Raising the Dad Page 19
Mike looked to the closed door, and then back to John. Something big loomed.
John let it come bluntly, to get it done.
“Dad’s not dead. He’s been alive, all this time,” John said. “You’re going to see him now.” And he opened the door.
John stepped in. Mike did not. The words John just said, the macabre pristineness of the room inside, the form in the shadowy bed that was visible from the hallway—it all froze Mike in place as his mind began to churn.
John agonized as Mike’s uncomprehending eyes met his. “Come on, Mike,” he said gently, taking his brother at the elbow. “You need to do this.”
John got him into the room, but Mike would go no farther. His chest began to heave from a shortness of breath as his eyes locked upon the man in the bed. John had earlier positioned Larry facing into the room, but with the dim light, the toll that time and disease took on Larry and the madness of the moment, Mike found it easy to push back the truth.
He looked to John, certain instead that his brother had lost his mind.
“What the fuck are you doing in here?” Mike whispered sharply, finally taking in the carefully staged comfort of the room.
“That’s Dad, Mike,” John whispered, gently but firmly. “It’s him.”
Mike wasn’t having it. “What the fuck are you doing in here?”
“Look at him. Just look at him.”
The plaintive urging of his little brother compelled Mike to take one step closer. The view was clearer now. Mike was old enough to remember his grandfather—Larry’s dad—before the old man died at sixty-seven, eaten away by cancer. The resemblance was there on the man in the bed. That family face was there.
Mike’s legs failed him and he sank to his knees. His head filled with helium and white noise as wracking sobs overtook him.
If there were words for the moment, they came out only as choked, baffled gasps. John knelt beside his brother and held him as Mike quivered at the unexpected and relentless flood of emotion.
“I know,” John whispered, rubbing Mike’s shoulder beneath his long, dirty hair. “I know.”
* * *
Mike finally made it to Larry’s bedside, and John left the two of them alone. John stayed outside the room for as long as Mike needed, and then they sat in the hall as John walked him through the journey that brought them here.
As Mike sat beside his brother and John laid out the plot that Walt Bolger carried out, John saw the fury and disbelief pass across Mike’s face. But it was tempered by a humbled calm that John had gambled would be there. It might not last, but the same momentousness that slammed John into accepting this as an opportunity to reclaim their father seemed to have struck Mike the same way.
Mike’s eyes remained locked on the door to his father’s room. “You end up hating somebody—really hating them,” he said softly. “But the whole time, maybe you’re thinking, ‘On the other side of all this shit, maybe we could be cool with each other someday.’ You know? When we were older, we’d work it all out.
“But then out of nowhere he up and dies, and we never…”
He gave into another bout of tears. John allowed him a moment, but then he resolved to get to the responsibility left to them.
“What are we going to do about Mom?” John asked.
Mike felt the shock as the full weight of what they needed to do hit him.
“Fuck!” Mike groaned hopelessly as he replayed what he just endured. “She can’t … If we …
“Fuck!!!”
The answer wasn’t going to come to them just then. They stood and sighed heavily in tandem. John turned to lead them out, but Mike wasn’t ready to go. He stared at his father’s door.
“Go on back in,” John said, sitting back down. “I’ll wait.”
“You come, too,” Mike said softly as he opened the door and gestured John in. “We’ll hang out. The three of us.”
Forty-one
Katie’s school recognized her as one of the top artists in her class. While she invested predictable teenaged energy into deflecting praise and protested anything as humiliating as a party for her and her friends at her grandmother’s house, John could tell at the gallery exhibit that she was shyly excited to be recognized for her talents.
Since the exhibit recognized the full range of her work, it went back a few years. The arc of her creative skills but also the swing in her persona were clearly charted, with mixed-media projects of simple beauty and whimsy gradually giving way to grim black-and-white photo studies and stark, disquieting charcoal landscapes.
Back at her grandmother’s house, food sat uneaten as Katie’s mopey crowd generally failed to attend. Friends from earlier years—freshly scrubbed and a bit dweeby—filtered through the house, grazing on snacks and making polite conversation with Katie’s proud grandmother. They smiled nervously as Rose’s disordered thinking tumbled out in tangles. After answering over and over again how they knew Katie and where they went to school, they graciously slipped away.
The handful of goths who stopped by gathered sullenly in the living room, sitting in the shadows and watching a 1982 episode of Match Game on the Game Show Network. They surrounded Mike, who had been ordered to the family gathering by his mother. Other than sleeping in the old family house at night, Mike stayed away since he found out about Larry. He barely said a word at the party.
“Hey,” one kid mumbled to Mike when the game show went to a commercial. “Katie says you used to be somebody. In a band.”
Mike stared back mutely.
“You still know how to score dope?”
Mike glowered and went for the sliding door into the backyard. John was on him before he lit his cigarette.
“Where have you been?” John asked.
“Around.”
“You’re supposed to be here.”
Mike wouldn’t meet his eye. John knew the signs.
“You’re high,” he said darkly.
“Whatever.”
“We need to tell her!” John hissed. “You’re supposed to help me.”
Mike looked past him to their mother, standing in her backyard and chatting amiably with a longtime neighbor.
“This is gonna fuck her up,” Mike said moodily but with concern. “If we tell her, this is gonna seriously fuck her up.”
“We have to tell her. You agreed.”
Mike took a long drag on his cigarette. “I brought up Don Huff the other day. She had no idea who the guy was,” he laughed bitterly. “Asshole walked away with most of her money, made it so she’s stuck living in this shitty old house, and she has no memory of ever knowing him. She doesn’t even get to hate him anymore because as far as she knows they never met. How fucked up is that?”
“She remembers Dad,” John protested.
“Who knows what’s left of him in that head of hers? He could be all gone in there, until—boom!—there he fucking is again. Thanks to us.
“‘Larry’s back, Mom, deal with it.’ You really want to lay that on her?”
They watched from across the yard as Robin sidled up to Rose and rested her hand on her back. She helped the neighbor understand what Rose tried to say.
“Dean Durning means it,” John said to Mike. “I can’t buy any more time with him.”
“Dean Durning,” Mike sneered. “I oughta go kick his ass.”
“Yeah, that’ll be good. An assault charge is all you need to keep you out of jail.”
Mike sagged impotently.
“He’s going to pull the plug,” John said impatiently. “We may not even know about it until it’s done. If we’re wrong about giving her the chance to see him one last time, I don’t want that hanging over my head for the rest of my life.”
Mike drew on his cigarette icily. “You wanted my help figuring this out, I say we don’t tell her. I think that’s the thing to do, seeing where she’s at.
“If we’re wrong,” he said with a shrug, “you get used to things hangin’ over your head.”
* *
*
Later, Rose found her sons in lawn chairs on the back patio as the sun went down and Robin cleaned up in the kitchen. Their mother was in her nightgown as she sat down in the twilight.
“I’m tired,” she yawned contentedly.
“You should go to bed,” John said.
Rose looked across the yard. Some strands of a thought vexed her. “Wasn’t that something, what she said? The whole thing?”
John had no idea what she was talking about but invested himself in wherever she wanted to go with it. “It was!” he said in agreement. “I couldn’t believe it.”
“Shouldn’t someone know the way?”
“I think so. I told her I’d ask.”
“Someone really should,” Rose said. “Will you let me know? I really want to know. It’s not right.” It troubled her, whatever it was.
“I will. But I told her it would take two weeks. So just don’t let it bother you until then. Okay?”
That seemed to bring Rose some peace.
Mike watched. He always got exasperated and cranky trying to talk to his mother, but he saw how John just rolled with whatever she talked about. It didn’t seem to matter what you said back so long as you listened and returned words back to her.
“You should know,” she said to Mike, who took a moment to realize he was drawn in. “For all the times it did it to you. Right?”
“I think so,” Mike said awkwardly, sensing how it worked. “I think you figured it out.”
“With the birds!” she smiled.
Mike clucked indignantly. “It’s a joke without the birds,” he said, like you’d have to be an asshole to not want it with the birds.
“See! We know,” she grinned before giving into a fuzzy yawn. “I’m tired.”
“You should go to bed,” John said.
“I think I will,” she said sleepily as she stood and then stooped down to kiss John’s cheek. “Goodnight. Don’t let the bed bugs bite.”
“Okay.”
She kissed Mike. “Don’t be out too late.”
“I’m in for the night,” he said. “I’ll be here.”
“I like that,” she said. “And then, three more! Can you believe it?”
“Three is really something,” Mike agreed.
“Three!” Rose marveled as she turned to amble barefoot across the lawn. “I’ll tell Robin.”
She stepped unsteadily into the house and John and Mike watched through the kitchen window as she spoke to Robin with fervor. Robin nodded earnestly as she dried a coffee cup.
Mike’s cigarette ash dotted the dimming light as both men sighed and said nothing.
Forty-two
John had begun missing deadlines. Because of Next Step’s reputation and relationships, many of the smaller foundations—donating a grand here, three grand there—would still accept a proposal a few days late and a bit fuzzy around the edges.
But Betty Stienke was not to be messed with. Dead since 1967, as a girl she married into a tannery empire that thrived in the Midwest for nearly one hundred years, and she died with millions. The Betty S. Stienke Foundation hovered over the philanthropic landscape as one of the richest sources of human services funding in southeast Wisconsin for decades, and Next Step earned tens of thousands of dollars every year from the foundation’s long-serving and ruthlessly inflexible foundation manager.
Every year when it came time to reapply to Stienke, John felt the future of the agency—and the lives of those they tried to help—riding on his shoulders as he hunkered down and ground out the complicated grant proposal. He never failed to bring in the money.
But this year Stienke fell right in the thick of his Larry dilemma, and John cut corners. Five days past deadline, he finally cobbled together entire blocks of text from previous grants and knocked it out while sitting at Larry’s bedside in the middle of the night. The budget he included with the funding request was a lazy approximation of predicted revenue and expenses.
It ate at John to turn in something so slipshod, but he gambled that almost two decades of a productive relationship between foundation and agency would earn him a pass for an off year. When Stienke came around again in twelve months, Larry would be gone and John’s head would be back in the game.
* * *
He was asleep on his couch when Fred Kirby, Next Step’s executive director, called and told him he needed to see him right away.
“What happened with Stienke?” Fred began gravely as soon as John sat down in his shambles of an office.
Past retirement age, Fred was a supremely decent man and as close to a father figure as John had ever allowed himself. It was Fred who trusted John to set his own hours and meet his deadlines without oversight, and John never let him down. So he despaired to hear the uneasy tone in his boss’s voice.
“I told Kurt Stamper that I was going to be a few days past deadline,” John squirmed. “He was his usual grouchy self, but he was okay with it. Is he saying—?”
Fred held the proposal in his hand. Seeing a printed copy for the first time, half the thickness of a typical Stienke appeal, John’s heart sank at what he tried to get away with.
“What is this?” Fred asked plaintively. “This is not what we turn in to them.”
John went gray with regret. “There were things going on, at home. I had a lot of things on my plate, and…”
“I told Stamper you must have just emailed the wrong file,” Fred continued hopefully. “This is a draft. Right?”
“Look,” John protested weakly. “They know what we do here. They know we’ve never been anything other than one-hundred-percent responsible with their money. They expect us to jump through the same hoops for them every year, but just because—”
Fred flipped through the pages with alarm. “These are just pieces of past proposals. You didn’t even take out the other funder’s name on one page.” Fred held it up; a crotchety circle was scrawled around the offending word. Kurt Stamper had caught John not even bothering to use search and replace to catch the mistake.
John winced and sagged.
“The foundation is spending down. They’re cutting back on who they’re supporting until the funds are gone. And now we’ve fallen off their automatic renewal list,” Fred said gravely. “He’s sending us to the board for review. They’re going to be looking at us closely, asking a lot of questions.
“In this economy, if they decide there are other agencies who are doing what we do more efficiently … We could lose this.”
John’s face burned with regret. Fred studied him with personal concern that undercut this perilous threat to the agency.
“How did this happen?” the old man asked patiently. “What’s going on?”
“It’s just…” John sighed. More than once he longed to unburden himself to Fred about his father, knowing that he could trust Fred with a secret.
“I’m just going through a rough patch at home,” he said.
“I knew your marriage was having some problems,” Fred offered sympathetically.
“Well, you know,” John said, sitting up defensively. “When you’re married for a long time, things change, but that doesn’t mean that…” He trailed off, realizing that the only cover he had was marital discord.
“We’ve been working through some things, but I think we’re going to be fine. It’s just been … hard.”
“I understand,” Fred said sincerely, before rattling the meager pages of the Stienke proposal. “But, John, this is serious.” Fred had been dealing with health problems and John knew he had been trying to find a successor since before the economy went bad. If they lost one of their top funders, finding someone to take over for him would be impossible.
“We have nothing to fear going before their board,” John said confidently. “We do good work here. It’s about time they take a closer look at us, to see what all we’re accomplishing with not a hell of a lot of money.
“Things are so tough out there, they might decide they want to give us—”
“I’m sorry,” he said to Fred. “I really need to…”
He answered the phone. “Hey, I need to call you back. I’m in the middle of—”
“You need to get down to the mall,” Mike cut in sharply. “Right now.”
John met his boss’s eye with unease. “Can’t you deal with it?”
“No. She went over to Macy’s with Mrs. Ludlow and store security called and said I had to get over here and … I’m not dealing with this shit alone.”
John grimaced. “I’ll be right there.”
He hung up and stood. “I’m sorry,” he pleaded to Fred. “I’m on the tail end of resolving this. I won’t let you down again. But…”
“Go,” Fred said.
“Stienke’s going to be fine.”
“I hope so.”
* * *
A store employee led John through housewares, intimate apparel, and travel accessories. The store on a Monday morning was sterile and half-empty. The piped in music played Céline Dion. Her heart was going on.
They moved from the customer side of the operation to the airless row of management offices. Passing a lounge area partitioned by a large window, John saw his mother sitting alone on a bank of vinyl chairs. Mrs. Ludlow, a neighbor since the day the family moved into the house decades ago, sat apart from her, looking ashen and unsure.
Rose sat compactly, staring at her hands.
Instead of being taken to her, John followed the assistant manager around a corner to find Mike, pacing agitatedly with an unlit cigarette in his mouth. His usual shabbiness clashed particularly harshly with the antiseptic corporate offices.
Mike came alive at seeing his brother. “What the fuck, man? What took you so long?”
“What happened?” John asked.