27
The chief help I seem to be able to give is to run errands. Adele sends me to the grocery store, to the pharmacy, to the jewelry store, where she’s left her watch to be repaired. She thinks of these tasks individually, so that I am out of the house more than I am in it. As if by summoning me, she surprised herself and now needs to remove me. I go, happier to be driving around on fool’s errands than sitting in that house, waiting to feed my father his next bowl of soup, or sit on the surprisingly comfortable couch, waiting for my next order. This is when I miss Mack the most; the reason I wanted him with me. To give me an ally. A reason to leave the house, a reminder that I am important in the life of at least one creature.
So far, Adele has done the more intimate nursing tasks. My “help” is mostly kept outside the bedroom door. I think that she’s a little afraid to leave me alone with my father. Afraid of what I might say, or of what he might admit. So I run to Stop & Shop and to CVS and linger a little while at the North Dartmouth Mall before claiming her watch from Zales Jewelers. I use the time to check in with Candy, joining the club of women wandering the mall avenues, cell phone pressed against an ear, isolated in a crowd by the voice of a distant friend. When I hear Candy’s “Candy’s Place,” I so want to be home, home with Mack.
“Any trucker who comes in, I ask if they’ve seen Artie, but no one has, and most don’t know him at all. It’s like he disappeared off the edge of the world.”
“Or he’s hiding from me.”
“One guy did say that he thought he knew who Artie’s agent is. But he couldn’t remember the name. Says he’ll find out and get back to me. I didn’t want to bother you with that bit of noninformation.”
“Artie is like the invisible man. No one sees him. No one knows him.”
“What if he was in an accident or something? Maybe that’s why he’s invisible.”
It’s a good idea, and I wonder if I can get the state police to tell me if an Arthur Schmidt was involved in any accidents, is maybe dead. As long as he didn’t have my dog with him at the time, it wouldn’t break my heart. But the idea doesn’t take hold. “He’s a gypsy driver. Accountable to no one that we know of. Rockin’ Roadie. That’s all anyone on the road knows him by. He could have gotten a load and headed to Canada, or gone down south, or driven anywhere but back to Washington.”
“Justine, he’s got to be somewhere, and so does Mack.” I can tell by the tone of her voice that Candy is distracted, customers coming in for an early-morning pop. It’s only nine there.
A beep beckons me away from Candy to another call. I wouldn’t jump from Candy’s call except that it might be the one that I’m waiting for, the next call to move me closer to finding Mack. Every time the phone rings, my heart does a little dance of useless hope.
It’s Adele, wondering where I am and why am I not there. Could it be because she sent me away? There have been a couple of moments when I’ve wondered if she is all right mentally. She’s made little slips that have puzzled me, like when she lost the word for toilet paper, or when she told me something that just didn’t add up about Paul’s kids, as if she was talking about much younger children. I’ve worked in a nursing home. I’ve been assigned to the Alzheimer’s wing. I know the difference between forgetfulness and senility. But I have never been there at the beginning, when the mind begins to retract. I’m not sure if incipient senility is what I’m seeing, or if my opinion of Adele is so harsh, I’m wishing.
“Are you on your way back?”
“In a minute, I’m waiting for them to find your watch.”
“Don’t wait for it. Come now.”
Normally, that demand would have been spoken in Adele’s naturally imperious tone. Not this time. She sounds panicked.
“I’m fifteen minutes away. I’m on my way.”
Adele ends the call, as she always does, without saying good-bye.
* * *
I bang through the back door and drop everything on the kitchen table. Adele is in my father’s room and I hear her voice and the sound of the television tuned into some chat show where the audience is compelled to applaud at every line the host utters. I snap it off. In the sudden quiet, Adele’s voice also shuts off. My father is lying flat on his back, his mouth gaping open, and the odor of urine is pungent. Adele is standing over him, a wet washcloth bunched in her hands.
“He won’t wake up.”
“How long has he been like this?” I reach for the bedside phone.
“A few minutes.”
“But he was he like this when you called me?”
“Yes.”
“Why didn’t you call the ambulance?”
“I don’t want him to go.”
I dial 911.
“Where’s Paul?” I assume she tried him first.
“I didn’t call him.”
“Okay. I’ll call him.” I don’t want to be alone with his mother in this.
Adele keeps wiping my father’s face with the cold washcloth. “I don’t want him to go to the hospital. He should be here.”
“He’ll need to go for a little while. We’ll bring him back.” I don’t know why I promise this, except that I’m pretty certain the outcome isn’t going to be one that gives us a choice in the matter. These are cheap words to offer. In the same moment, I realize that this means I will never get from my father what I’ve wanted since I was seventeen years old—an apology. No cheap words for me now.
* * *
Done with his first year at college, Paul came home that summer and fell back in with his friends from high school. They were jocks, three-season athletes. One or two had gone to good schools on athletic scholarships. More of them had stayed in New Bedford and gone into their fathers’ businesses, or gone to technical school for the nine months between graduation and an apprentice license as electricians or plumbers. Those were some of the kids Paul hung out with. They met together every night to act out Bruce Springsteen’s “Glory Days.” They were still underage, so their preferred hangout was the outdoor basketball court at the high school, where they could sit in a car, between games of skins versus shirts, and knock back Bud Lights without too much scrutiny from slow-rolling police cars. In their minds, anyone who might see the former heroes of the basketball court, or the baseball diamond, or, best of all, the football field, playing a pickup game would think back to those golden hours and be charmed by the scene of these gods on earth still flaunting the jump shots of their high school years. The drunker they got, the more those glory days revealed the flaws in their postgraduation lives. Some were doing grunt jobs, ordered around by bosses who had once themselves been glory boys. Or, they were like Paul, an average student but a moderately talented athlete, which got him a scholarship to play on an average state basketball team that never even made it into the play-offs.
Ronnie Markham was one of the boys who made it to a big school on an athletic scholarship. They always talked about how someday there would be a trophy named after him; his athletic prowess had put the school on the map time and again. It helped that his father had the largest, most successful car dealership in the area. Markham Motors, three generations old, enjoyed a fair amount of signage on the playing fields of our high school.
It had been a while since Ronnie had hung out with Paul. A year older than Paul, he had finished his sophomore year at BU. They’d reconnected on the basketball court and now Ronnie showed up at our house three days out of four. He and Paul would go out, shoot those baskets at the high school, and then do whatever it was that they did until the early hours of the next day. Sometimes I’d open the door and there he’d be on our front step, still the Greek god of New Bedford. “Hey, kid. Where’s Paul?” That was the sum total of his interest in me.
And then it wasn’t.
That summer, Markham Motors did a little trimming. Cost cutting. Belt tightening. My father’s job was on the line; it had been a few years since the last bronze plaque.
* * *
I can hear them talking about it through the thin walls of my converted closet, Adele’s badgering tone, imploring my father to call a meeting with Markham and point out all his years of success and experience. “Tell him that if he’s smart, he’ll make you the manager. Put the experience at the top of the heap.” I’m a smart kid, and I know that experience isn’t always the best card in the hand. Youth is. After all, youth rules, no old folks in the commercials.
My father’s reply is muted, his words mostly inaudible through the wall. Just one coming through: “Can’t.”
“Won’t is more like it.”
My father must be moving around the room, because suddenly I can hear his voice clearly. “We have the rents. It’ll be all right.”
Adele’s reaction to that is plain: “Not enough.”
“We don’t know that Markham will let me go. Let’s not worry.”
“That’s all right for you to say, but I have to run this house on your salary. It’s not easy. It’s never been enough. Don’t you think I want a little luxury now? A little improvement? Some of the things that I’ve been putting off for years? If he lays you off, how far do you think those rents will take us? They barely pay for the upkeep on that house. We’ll have to raise them. Bottom line. We raise the rents.”
This isn’t the first time I’ve overheard that conversation. Adele is obsessing on what she thinks is inevitable, while my father keeps his head buried in the sand. The discussions have moved out of their bedroom and into the kitchen, where the staple diet of conversation is the relentless conjecture: If Markham fires my father, how will we survive?
* * *
When Ronnie Markham began to show up at our house, my father did everything to encourage the friendship. Everything. In the end, Markham didn’t fire my father. I’ve never been able to decide if it was because of Paul’s friendship or my spectacularly bad date with Ronnie that kept my father employed until retirement.
* * *
The ambulance has arrived; the flashing lights bounce off the bedroom walls. I take Adele by the hand and drag her out of the room so that the EMTs can transfer my father’s inert body to a stretcher. Someone is trying to extract information from Adele, but, for once, she is silent.