought it up about a week after she agreed to help keep Larry going.

  “You’d just meet him,” John said before correcting himself, Larry being beyond making new acquaintances. “You’d see him, for just a minute. We wouldn’t have to stay.”

  “I won’t pretend to talk to him,” she said bluntly. “And I don’t want you making conversation for us. ‘Hey, Dad, here’s the wife!’ That would be too … Just, no talking.”

  “Okay.”

  “What if we get caught?”

  John smiled. “Honey, you don’t need to do this. I’d really understand.”

  “He’s your father. As long as you’re doing this—we’re doing this—I should at least meet…” she drifted off, dismissing the convolutions with an exasperating sigh. “I should have a look at him.”

  “Okay,” John said, loving her for trying to figure out how to make this work.

  She sized up the jeans and T-shirt she wore. “I have to change.”

  * * *

  By the time John led Robin into room 116, the lovingly preserved tableau clashing with the haunted house rot she stumbled through to get there, Robin regretted her decision. She thought she could distance herself enough from the creepiness of it to play a part in her husband’s ordeal, but as her mind strained to take it all in she realized that there would be no fault in finding this more than any wife should be expected to handle.

  A Christmas card photo of her with her family from several years ago sat on Larry’s shelves. Robin squirmed at seeing herself reduced to a prop.

  And then she saw Larry, emaciated in his perpetual nap. Robin immediately saw the resemblance between father and son, rendered on Larry in a near death mask of what John might be reduced to one day. Would Robin still be his wife by then? Would disease or body failure bring her to the same tragic state of diminishment?

  Tangles of time—past, present, and future—spun through the room in ways Robin hadn’t anticipated. The power John said he felt standing in his father’s presence struck her in entirely different ways.

  Robin felt the unspoken pressure to extend a hand to make contact with Larry’s waxy skin, or to straighten his straw-like hair. It would have been the compassionate thing to do, if only for John, whom Robin felt anxiously desiring some sort of bonding moment between the two. But this scheme was too grotesque, this sad form in the bed too much a stranger. She came to have a look, as she said she would. But it was not in her to offer more.

  Uncomfortable meeting John’s eyes, she sized up Larry’s room. The new Tom Perrotta novel John was struggling to find time for at home waited for him beside a comfortable-looking wingback chair. A box of Cheez-Its, some cookies, and a case of bottled water were situated beside the chair along with the pair of slippers Robin hadn’t noticed missing from their house.

  John had described the process of tending to his father, but she also knew there were long hours to fill in the middle of the night, when he wasn’t home sleeping beside her. When he wasn’t there to confront Katie as Friday and Saturday night curfews were broken.

  What he created for himself here was cozy, like a den. Robin couldn’t help desiring such a refuge for herself.

  There was a dense and brittle silence at Larry’s bedside, John and Robin seeming to have jointly realized that there was nothing for them to discuss. Robin worked up to announcing her desire to leave, but sensed some sort of protocol required her to stand dutifully for at least a few more minutes.

  The unwieldy quiet bore down on John, made him squirm with discomfort. Some gummed-up cell of his brain suggested to him a mood-lightener.

  “See, Dad,” he said, leaning over his father
with a proud, man-to-man smirk. “I did all right.”

  Robin recoiled. “Jesus, John!” she protested, rushing from the room.

  There was no way she’d find her way out of the old building on her own. A rat up her pant leg would not make things any more comfortable between the two of them now that Robin had met the old man. John bolted to catch her.

  * * *

  When John arrived at the high school after Robin’s call woke him up, there were fire trucks in the parking lot. Inside the building, teachers and parents who were looking angry and sad grouped together at the periphery of the main commons. As John approached, he smelled the smoke and felt the dampness of too much water where there should have been none.

  Rounding the corner, he saw that the commons—where he spent hours as a student—was drenched. One whole wall, where banners and artwork were always on display, was charred black. The fire began to reach elsewhere before the sprinklers in the ceiling did their job. But the student projects situated throughout the room were turned into soggy clumps of papier-mâché and poster board.

  John saw Robin standing with Debbie Sterling and Johnette Griff, Robin’s two closest friends in the math department. The uneasy look John detected from the two of them as he approached his wife put him on immediate alert.

  “What happened?” he asked. Robin quickly took him by the elbow and led him to an empty classroom, closing the door behind them.

  “Why don’t you know where Katie is?” she began.

  “She…” John stammered. “I don’t know. I was busy, I lost track of the time.”

  “I trust you to be with her after school.”

  “I am! I just…” John insisted defensively. He fought to keep this tamped down. “Do you want to tell me what’s going on?”

  She dialed down her anger. Besides her concerns for her daughter, she was saddened that her school was attacked.

  “A bunch of kids came running in from the parking lot, started tearing things up in the commons, and one of them set a banner on fire. It was a bunch of those fucking goths.”

  John knew that Robin’s emotions had to be raw to show such contempt for any of her students. Even the shitty ones.