“He’s fine,” Rose said dismissively as she sat across the booth from John at Rocky’s.
“You don’t have to put up with his smoking, or the band,” he said. “It’s your house.”
“He tries to smoke outside when I’m home. And I like having the music. It reminds me of when you were boys. He needs to get his chops together.”
John sighed to hear Mike’s bullshit echoed back through their mother. Of all the concerns she should have for her eldest son, his chops were way down on the list.
“He needs to find a real job,” John stressed. “He’s forty-five years old.”
“He could be Vince O’Neil, any day now,” she said hopefully. John stared at her sadly—how much crap had she rationalized over the the past thirty years to accept the wreck of a life Mike brought upon himself?
“Even if he could make money from this, which he can’t,” John said, “he’s going to be back in bars, hanging around drugs. It nearly killed him last time.”
Rose shivered and withdrew, and John knew that he exposed her to blunt talk she was no longer able to process. As her thinking grew more scattered and her memories more elusive, he saw that she became easily upset at uncomfortable truths.
Surely her mind retained bitter shards of Mike’s rock-and-roll crash. She watched as the Gravel Rash dream died so gruesomely, leaving Mike broke, uneducated, and in prison before he was twenty-five. But those dark recollections—along with the details of her husband’s death—were haphazardly filed in a drawer that dementia was fast welding shut. John saw that she could retrieve traces of memory, but the essential connections that make a memory vivid or even cohesive enough to understand were lost.
Blurting out a biting reference to Mike’s downfall just sent her mind churning for details that she knew she should possess, but were never going to come. As a result, John found that talks with his mother most comfortably stayed rooted in formless chitchat: old family friends, local gossip, past Husted glories and minutia.
The unfailing sameness nurtured her. Ordinarily, John was content with indulging whatever frivolous topics brought his mother solace, and that was the expectation when he had called her the week before to schedule lunch at their usual spot. Back before Larry came back.
Rose loved Rocky’s. The older waitresses still doted on her as Lawrence Husted’s widow; even the younger ones knew her as a regular and treated her with cordial deference. Rose still expected respect for her standing in the community, even if it had faded over the years. At Rocky’s, it was as if Larry Husted never died. When Rose walked in, respect was paid.
So there sat John, the hospital looming over his mother’s shoulder, her husband alive within. John ate nothing. His stomach roiled with acids and anxieties that scoured his insides.
This was not remotely the time to tell Rose the secret. This was just a lunch date.
The dark conversation about Mike quickly dissipated. Small talk loomed.
“So what did Walt Bolger want to talk to you about?” she asked, picking at the cottage cheese beside her BLT.
John froze; this she remembered.
Then, for not the first time he went easily to hazying up the truth. Her condition sometimes demanded it, and conveniently made it easier to justify. Facts didn’t always stick, and John couldn’t count on the memories crucial to her full understanding. If the goal was to keep her calm—and the reality was that she might not remember what she was told anyway—sometimes a well-intentioned lie did the trick.
Lying in bed at four that morning, dreading this lunch, John spun such rationalizations easily.
“He wanted to tell me that he’s leaving town,” John said.
She waved this away. “He’s been talking about leaving for years. He’s never going to let that hospital go. He’s got to be over seventy years old and I hear he’s still hanging around there.”
“He means it this time. He wants to make sure you’re going to be okay.”
“Tell him I’m fine. I’ve got you, and Mike. And, you know,” she said defensively, “all old people have problems remembering things. It’s not the end of the world.”
He felt her shutting down this topic of conversation. It broached unpleasant realities.
“Well,” he shrugged. “I think he’s just trying to be a good friend.”
“I know,” she conceded with a tolerant sigh. “He’s just an old worrywart.”
They said nothing for several moments as Rose searched for memories in the coffee shop, then she turned to catch John transfixed by the hospital across the street.
“Penny for your thoughts,” she said.
He squirmed. “Just thinking about Dad. Guess it was seeing Dr. Bolger the other day. He told me some stories.” John smiled at some of the tales Walt had shared.
“I don’t think I want to know what those two got into when they were around each other,” she sighed with fond disapproval. “They could be like a couple of little boys. Walt Bolger really loved your father.”
“Yeah,” John said. “I got that.”
He stalled. He knew the question that needed to be asked, but here was the thing: This was a family that almost never opened up about deeply personal things. John and his mother were close enough; Mike was Mike. Rose and Robin got along fine. Katie was as close as any teenager to her grandmother, which was typically not close at all. On holidays, or for random reasons, they all came together and smiled and inquired about the inanities of each other’s lives.
But the pain and the sorrow and the joy and the nagging anxieties that each experienced, which each continued to wrestle with, sometimes for exactly the same reason—do families really talk about such things?
Still, on this day, John needed to know. He really needed to know.
“Do you ever think about Dad?”
Rose shifted awkwardly. A raw, naked emotion was unexpectedly spiked and demanding a response. This was why families stuck to talking about the weather and how the Packers were doing, John thought.
“Of course,” she said with an edge. Was her answer true, John wondered, or was this the tone a widow takes when she is forced to admit that after thirty years the honest answer is, “Not really.”
John had admitted to Robin that his father had long ago faded from his mind. A photograph or one of the hoary family myths running in endless rotation brought Larry back just long enough to reburnish his vaguely recalled presence in John’s past. But little of Larry reached across the decades to coalesce into a meaningful memory.
Still, Larry and Rose had history. They lost their lifetime together, but the time they did have, when their lives were young and their futures uncharted, had to have a left permanent mark on the spouse left behind.
For John to presume otherwise would be to accept that if he vanished that day, Robin might think nothing of him thirty years on. Or that he could so easily stop thinking of her. A marriage had to count for more than that.
But could Rose remember? She was beginning to have trouble remembering her granddaughter’s name; what thoughts remained of a marriage severed three decades ago? Without knowing what she still felt about Larry, how could John be sure that she would be able to cope with the unthinkable secret he was keeping from her? If he strung this out for another year, could he ever really know?
On the other hand, if John walked her across the street right then, how could he ever undo the trauma he caused if it turned out he’d made a terrible mistake?
These were the questions that gnawed at him.
He looked past his mother to the hospital. He and Larry were alone in this. For how long, John had no idea.