Abe Winter awoke less than rested, autumnal sunlight puddling on his wife’s empty side of the bed as he eased himself upright and swung his feet into his waiting slippers. Padding to the bathroom, bleary-eyed, his bladder fit to burst, Abe steadied himself with one hand on the vanity, stooping slightly as he emptied himself into the bowl, the ritual being one of the few reliable pleasures left as he braced himself for what was sure to be his final birthday.
To hear Doc Channing tell it, Abe might make it another six to ten years, so long as he managed his blood pressure and didn’t fall down any stairs. But life amounted to more than just a beating heart. Vitality could not be measured by instruments or blood panels, and there was no metric for will, which could only be weighed from the inside. On his way out of the bathroom, Abe paused before the mirror to inspect his personage, frail and cadaverous, rheumy eyed, skin brittle as old parchment, hair gone thin and white as spider silk. He had the look of a man who was liable to get lost on his way to the kitchen, a man easily coerced into sending a sizable check to the next telemarketer who happened to solicit him on the county’s last remaining landline. A brutal assessment, perhaps, but one look at his shabby condition was all the confirmation Abe needed. This winter would surely be the end of the road.
While there were still a few loose ends to tie off, arrangements financial and logistical, Abe’s goal was to resolve these particulars by the holidays. He’d done his damnedest to outlive Ruth, which had been the plan all along, to spare her the headache of his passing and all the attendant details. But he wasn’t going to make it.
As Abe emerged from the bathroom, Megs, the blond Lab they’d inherited as a puppy from their youngest daughter, Maddie, lifted herself with no small effort from her place at the foot of the bed and ambled slowly after Abe as he started down the hallway. Megs was pushing thirteen now, morbidly obese from a sedentary lifestyle and years of table scraps and riddled with lipomas the size of mandarin oranges. It was not unlikely that Megs would be one of those loose ends Abe would have to tie up in advance of his own passing.
He found Ruth in the kitchen, already dressed for the day, a red enameled cast-iron pot of water boiling on the stovetop, a mound of neatly halved new potatoes heaped on the cutting board, cider vinegar and Dijon mustard nearby at the ready, along with a perky bundle of parsley, freshly rinsed.
“The old Streamliner potato salad, eh? French style,” he said.
“Ahh, the birthday boy,” she said, planting a kiss on his temple.
She was still a beauty at eighty-seven, with a toothsome smile that could disarm the dourest of tax auditors and the same piercing blue eyes that had captivated Abe in 1953, only deeper set now, the corners etched by a lifetime of conviviality and grief.
“I ironed your dress shirt,” she said.
“I have to dress up now?”
“And wear a bow tie,” said Ruth.
Abe’s eight ounces of prune juice and 80 mg carvedilol were waiting for him on the tabletop next to the Saturday edition of the Kitsap Sun, that venerable publication that Abe had grown up with back when it was still called the Bremerton Sun, a paper that grew thinner and less substantive every month, though the price kept going up, and some days it didn’t arrive until nearly ten a.m. Abe supposed that was the price of doing business when you were one of eight remaining subscribers. All the news was on Tweeter now, and the other one, Tickety-tock, where teenagers Gorilla-Gluing body parts to various objects passed as newsworthy.
“I hope Anne and Tim don’t get delayed in Denver,” said Ruth, offloading the potatoes into the cauldron. “They’re expecting a foot of snow in Denver.”
“They ought to just stay put,” said Abe. “You’re making a big deal out of nothing, here. You’re treating this like my funeral.”
“Not everyone lives to be ninety,” Ruth said.
“Well, you’re making me wish I hadn’t,” he said. “And for the record, the day’s not over yet. I was born at nine thirty p.m. I could still die, you know?”
These little allusions, morbid quips made in jest regarding his impending demise, had become more frequent of late, as Abe hoped they might help Ruth prepare for the eventuality, if only incrementally. But Ruth was buying none of it.
“You’d love the attention, wouldn’t you?” she said. “Dropping dead in front of your entire family.”
“Ha,” he said. “I’d rather go in my sleep.”
“Snoring yourself to death hardly sounds peaceful,” Ruth observed.
Abe lowered himself into place and promptly washed the carvedilol down with his prune juice. He figured he must be about the only guy drinking the stuff anymore. An American staple in the last century; fibrous, good source of vitamin C, kept a body regular. But like nightshirts, wristwatches, and the traditional boy-meets-girl narrative, prune juice seemed to have fallen out of style.
Abe turned his attention to the newspaper, startled when the toaster sprung. A moment later, Ruth placed a single slice of lightly buttered sourdough bread in front of him and proceeded to top off his prune juice.
“Easy now,” said Abe. “You don’t want me to spend the whole party in the bathroom, do you?”
“I told Kyle I’d pick them up at the ferry at three forty,” said Ruth. “But he and Soojin insisted on taking Uber.”
“Who’s Uber?” said Abe. “It’s not a dog, is it?”
“It’s like a taxi,” said Ruth. “Maddie’s leaving Corvallis before noon, so she ought to be here by three thirty.”
“She’s not bringing her puppy, is she?”
Ruth’s ensuing silence served to answer that question.
“Great, another puppy.”
“Ted and Melissa DeWitt can’t make it,” Ruth said. “Ted just had a second bypass last month and he’s not feeling up to it.”
“Geez, did you invite my high school gym instructor while you were at it?” said Abe.
“Del Gundy died thirty years ago, or I might have,” said Ruth, setting the colander in the sink. “But I did invite the Jacobsons and the Duncans.”
“I thought they were dead.”
“Oh, stop it,” said Ruth. “Al still golfs.”
“Those policies I sold them in ’62 are going to waste. Heck, they’re liable to outlive their kids at this point.”
Yet another reason Abe was ready to call it a day: He couldn’t bear the thought of outliving another one of his children. Nearly fifty years on, the loss of Karen still haunted him, as it haunted Ruth, as it haunted all of them. Kyle was turning sixty-four in the spring, and he’d already survived one heart attack. What if he didn’t survive the next one? It seemed imperative that Abe move on now, while his children still had some life left in them, while they could still look after Ruth.
After breakfast, Abe retired to the living room, where he lowered himself into his chair, an unoffending beige lift recliner that Ruth had insisted upon. He still hadn’t gotten used to the thing after four years. His old green chair had been ratty and, yes, matted with dog fur, and the springs had been shot, and never mind that he could hardly get out of the thing; he missed it all the same. Change, it seemed, was relentless, and make no mistake, it wasn’t always progress.
Megs promptly plopped down on the braided rag rug at Abe’s feet with a long sigh, imploring Abe with her milky eyes to acknowledge her presence. Abe obliged dutifully with a pat on her head.
“You and me, Megs,” he said, without further explanation.
One by one, the guests arrived, first Maddie, who, at fifty-three, had been their surprise baby, conceived nearly a decade after Abe and Ruth had agreed to stop growing their family. Three kids had been perfect. They’d hit the jackpot with Anne, Karen, and Kyle. A family of five was chaotic enough. Following the debacle of the 1960s, and all the trouble Anne and Karen had given them, Abe, pushing forty, certainly wasn’t prepared to bring any more children into the world, and at thirty-five, Ruth was perhaps no longer ready, either, a fact that her emergency hysterectomy three months after Maddie’s delivery seemed to corroborate. The thought had occurred to Abe more than once, in the past five decades, that maybe Maddie wasn’t ready to be born into a world she seemed to take so personally—every social injustice or inequity, every heartbreak, defeat, or failure, and yes, every stray puppy.
The new one was called Perry, a shrill Pomeranian who couldn’t have weighed five pounds. The instant Maddie set Perry down, the little bugger was harassing poor Megs, yipping and snapping, and sniffing at her hind end with impunity.
“Happy birthday, Dad,” said Maddie.
Her hair was still cropped short, a dyed patch of blue on one side, a style Abe might have had a hard time reconciling on a twenty-year-old, but at Maddie’s age it seemed beyond a stretch.
Abe was ashamed of his stiffness and ill temper as she hugged him. It wasn’t Maddie but the damn Pomeranian who was the source of his discomfiture.
“Can you please do something with that puppy?” he said, a tad more stridently than he’d intended.
“Oh, Abe,” scolded Ruth.
Maddie scooped up the Pomeranian, who fell silent immediately for the first time, if only momentarily.
Ruth wiped her hands dry on her apron and kissed Maddie on the cheek. “Don’t mind your father. He gets overprotective of that old dog,” she offered on Abe’s behalf. “I love what you’ve done with your hair. Very punky! You two get comfortable, I’ve got more prep to do.”
“Can I help, Mom?”
“Yes, by babysitting your father.”
Abe and Maddie retired to the living room, the little Pomeranian yipping in her arms.
Kyle and Soojin were next to arrive, by cab, a little after four.
“There’s not a single Uber on this island,” said Kyle as they made their entrance. “Can you believe that? It’s like the nineteenth century around here.”
Kyle looked unhealthy, his face drawn, his pallor slightly gray, while Soojin, Kyle’s elder by a handful of years, had not seemed to age a day since the mid-1990s. Ruth had lectured Abe two Christmases ago that it was improper to suggest that Soojin’s graceful aging had anything to do with her being Korean, that it might be construed as racist, thus Abe was careful not to acknowledge the fact.
“Hey, Pops,” said Kyle, leaning over to hug him in the recliner. “How goes it? The big ninety! What’s that even called? A nano-something-or-other-genarian?”
For ten years, Kyle had been their youngest child, but he took naturally to the role of middle child upon Maddie’s appearance: agreeable, diplomatic, flexible, if not a little quick to compromise. More than any of their children, excepting Karen, who had been a model child before thirteen, Kyle had most aimed to please his parents.
“Hey, I brought you something,” he said, handing Abe a box.
“We said no gifts,” Ruth reminded him.
“It’s nothing,” said Kyle. “It’s not even wrapped. It just made me think of Dad.”
Abe struggled to open the cardboard box for about thirty seconds with his uncooperative digits before Kyle saved him the humiliation, producing a pocketknife and neatly slashing the offending ribbon of packing tape. Inside the box was a framed piece of plexiglass, maybe twelve inches by eight, and an electrical cord neatly coiled in a plastic Ziploc.
“What is it?”
“It’s a page magnifier,” said Kyle. “Since you won’t use the dang Kindle I sent you.”
“What am I supposed to do with it?”
“You plug this in, it’s got an LED light, you hold the newspaper under it to enlarge the print.”
“Ah,” said Abe, knowing the magnifier was destined for the closet along with the CarCaddie, the GrandPad, and most recently the compression air massager.
“Thanks, son,” he said.
Having beat the snow out of Denver, Anne and Tim were next to arrive, around five thirty, in a rented Taurus. Watching them make their way up the steps, Abe was dogged by the fact that after all these years he still wished Anne could’ve made it work with Rich Tolbert. Tim was fine, a little on the flaky side, politically speaking, and not exactly a man’s man. As though Tim were reading his thoughts, he immediately beat a path to the bathroom, clutching his bladder, while Anne seated herself on the same midcentury modern sofa that she’d routinely fallen asleep on from the second Eisenhower to the Nixon administrations.
At sixty-eight years old, the eldest of the four Winter children, Anne still held Abe and Ruth accountable for their parenting and had in recent decades reversed the roles on them. It didn’t take her long to start in with the downsizing lecture.
“Don’t you think it’s time you two started thinking about downsizing?” she said to them. “This house, the farm, it’s so much work. And look at this place, it hasn’t been updated since the seventies.”
“That’s not true,” said Ruth. “We replaced the carpet in 2018. And your father’s chair.”
“Mom, this place is a museum.”
“You hush,” Ruth interjected. “And where are we supposed to live, a nursing home? We’ve been in this house for sixty-four years, we raised you kids in it, why should we give it up now?”
“What do you need with all these rooms?”
“At least your sister will be using one of them, tonight,” said Ruth. “You didn’t need to book a hotel, you know. You still have your old bedroom.”
“Mom, my old bedroom has been a sewing room since 1973. Don’t get me wrong, I have great memories of the farm, but in most of them I’m a kid. What are you gonna do when Dad’s gone?”
“You talk about him like he’s not sitting right next to you.”
“Sorry, Dad, just thinking out loud, here,” said Anne.
It was a relief when the Duncans and the Jacobsons arrived in tandem, the four of them shrunken and overdressed when Abe and Ruth greeted them on the front porch.
There followed hugs and pleasantries to span the years since any of them had gone out of their way to see one another.
“Looks like you need to get a new coat of paint on those old rockers,” said Al Duncan of the twin rocking chairs that had remained fixtures on the front porch for over forty years since Al hand-made them.
“I say better to let them age gracefully,” said Abe.
“Speak for yourself,” said Al.
The Duncans and Jacobsons stepped into the foyer, proceeding to the living room, where they were greeted by the spectacle of Perry the Pomeranian sexually assaulting poor Megs, who was sprawled indifferently at the foot of Abe’s recliner. In a rare act of decorum, Maddie scooped Perry up and set the puppy in her lap as a new round of salutations ensued.
For over sixty years, Al and Terri Duncan and Thom and Nancy Jacobson had been part of the Winters’ lives. Anne and Karen and Kyle had grown up with the Duncan kids, John and Jen, along with the Jacobson kids, Frank and Cathy. Their family lives were inextricably linked by dozens of obligations, science fairs, Scouts, volleyball practice, and in the case of the Duncans, even church. Family life had all but forced the three families together. Abe had sold both couples auto, home, and life insurance in the early sixties. Al had been Karen and Kyle’s orthodontist. Cathy had gone to senior prom with Kyle. Once the kids were all off to college, the Winters and the Duncans and Jacobsons crossed paths less frequently: chance encounters in the supermarket or on the ferry, office visits, the occasional social call. Still, half a century on, the bonds of their friendship held strong. Such kind people, the Duncans and the Jacobsons, so steadfast and reliable. Every year a Christmas card.
Dinner was quite a production. Pork loin glazed in honey mustard, French potato salad, green beans, Hawaiian rolls, and yellow squash. For dessert, Ruth presented a chocolate layer cake emblazoned with “Happy Birthday, Abe,” in cobalt-blue frosting.
They talked largely of the grandchildren and their various doings: Martha, Anne’s eldest, and her promotion to senior vice president of the cosmetics corporation; Matt’s recent bout with skin cancer; Ben’s divorce; Karl’s recent second marriage; and Kaylee’s newborn, a girl named Lucy. Grandchildren, and now greats; there were too many to keep track of, and while their continuance in the lives of Abe and Ruth was only peripheral, and their presence next to nothing, each of them remained a source of pride, for each of their lives could be traced back to Abe and Ruth, and the little acorn they’d planted seven decades ago, which had grown into a mighty oak, casting its seeds from Oregon, to Colorado, to New Jersey. It was a gift to know that Abe’s life had accounted for so many blessings.
With a half glass of red wine warming his blood, a wistfulness overcame Abe. What further proof could he possibly need than to look around the dinner table and know that he had lived his life well? Abe could not help but acknowledge his extraordinarily good fortune. The next time these cherished people assembled in one place, Abe would almost certainly be in a casket.
Watching Ruth, glowing with satisfaction, it was clear she was in her element, as it was equally apparent that she still had a good deal of living to do. She’d get along fine without Abe. She’d still have Bess Delory and the rest of her church friends, and the kids, and the grandkids, and the Jacobsons and the Duncans.
As dinner wound down, Kyle stood up and tapped his wineglass with his spoon to signal a toast.
“Mom,” he said. “First of all, beautiful meal, you really outdid yourself. Thanks for bringing us all together. So nice to see the Duncans and the Jacobsons after all these years. I’m an old man myself now, and I’ve learned some stuff along the way. But most of the important stuff, I learned from you, Dad. Mom, too, of course, but I’ll save that speech for her ninetieth. You taught me about responsibility, you taught me about priorities, about integrity and reliability. You taught me how to be a man. But you didn’t just tell me these things, Dad, you showed me. You showed us. So, on behalf of everyone at this table, I want to thank you, Dad. Happy ninetieth birthday.”
“Hear hear,” everybody said in unison.
A few minutes later, in the living room, Abe stationed himself beside his son and draped his arm around him.
“Nice toast, kiddo,” he said. “A few tweaks and you can use it again as my eulogy.”
“I’m not holding my breath, Pops. You’re a perennial.”
The comment, though delivered playfully, begged the question: How long did Kyle really expect Abe to live? Was he on Doc Channing’s six-to-ten-year plan? Abe doubted it. Kyle had to know that the end was coming sooner than later.
The Jacobsons were the first to bow out for the evening, and the Duncans took it as their cue to follow. Abe walked the four of them out to the front steps, a slight quaver in his voice as he bid them all farewell with handshakes and hugs, acutely aware that whatever their good intentions might be, it was likely the last time he would ever see any of them, and they him. And it occurred to Abe how fortunate he was to possess such knowledge, so that he could hold it close to his heart, and perhaps, if he clung firmly enough to it, take it with him to the hereafter.
Kyle and Soojin were the next to leave. Having booked a room at the bed-and-breakfast in Eagle Harbor, they phoned for a cab around nine thirty, though it was well after ten by the time it arrived. Again, Abe ushered them out to the porch. Out of all the kids, it seemed the most likely that Abe would live long enough to see Kyle again, as he lived the closest, but you never knew.
Soojin pecked Abe on the cheek and proceeded to the waiting taxi as Abe and Kyle lingered momentarily on the porch. Clutching Kyle by the shoulders, Abe wrapped him in a bear hug, reluctant to let him go. How could it possibly be that Kyle, himself a senior now, long in the tooth, his hair gone thin and gray, his very frame beginning to shrink, was the same little boy who once darted recklessly up and down the stairs and hallways of this very house? Time did not march on methodically, minute by minute, day by day; it sprinted away from us in mad bursts, a thief in flight.
“I love you, Pops,” said Kyle, extricating himself from his father’s embrace. “Take good care of Mom.”
“It’s the other way around,” said Abe. “She takes care of me.”
“Whatever you say, Pops,” Kyle said, descending the steps.
Abe lingered on the porch as the cab pulled away up the driveway. Just as it rounded the corner out of sight, he stepped back into the house, where Anne and Tim were in the foyer with Ruth, buttoning up their coats as they readied themselves to leave.
“Daddy, I’m telling you, now is the time to sell this place,” said Anne, unable to resist one final overture. “The market is right on the bubble. If you wait any longer, prices will go down. You need to leverage this.”
Abe was tempted to ask Anne why she cared so much. What could it possibly matter to her? Was she really concerned about them, or was she simply trying to avoid the eventuality of having to put the house on the market herself when Abe and Ruth were gone?
“If we decide to sell, you’ll be the first to know,” said Abe, kissing his eldest daughter on the cheek.
Minutes after Anne and Tim left, Maddie started up the rubber-treaded staircase to her old bedroom.
“Good night, sweetie,” said Abe.
“Good night, Dad. Sorry Perry was such a spaz.”
“It was nothing,” he said, waving it off. “Sorry I got grumpy.”
“I get it,” she said. “Megs is like one of us.”
Now the house was quiet at last. But for all the stillness, there lingered a palpable life force, as if the house itself were alive by extension of all that had come to pass under its roof. Megs, free at last of the hectoring Pomeranian, lay still on the floor beside Abe’s recliner, her breaths long and labored in slumber. Now and again, a tiny, muffled yip escaped her black jowls from the other side of consciousness.
Abe found Ruth in the kitchen shortly before midnight, hand-washing the last of the dinner dishes. Unbeknownst to her, Abe stood for a moment in the doorway, admiring her sturdy figure from behind, her straight back, her hair somehow still not completely gray at eighty-seven.
Ruth left off scrubbing to wipe her hand dry on her apron and proceeded to massage the underside of her jaw just as Abe crept up behind her and wrapped his arms about her waist.
“Tooth still bugging you, huh?”
“I think I’ll have to get the darn thing pulled,” she said.
Abe spun her around to face him, pressing his lips to her forehead. The weight of his numbered days lay heavily upon him as he gathered her in an embrace. God, how he loved this woman, God, how he’d loved this life.
“It’s late,” he said. “We can finish cleaning in the morning. Please, come to bed.”