John and Mike sat in the doctor’s waiting room, Mike fidgeting between put-upon sighs. Standing out in his down-market rock star wear (scuffed boots, ripped jeans, a cheap leather vest over a Quiet Riot T-shirt), he drew the attention of a little girl fascinated by his tattoos. She leaned over the row of chairs behind him and he was oblivious as she intently sounded out the word inked into his right shoulder.
“Tits!” she finally pieced together proudly. As she was right next to Mike’s ear—and no more than seven years old—this made him jump.
The girl smiled as Mike struggled to make sense of the moment he shared with her, until she nodded to his shoulder. A cartoon cat salivated there, its eyes popping out of its head with a Tex Avery ba-boiinng, as the tastefully austere caption explained: Tits!!!
Mike got this one at nineteen, when he and Taggert hitched to Detroit to see Anthrax. He couldn’t recall the inspiration for the design; he was so high that night that he didn’t discover he was inked until the next afternoon, when he regained consciousness beneath the seesaws outside an elementary school. But someday soon, when the little girl in the waiting room learned about punctuation marks, she would understand that three exclamation points in the context of a cat viewing tits suggested that these were tits that exceeded commonplace expectations. Or the cat just really liked seeing tits.
Mike covered up his shoulder grumpily as the girl’s mother pulled her away with a mortified scowl. John, who watched this from the corner of his eye, shook his head with a goading smile.
“Nice.”
“Fuck you,” Mike whispered, betraying just the trace of a blush. The mother heard this, too.
“Time was,” Mike said cockily, “chicks were all about the tats. You wouldn’t know.”
“Who’s going to hire you looking like that?” John shot back.
“I have a job.”
“That’s not a job!” John insisted. “You have no health insurance. They’re barely paying you. After gas and dope—”
“I’m not using!”
“Fine. But you can’t be making any money.”
“What do you think we could get for the house?” Mike asked abruptly in a tone that suggested he had been considering this for a while.
John was dumbstruck. “We’re not selling the house! Where would she live?”
“She doesn’t need all that room. We’d find her an apartment. Or maybe…”
“What? She’d move in with me?”
“Some families do that,” Mike said piously.
John stammered at Mike’s nerve. “That is her home. She doesn’t want to move,” he said. “Besides, nothing is selling right now, especially those old houses on the east side. The place is falling apart, thanks to us.”
“Maybe we could—”
“I can’t believe you,” John whispered through grit teeth, a long-suppressed rant rising to the surface. “Find a lawyer to sue somebody. Kick your mother out of her house. Anything to keep you from getting a goddamned job like the rest of us.”
“I have a job!”
“That’s not a job!”
A nurse stood before them awkwardly as their spat spilled into the waiting room. “You two can come on back now.”
* * *
John and Mike were led into the examining room, where Rose sat demurely opposite Dr. Kelly. A button on her blouse was not done up, exposing her bra. There was no script provided to a son to alert his elderly mother that she was showing skin, so John grabbed the only remaining chair in the cramped room and averted his eyes.
“Well, the good news is that your mother is physically doing great,” the doctor began blandly, consulting his notes. “Her blood pressure, all her vitals, the blood work—she’s fit as can be. I’m seeing a little osteoporosis, which is to be expected, and I’m seeing just the earliest signs of cataracts, which we’ll want to keep our eye on. But we should be very happy with what we’re seeing here.”
The doctor smiled to the brothers and stifled a double take as he beheld Rose’s oldest son. He focused his attention on John as he flipped through Rose’s file.
“You remember when I saw Rose about a year ago I had her take a little test for me, just so that we could begin tracking these memory issues we were concerned about. It took some convincing but I just had her take the test again, and I’m seeing some things we need to discuss.”
Rose looked defeated as the doctor preceded to talk as if she wasn’t in the room.
“For instance, I asked Rose how many different kinds of animals she could name in thirty seconds,” the doctor continued. “Last time, she named eighteen. Today, she named eleven. That was a little disappointing.”
The doctor had a dry, insensitive tone. John shrugged to his mother with an understanding smile and then turned to Mike, hoping to see him offering similar support to their mother. Instead, Mike was deep in thought, probably testing his own animal-counting skills. John could tell by his brother’s dim twitching that it wasn’t going well.
“And I asked her to draw me a clock showing five o’clock,” the doctor said, putting the two drawings side by side. Last year’s drawing was shaky but showed five o’clock dead on; this year’s was more like 3:05, with an extra hour hand bisecting an edge of the ragged circle before being scribbled out.
Rose bristled defensively. “I never could draw. I have to pay a doctor to tell me that?”
The doctor pushed on. “And, well, there are six or seven things we test for. And in all areas, we’re seeing a diminution of cognitive skills that we need to be concerned about.”
“Can you say for sure it’s Alzheimer’s?” John asked. Mike saw his mother recoil at the word.
“I would say it’s dementia,” the doctor said. “Alzheimer’s is a form of dementia. There are distinctions, but even we can’t define them too clearly.
“These things can always level off, and we have her on medications that have shown great results in slowing down the process in other patients,” he continued. “But just going by the testing, we need to recognize that the disease is advancing at a pace that is on the high side of the scale.”
The doctor’s arid assessment of the situation brought a leaden pause to the room. John felt the usual push to step up and tend to his family’s business. But Mike spoke first. “How fast are we talking?”
“It’s impossible to say,” the doctor replied, turning his attention to Rose. “You are physically strong, Rose. You’re still engaged with life, with your friends, and your two sons here. You have challenges ahead of you, but I have every reason to believe that things don’t have to change for you for a good long time. Will you trust me on that?”
He smiled and squeezed her hand. She appreciated his kindness, but then he immediately returned his attention to her sons. “The changes you’ve been seeing will continue. You need to monitor them and determine when things have advanced to a point where it’s not safe for her to be on her own.”
“She’s not alone. I’m living with her,” Mike said firmly.
“That’s terrific,” the doctor said. “Still, there will come a point where she’ll need more help than you can provide.
“There are some excellent memory care facilities in the area, but the best of them have long waiting lists. It would be prudent to start checking them out, see where Rose would be comfortable, and get her name on some lists.”
The doctor consulted her file. “Her long-term health plan is…” he said, wincing just slightly as he saw her coverage. He put a hopeful spin on it. “There are many fine places that will work with you with this type of insurance.”
John, Mike, and Rose processed this as the doctor closed his file and stood. “You should schedule her for six months, and we’ll see where things stand then. Call if you have any concerns before then. Sound good?”
He winked and made his exit. The three Husteds didn’t seem ready to leave. Mike finally broke the pall.
“I got twenty-one. Animals.”
“That’s good,” Rose said, impressed.
“What I did was, I just pictured a zoo,” Mike boasted. “All the animals you’d see at the zoo. Bears. Elephants. Tigers.”
Rose admired the ingenuity. “You remind me of that trick next time I come,” she said conspiratorially. “I’ll fix his little test.”
“Giraffes. Rhinos. Bears,” Mike continued sagely, as John handed his mother her purse and moved his family toward the door.
Mike kicked the floor when he remembered an animal he missed. “Penguins! Fuck!”
“Michael.”
“Sorry.”
John rolled his eyes with honest bemusement. His mother was just about through the door before he pulled her back.
“Um … You need to…” He pointed shyly to the undone button on her blouse. “Sorry.”
“Oh, for heaven’s sake,” Rose clucked at her son’s awkwardness. She fixed herself up and followed Mike out. “I would have never thought of penguins.”
“Zebras,” Mike said.
“Bears,” John contributed sarcastically under his breath.
“Bears,” Mike tallied.