18

Adele is sitting in a kitchen chair. Paul is gone. She says nothing to me, so that the silence of the sickroom and the silence of the kitchen make me think that no one will speak in this house until I go away. But I’m not going anywhere. She asked me to come, I’m here, and she’d damn well better like it. I’ve lost my dog because of this, so giving me the silent treatment is not acceptable.

I’ve lost my dog, my Mack. The thought keeps returning to me, fresh in its intensity each time.

“Got any tuna?” I suddenly realize that I’m really hungry and I’m not going to wait for an invitation.

Adele looks up from studying the pattern in the old tablecloth. “Yes. In the cupboard.”

I don’t move for a moment, just look at her. I’m having trouble recognizing this stranger as the same person who tortured me enough that I bolted from home as a girl; the one who gave me no choice but to strike out on my own as soon as I could. She traces the pattern of the flowers with her sharp nail and sighs. Should I feel sorry for her? She’s remained my father’s wife, taken care of him. Presumably loved him in some way. She doesn’t look at me, doesn’t tell me anything, and I don’t know if she’s expecting me to ask her questions or if she is so absorbed in her thoughts that she’s forgotten I’m standing here. I look at Adele and see her as she really is, an old woman facing widowhood. The upright posture and the Wicked Witch of the West scrawniness have melted into a dowager’s hump and a midriff roundness. Her hair is the yellowy white of faded blondes and the skin on her hands looks like paper that’s been crumpled and then flattened. I try to think how old she is and am shocked to think that she’s at least seventy-five. She’s been a part of my life for over thirty years. I think that when I was a kid, I held out some hope that eventually she’d go away, or that my father would come to his senses and we’d go away.

Now she looks at me. “Well, are you going to stand there or are you going make us some lunch?”

I laugh out loud. The relief is amazing. She’s still Adele.

She directs my making of the tuna sandwiches from the amount of mayonnaise to the way I cut the sandwiches. I ignore her and make it my way, lots of pepper. I plate the sandwiches, find an open bag of chips, and wrench open the antique avocado-colored refrigerator to hunt down something to drink. The first shelf is filled with some sort of protein drink, chocolate- or vanilla-flavored. Something intended to supply calories to a person with no appetite. I slam the door shut and fill two glasses with tap water.

How do you make small talk with someone who has always seen you as a burden, a pain in the neck, an unfortunate price to pay for happiness? Am I such an outcast that she can’t bring herself to talk to me? Then I wonder if it is simply hard for her to talk about my father, to tell me what’s been going on. She called me, called me here. But now she has nothing to say to me?

It’s up to me to get things started. “How long will he sleep?”

“I don’t know”

“Is he in pain?”

“Sometimes.” She looks at me as if I have asked the most personal of questions. The hostility coming from this withered apple doll is less frightening than it was when she would focus her pale eyes on me when I was a teenager. Those looks were sharp and hurt as much as it did when she grabbed me by the bare arm and dug her fingernails into my flesh. “The morphine helps.”

That’s about as much conversation as either of us wants. So we eat in relative silence, politely passing the chip bag back and forth.

My cell rings. The sound of it startles both of us. A quick glance at an unfamiliar number and my heart starts to beat. It’s a 617 area code. Boston. It’s Troy.

“No one has seen a dog, but a couple of the guys recognize the Rockin’ Roadie handle.” Troy has been as good as his word. He’s talked to truckers from all over, asking about the dog with Arthur Schmidt. I have to be satisfied that Artie or his road moniker is at least known, even if no one has seen Mack.

“Thanks for trying.” I’m certain that the disappointment shows in my voice.

“Truckers do not take kindly to men who mistreat women or animals. No they don’t. Word gets out, he’s a dead man.” He sounds vaguely like a cowboy, and I kind of think that he’s not correct in this estimation. I can hardly believe that these hardworking drivers are that interested in my problem.

But I do appreciate what he’s saying and tell him so, wondering why this stranger is doing this for me. I wonder enough to ask him.

“I have a dog, ma’am. If anyone ever stole her I’d kill the fucker. Pardon my French.”

“No apology necessary. It’s what I intend to do if I ever catch up with Artie.”

We both laugh a little—that humorless chuckle people give when the next sound might be a cry.

*   *   *

I clear off the lunch plates while Adele goes into my father’s room to check on him. They are the same Corelle plates that served as our everyday ware back when I was a kid. I am a little surprised that they have survived all these years. Why is it that a visit to a childhood home turns common objects into jarring memory? The sight of a white glass plate with a seventies orange pattern has the power to drag me into my childhood. Sitting here in Adele’s kitchen, I am thrust backward in time. I have been gone so long, it should have changed utterly, but instead I see the same plates, the familiar cookie jar with the very same chip out of the lid. The clock on the wall is a three-dimensional memory, bringing me back to the hours spent watching it as I struggled through homework or sat there, being forced to consume some hard green vegetable left on my plate. Or to the night that I waited while my father and Adele argued over the story that I was telling them; argued over whether or not to act. I waited for them to do something the night I came home from my date with Paul’s best friend. Waited for them to finally decide that I was being a big baby and order me to take a shower and go to bed. Nothing had happened that didn’t happen on a date with a college boy, a grown man. A man with a good upbringing. A man whose father was my father’s employer.

I pull myself out of this self-indulgent funk. The clock becomes just a clock. I wash and dry the plates and put them away, noting that they are the last two of the set. That’s all they need anyway. They have managed to grow old together, my father and our neighbor. They have more than doubled the number of years that my father was with my mother.

It was as if my mother vanished. One moment, we were sitting in our kitchen; the next, she was on the floor. I can’t remember anything more except the way the ambulance driver took me by the shoulder and made me sit on the kitchen chair, out of the way. We’d been baking cookies; it was almost Christmas and my mother was trying out a recipe for a new kind. I don’t know who called the ambulance. I don’t remember my father’s being there, but I guess he was. It is a seamless memory, going from hoping my mother would let me have the leftover cookie dough to standing in a line at the funeral home.

*   *   *

I flop onto that creamy white couch beside my grubby duffel bag and listen to the soft murmur of conversation coming from Paul’s old room. I’m here, but who cares? Adele demanded that I come, and now she acts like I’ve invaded her home. Again. For the first time, I wonder whose idea it was for me to be here. Who convinced Adele and my father that I should be a member of the club that will witness his slow slide into death when I haven’t been a meaningful part of their lives in years? I’m clearly an unwanted guest, and my father has nothing to say to me.

Mack would love this couch. If he were here, as he should be, I could tuck his body up close to mine. I would tuck his body up close and rest my head on the fine triangle of his skull. He would sigh and be happy to be held. I press a hand against my chest, where I can feel my heart squeeze down on itself each time I realize that Mack could be anywhere and that I may never find him. Or nowhere and that there’s no point in searching for him. I can’t think that way. I just can’t.

I flip my phone open, hoping that by some quirk I have missed the call that will tell me where my dog is. No missed calls. No voice mails. No answers.

I hear the murmuring and the sound of a toilet flushing, then the click-roll of a walker being pushed down the short hallway. My father always prided himself on his height and his posture, but the glimpse I have of him now is that of a hunched-over old man who is gripping the handles of the walker and eking his way down the threadbare wall-to-wall carpet of the hall. This disease has reduced him to an old man even though I know he’s not more than seventy. Isn’t seventy the new fifty? It’s what I tell myself when I think of going over the crest of forty-five, the short descent to fifty. If Adele, five years older than my father, looks her age, my father looks like someone else’s idea of an old man.

There is a moment of suspension as the pair of them, father and stepmother, simultaneously look at me without smiling and then continue on their way down the narrow hall.

“Do you need my help?” I call out to them as I push off the couch.

“No.” Adele, as always, answers for both of them.

Did I mistake the desire for my presence with what was only a courtesy call? Fulfilling the social expectation that a daughter be notified of her father’s impending death? Was the truth of it that I risked everything on what amounted to manners? Or that Adele was calling my bluff?

The air in this living room is stifling, close. The windows are closed against the mild September day. Suddenly, I can’t breathe in here. I bolt out of the front door and stand on the chipped front step, sucking in breath after breath. I can’t make myself go back in there. I have come all this way, and sacrificed the being I love best next to my absent son—for what? To be revisited by every bad memory I’ve worked so hard to grow beyond? This is a haunted house, and I don’t have to be here.