The small plant John bought sat on Larry’s bed stand. He spent some time picking it out, wanting it to fit in with the simple but warm décor Walt Bolger had shaped over the years. Seeing it now in the room, it looked puny, insubstantial for the circumstances—entirely the wrong statement to make. This was why men don’t bring each other flowers.
He had come to observe Gloria’s eleven o’clock visit; he would sit with his father until she came back at three. She was still apprehensive after Walt explained the situation to her, but John believed she wasn’t going to protest working for him going forward—she was making good, tax-free money for a few minutes work. If she worked other jobs during the day, she probably earned a better living than John. She would take his money just as she had Walt’s, and hope that Larry continued to have a long, secret life.
Seeing his father’s treatment a second time drove home the methodical simplicity of it. The diapering and tooth-brushing still made John squeamish, but he quickly saw the parallels. As a hard-charging doctor in the early seventies, Larry Husted may not have been the most evolved father in the world, but John chose to believe that he diapered and brushed John countless times when he was small. John certainly did it for Katie.
What’s a little spit and shit between family? It all washes off.
If Larry got sick, Gloria would take care of it. Or maybe that’s when John would tell Gloria to not come back. If Larry got sick, maybe John would just sit and let nature take its course.
Until then, there would just be the routine: lotion the pressure points (gently, never rub), brush the teeth, change the diaper, change the IV bottle, reposition the patient. Wait and repeat. It was important work, but it was only difficult for its frequency and the need to remain unseen. After watching Gloria that second time, John felt almost cocky about his ability to take over.
“Gracias,” John said as Gloria left, using his high school Spanish for the first time in his adult life. If he ever needed to tell her that he had a burro named Pepé, he remembered how to say that, too.
He meant to find Katie’s English-to-Spanish dictionary and take it for his own. Based on her grades, it wasn’t doing her any good.
“How do you say ‘flunk’ in Spanish?” he asked Katie recently.
“Do you know they don’t even have sarcasm in Spanish?” she responded glibly.
“Is that true?”
“Sure.”
Once Gloria slipped out, the density of the solitude in the room pressed in on him. The lateness of the hour didn’t help; John’s thinking always got wispy and weird when he was sleep deprived.
Unable to find an acceptable position on the chair near Larry, John slid it closer, causing a scraping sound that rattled the still. He instinctively looked to his father with alarm.
“Sorry,” John whispered.
Gloria left Larry turned toward him. Eyes closed, his face drawn taut by the ruinous toll of this unnatural existence, John nevertheless recognized himself in his father. Every time one of Larry’s friends or colleagues encountered John around town, they all made the same observation: “You look just like your father!”
He studied his father’s face. If John currently resembled Larry at forty, then here was his face at seventy-seven.
If I had spent the past thirty years plugged into a wall, John thought to himself mordantly.
Larry’s hair was unwashed and speckled with dandruff. Clearly hair care did not have the same urgency as dental hygiene, but was it ever washed? This was not three decades of hair. Who cut it? How often? He added this to the list of questions he wished he had asked Walt. There were finer points of “Larry care” that hadn’t occurred to him in light of the grimmer realities he was going to be addressing.
John brushed the hair back from Larry’s temple; he didn’t approve that it was so brittle and dirty. He’d find out how to do the shampooing and make it a regular part of his care. He used to love doing that when Katie was little.
Drawn in close, the time was right for a private word with his father. Not because he believed Larry could hear him, but because he hadn’t spoken to his father since he was thirteen and never expected to have the chance again.
He cleared his throat and instinctively made sure no one else was around to hear.
“I shoveled the driveway,” John began awkwardly. “You probably don’t remember, but that last morning, when all this started, you told me to shovel the driveway. So I did it after school, before homework.”
The absolute vacuum into which he spoke mocked him. He winced and scolded himself: You open with that?
Oh, well, he reasoned. Maybe specifics weren’t all that important to start.
“Haven’t stopped shoveling, every time we get snow. If I don’t have Mom dug out by lunch, I hear about it. Still trying to get Mike to do his share, but…” he trailed off. No point in getting into that yet.
“And I have to do my own driveway. We’re on Kern Street, right down from where the Fredericks lived. Katie—she’s fifteen—says shoveling’s not a job for girls. No grandson. Sorry.”
Would Larry care that he had no male grandchildren? John decided he would. From this point forward, Larry became pretty much whatever John projected on him.
“But I have a snowblower, so…” John shrugged, not even interested in his own story. The lateness of the hour lubricated that part of him that encouraged his thoughts to ramble to odd places. “I figured you’ve been lying here, wondering how the driveway turned out.”
He leaned back; exhaled self-consciously. The chair pinched his spine, defied him to settle into one spot for more than a few minutes. He wanted to prop up his feet at the foot of his father’s bed, certain that this position would be the most conducive to keeping the vigil, but he instinctively recoiled at the casual disrespect.
He couldn’t help using humor to take the edge off the burden that fell on him, but the full weight of reality never left him. His father had this profane stasis forced upon him for longer than the mind could grasp, and no one would ever know if the best intentions of Larry’s closest friend had turned out to be a torture sentence.
The shittiest of hands was dealt to the gnarled body before him. Solemnity was due.
“So…” John exhaled, already feeling spent. He coughed weakly, then settled back into the chair. Maybe that was enough talk for now.
They had all kinds of time.