Raising the Dad Page 20

Mike was coiled to flee. He’d already heard the whole story. “Look, you’re gonna have to—”

  A door marked STORE SECURITY opened and a middle-aged man with a kind face emerged. He seemed relieved to see John but reticent to proceed following a tepid handshake. “You must be Rose’s other son. I’m Ted Reichard, the manager here. Please, come in.”

  He gestured both brothers into the security room. Having missed his chance to escape, Mike warily followed John in.

  The security room lacked any air of covert mystery whatsoever, just a cramped little nook off the employee lunchroom. Monitors over a video deck showed vulnerable corners of the store. Shoppers blandly went about their business as cameras spied on them.

  John and Mike were directed to sit in the two chairs at the security console. The manager stood as he proceeded. He couldn’t have known that Mike hadn’t had time to tell John what happened.

  “We are trying to be as sensitive to this as possible,” he began. “We know your mother has her challenges, and I can’t imagine how embarrassing this is for her.

  “But when she became upset and started threatening lawsuits over how we have dealt with the situation, it became my job to protect the store’s interests. I think you should watch what happened, and then we can talk about where we go from here.”

  John squirmed as Mike stared at the floor.

  The manager pushed a button and one of the monitors played back silent, grainy images from a dressing room. The camera was trained on an empty stall as a store employee walked past.

  On the tape, a customer emerged from behind a closed stall door, looking displeased with what she tried on. John leaned in as Rose and Mrs. Ludlow walked into view, each with prospective purchases draped over their arms. Rose loved to shop; even without the audio, John could see that she was in good spirits. She tried to chipperly follow Mrs. Ludlow into her dressing room before being redirected into a stall of her own. She closed the door behind her.

  The voyeuristic queasiness grew as Rose’s feet, a few inches apart, showed through the gap below the stall door. She appeared to sit down. Her feet were still, apart from some unsteady shifting, then she slid down her clothes and they balled up at her ankles.

  A deathly few moments passed, and then a customer walking past the fitting rooms slipped before catching herself.

  She looked down, then registered disgust as she examined her shoes. She studied Rose’s closed door with incomprehension, walked out of view for several moments, then returned with a young store employee. Both tried to avoid the puddle.

  The angle and the quality of the image muted the full reality of it, but it was obvious what happened. John’s heart constricted.

  On the video playback, the store employee delicately knocked on the stall door. Rose’s feet shuffled unsteadily before she opened the door, the camera for a moment catching her pulling up her skirt and realizing that everything was soaked in urine. The store worker was admirable for her discretion and kind handling, but Rose was obviously confused and mortified.

  “My sister had Alzheimer’s,” Reichard said softly. “I can imagine what happened. Your Mom was overstimulated from being at the mall, she steps alone into a stall, she disrobes. She just forgot where she was, that’s all.”

  Seeing Rose’s stricken face on the video, cornered and ashamed in that tiny room, was too much for Mike as he bolted from the room.

  On the monitor, Mrs. Ludlow stepped into view. Quickly assessing the situation, she attempted to step into the stall with Rose and close the door behind them, but Rose quickly became obstinate.

  Either to deflect her embarrassment or in a true inability to process what was happening, she began lashing out at everyone. Embarrassed shoppers moved past, trying to avoid the crazy lady, as Reichard himself appeared on the tape to try and gracefully defuse the situation. His concern and gentle touch was clear.

  Mrs. Ludlow finally got Rose alone in the stall and closed the door. An employee quickly brought fresh clothes.

  “We got her cleaned up as quick as we could,” Reichard said. “We got her fresh clothes, which we are happy to let her keep. I believe that we handled a sensitive situation as delicately as we possibly could, but … She was really angry before we were able to calm her down.”

  John wasn’t listening anymore.

  * * *

  He stepped from the security office. He was not surprised to not see Mike with their mother, looking tinier than ever.

  Mrs. Ludlow smiled at John before leaving the two of them alone. John sat down beside Rose and put his arm around her.

  “Hi, Mom.”

  “Hello,” she said defeatedly. He kissed her temple. They sat in silence for a moment.

  “I had to see a man about a horse,” Rose finally said simply.

  “Sounds like,” he smiled as he pulled her closer.

  She smiled, too, but then sagged. “I’m sorry.”

  “Nothing to be sorry about,” he said. They fell silent again, neither anxious to leave. To have to walk back out through the mall, forever garish and carefree, felt cruel.

  He finally rubbed her back. “It’s past lunchtime, you must be starving. Let’s go to Rocky’s. My treat.”

  He stood, but she pulled away.

  “Mom. Nobody is ever going to know.”

  “You don’t know that.”

  “Nobody will know,” he said firmly, offering his hand. “I promise.”

  Forty-three

  John and Robin sat across their kitchen table. John cradled a cup of coffee as if its heat might cauterize what hurt him.

  “She can’t be on her own anymore,” he said. “Mike is useless.”

  There were only two options left for the care of Rose. Robin would’ve been within her rights to lobby for the less intrusive one, but John wasn’t surprised when she didn’t.

  “We’ll fix up the spare room,” she said without hesitation. “Your job will allow you to be here for her during the day—assuming you keep your job. We can all work with her at night.”

  John studied his wife, grateful for the compassion she had for his mother.

  “This isn’t a very big house,” he pointed out.

  “She isn’t a very big woman.”

  “Things would really change around here,” he continued, “for all of us. Christ, we’re just heading into the worst of it with Katie. Can we really deal with her and Mom at the same time?”

  “It would do our daughter good to be around someone with real problems, instead of the self-pitying drama she and her mopey little friends wallow in,” Robin said, finishing her coffee and then standing to get more. “Maybe she’ll start seeing them for what they are.”

  John smiled at her gruff wisdom and watched her at the coffeemaker. He waited until she returned with the pot and refilled his cup.

  “You and me aren’t a hundred percent,” he said quietly, conceding the truth that had been living with them for too long. “Moving my mother in here isn’t going to help with our … closeness issues.”

  “You think?” she drawled sarcastically. He smiled, but then she undercut the lightness with blunt reality.

  “It won’t be forever,” she said. “She’s changing fast, John. It’s coming fast.”

  He knew this, but despaired at hearing it.

  “I want to have her here, for as long as we can responsibly take care of her,” Robin continued. “But there’s going to come a time when she’s going to have to go where she can be safe. We need to start looking into that now, because a decent place will be expensive and her long-term plan isn’t going to cover all of it.”

  John’s insides constricted at the problems yet to come. Robin saw this and took his hand.

  “We’ll deal with that when it comes. For now, I want you to be here for her.”

  Robin continued. “I’ve watched how you’ve thrown yourself into caring for your father, even when there was nothing you could do for him. You still have time with your mom. While she still can, I want her to know ho
w lucky she is to have you looking out for her.”

  Tears teased their way into his eyes and he didn’t bother to push back at them. “I love you,” he told her.

  “I know you do,” she said. “I love you, too.”

  He swabbed at the emotion pooled in his eyes and tickling his nose, then sighed as he sized up their kitchen.

  “This really is a small house,” he said.

  “It’s fine.”

  “You know,” he said tentatively. “That old house of hers has a lot of room.”

  “We are not moving into your mother’s house.”

  “Okay,” he said, surrendering quickly and wisely. She wasn’t convinced.

  “For a lot of reasons,” she said firmly, “I am not moving into that house.”

  “Okay.”

  She bore down: “If we moved into that house, it would come with a fully installed Mike.”

  “Understood.”

  “I am only so wonderful.”

  Forty-four

  John and Mike stood at the living room window, watching Rose in her garden with Mrs. Ludlow. A male cardinal sat on the bird feeder, and Mike guessed Rose was engaging Mrs. Ludlow in her search for the bird’s mate as the two old ladies searched the trees. Paired-off cardinals never let themselves get too far from each other, Rose would always tell her sons when they were boys.

  Neither took their eyes off her as Mike spoke with uncommon focus.

  “If we tell her, about Dad,” he began, having walked through this for himself ahead of time, “and it’s a good thing, then we’ll know we made the right call. Forever. No matter how bad things get as she gets worse, we’ll have that—the three of us. The four of us,” he recalculated, surprising both brothers. It would be kind of like getting the band back together, with all original members.

  “No matter what fucked-up path it took to get us there,” Mike reasoned, “if telling her turns out good, that’s like a family thing we could all do together. It’d be all right.”

  “Yep,” John agreed.

  “But if we tell her, and it goes bad,” Mike flinched darkly. “It could go really, really bad. Like, ‘We had no idea how badly this was going to go’ bad. Like, ‘What the fuck were we thinking?’”

  “I know,” John said.

  “But,” Mike continued hopefully. “Even if it went really bad, she might forget we told her. Eventually. Maybe.”

  “I don’t know,” John said doubtfully.

  Mike conceded the point with a shrug before proceeding.

  “But you and me, we wouldn’t forget,” he said bluntly. “If it’s hell, if telling her turns out to be the most awful thing we ever have to go through, it’s gonna stick with us until the day we fucking die. Letting her know could hit her as hard as the day Dad died, and we let it happen.”

  John had considered this. A lot.

  “So,” Mike began to sum up, “are we not telling her because of what we’re afraid it will do to her? Or to us?”

  The reality of his big brother’s question stunned John, both for its implication and for the fact that Mike got to it first.

  Mike had been spending most of his time at Larry’s bedside, pulling from his father what he could, while he could. He had obviously been doing a lot of thinking. Maybe Larry, in his way, helped push his boys to take action.

  “Because if we’re saying there’s a chance knowing about Dad will make her happy, then we gotta grow a pair and get this done,” Mike continued. “’Cause time’s gonna come where she’s not gonna get to be happy about anything. Forever.”

  The simple truth of this landed on John hard. It was right there.

  “If we’re not telling her because it’s too hard,” Mike summed up darkly. “Then fuck us.”

  * * *

  They decided to practice on Katie first. Which meant convincing Robin.

  “You two are crazy,” she said, unfamiliar with the sight of John and his brother sitting as a team across from her at their kitchen table.

  “Katie’s going to have to be told eventually,” John stressed.

  “Why does she have to know? Ever?” Robin asked. “The only way this gets taken care of without turning it into a disaster is for as few people as possible to know. Just leave Katie out of it.”

  “I want her to know,” John said flatly.

  “And then what?” Robin asked. “She’s a teenager. In a culture where every stray thought they have is broadcast to the world, the more outrageous and intimate the better. You really think this won’t end up on Facebook and everywhere else?”

  It killed John to hear how cynical Robin had become about their daughter.

  “Sometimes you just have to trust people,” he said simply.

  “And what about your mother?” Robin pressed on. “Suppose telling her goes well? Suppose bringing her to her husband ends up being something beautiful? Which, my God, I would wish for that woman more than anything.

  “But then what? You can’t trust her to stay quiet about it. If she told one friend, which you know she might, the whole town will know, the way those women gossip.”

  John sighed. He learned a long time ago that But then what? is the phrase that separates people like him from people like his wife. But then what? is that irksome comeback that usually causes half-assed ideas to be smashed upon the rocks.

  “Nobody will believe her,” Mike said proudly, disarming his annoyingly logical sister-in-law. “Most of what she says anymore doesn’t make any sense, people will just smile and nod their heads.”

  “So your whole plan is built on the fact that she’s losing her mind?” Robin asked disapprovingly. “Nice.”

  “Sometimes life’s a shit sandwich,” Mike said. “But maybe the bread won’t be moldy.”

  John and Robin stopped to jointly mark the moment at which Mike Husted uttered something approximating a genuine—if crude—profundity. He noted their looks of impressed surprise.

  Robin looked at these two with an unexpected sense of bemused affection. For all her well-earned animosity toward Mike—and her suspicion that somewhere beyond all this he would earn gobs more—it was not displeasing to see the brothers coming together over something.

  She could picture them as boys, working as a team to earnestly beg their parents for a dog, or to stay up late to watch something on TV. In the same way John found sustenance by getting back some version of his father, she was happy for her husband that he had found his brother. At least for now.

  John grew earnest. “I don’t want to believe that Katie would do anything to hurt the family,” he said to Robin, quiet but firm. “And I don’t want to believe you think she would.”

  * * *

  Katie came home from school to find her parents and her uncle—who she barely knew, who was just a skeezy old loser to her—waiting. The heaviness in the living room and the funereal tone of the adults put her immediately on guard. But as they gingerly explained their way to the truth about Larry, John’s heart sank at the glib sarcasm and ghoulish fascination that soured his daughter’s reaction.

  “This is too weird,” she said with a mordant smirk, wishing she could escape to her room. “I mean, seriously.”

  “We’ve all been having a hard time making sense of it,” John said.

  “Does he have really long fingernails? Like Wolverine?”

  “No,” John said patiently. “There have always been people, to take care of things like that.”

  “He has people?”

  “He can’t feed himself, honey,” her father explained. “He can’t do anything. Without them to help him, for years, he would have died.”

  “But wasn’t that supposed to happen anyway?” she asked.

  The adults sagged at the myriad ways this story strained reason. It didn’t help that Katie’s tone was both honestly curious and mocking.

  “It was,” John struggled, “but it became complicated. These people, who loved your grandfather, they thought they were doing the right thing. At least at first. So t
hey worked really hard to take care of him. For a really long time.”

  “And now it’s your father’s job,” Robin said, stepping in. “But it’s not something we can keep doing. It’s been very hard on him. On all of us.”

  Her father’s behavior the past few months suddenly made sense. Her spine set as she pieced it together and recognized how to make this about her.

  “That’s where you go every night!” she protested haughtily to John. “You lied to me. It wasn’t about Grandma. Really nice, when you’re on me every day of my life about not telling the truth. Perfect.”

  “He’s been trying to help his father,” Robin said with forced evenness. “And he didn’t want to upset you.”

  “Whatever,” Katie dismissed with airy superiority.

  “Hey,” Mike interjected sharply. “Don’t be an asshole.”

  Everyone turned to Mike. Robin would later recall the unfamiliar desire to hug him.

  “He’s our father,” he said, bearing down on his niece. “He fucking died on us, when we were your age.

  “As much as you want to act like your dad is some fucking joke to you,” Mike said, pointing to John, “you wanna talk about what that’s like, havin’ your father drop dead out of nowhere? You wanna try living through that?”

  Katie blinked soberly, a little afraid. Her uncle probably hadn’t spoken five hundred words to her since the day she was born.

  “And now he’s had to figure out this,” Mike continued on John’s behalf. “This has all been on him. This has all been out of his pocket. I can’t do shit to help. Because I’m forty-five fucking years old, and back when I was your age—when I mighta started making something outta myself—I was the same hard-ass poser joke you’re turning into.”

  Provoked, Katie made as if to shoot back. But she was way out of her league.

  “You got it made,” Mike continued caustically. “You got—holy shit!—you got more electronic, computer-cell-phone-miniature-TV bullshit than they had on space shuttles when I was your age—that he pays for!!—and now you’re sitting here giving him shit when he’s trying to tell you about something that’s really hurting him? That we still have to figure out how to tell your grandmother—our mother—who might not think this is the fucking cartoon that you do? Really? You’re proud of this?”