That same early April evening, Flo pushed her bike into the wooden lean-to behind her apartment building, where the landlord grudgingly allowed her to park. Even if it weren’t a clunky old-fashioned model—just like she was—there was no way she could carry a bike to the second floor. She wove the chain through the spokes and around the drainpipe and snapped the lock shut, spinning the numbers. She had a moment of panic that she would never remember the combination. Then she reminded herself that the numbers were written in indelible ink inside her left sneaker. What would happen, she worried, when she forgot the back-up plan? Disaster, that’s what.
Flo saw disasters everywhere. She always had. She collected them and deconstructed them into their worrisome component parts. Starting in eighth grade when her best friend’s mom died of breast cancer, Flo made mental lists every night before falling asleep. Lists of potential catastrophes poised to derail her and her family. She planned her responses too: how she would cope if her father lost his job or her mother fell into an inexplicable coma or their house collapsed into one of those giant sinkholes they had down in Florida, possible even though they lived in Maryland. Over the years, Flo grew to firmly believe that this mental exercise would prevent ruin, but only if she imagined each one specifically. It was an endless task and one she took seriously. But when it came, the calamity wasn’t a sinkhole or a falling air conditioner. It was in her head and it stole her ability to inventory and list and plan and respond.
Trudging up the stairs, she acknowledged that her son probably considered her bike a disaster. At least once a week he begged her to donate the old contraption to Goodwill and stop risking life and limb. That was easy for him to say. Her two-speed bike, with its wicker basket and simple backpedal braking system, had carried her around town for over forty years, thanks to the elderly mechanic on Orange Street who kept it lubricated and working. Her evening ride around the central circuit in Forest Park was a better soporific than any of those stupid pills waiting to expire on the medicine cabinet shelf.
At her front door, she jiggled the doorknob and stared at the lock.
Locks required keys. Locks and keys and combinations and numbers meandered around her brain, circling and spiraling and refusing to line up right. The numbers stashed in her shoe weren’t the right answer, but nothing else came to her. She could hear the phone ringing on the other side of the door. Probably Sam, checking up on her. Now he’d be bound to lecture her again about carrying a cell phone, just in case of emergencies, along with nagging about giving up the bike. She liked her landline. She loved her bike. Where was her bike anyway? It must be inside the apartment. She had to make sure and she had to pee.
She turned the doorknob again, hard, but it stubbornly refused to open. Charlie meowed on the other side of the door. Closing her eyes, she leaned her forehead against the door and gave in to the images swirling in her head: the heavy iron keys she found in her father’s desk after he died. Leaning a different bike against the wire fence at Glen Echo to join Charlie—the human Charlie, not the cat—on the picket line. He wore a deep red dashiki. She carried a plastic-covered bike chain with the combination padlock and the string of numbers and voilá, she had it. She tugged on the leather cord around her neck and grasped the key. Yes!
Sometimes it took a while, but her brain didn’t let her down.
Sam couldn’t help himself. He left another phone message. “Ma, it’s me. Could you please call me when you get home?”
Flo hated it if he hovered too much, but she infuriated him with her stubbornness. If only she’d give up that damn bike, at least stop riding at night. Flo made her thoughts on that subject abundantly clear: “Butt out, buddy,” she’d said more than once. For the thousandth time, he wished that he had a sister to share his anxiety, or that his father were still alive. Not that Brad had been much good with emotions, and not that the man ever won an argument with Flo, but he might at least be an ally in the worry department.
It was bad enough having a teenager to fret over. Sometimes he thought that Anna got the easy part, living with Zoe for her first twelve years. He had been deliriously happy when Zoe moved upstairs into his half of the house, had eagerly built a ramp and wheelchair lift. But now he was the parent on the front lines of the potential major adolescent battles: cars and boys and drugs.
He shouldn’t have to worry about his mother every night too, listening for the phone until their ritual evening call, picturing Flo wandering off somewhere on that clunker of a bike and forgetting how to get home or neglecting to look for cars. He’d been thinking recently of attaching a small GPS transmitter to her bike. He would do it too, if he could be certain that she wouldn’t find it and get on her high horse about invasion of privacy or something. A tracker might be a drastic measure, but since the lunch with Zoe two weeks ago when he mentioned Assisted Living, Flo was barely speaking to him. She refused to talk about the place he found, refused to visit to check it out, wouldn’t even discuss the subject in general terms.
The whir of the wheelchair lift announced Zoe’s arrival home.
“How was study group?” he asked.
“Okay. Our project is cool.”
“The immigration thing?”
“That’s the one,” Zoe said. “We mostly agree on national policy, including college admissions and steps to citizenship. We had a good time. Except for Xander. He’s being a jerk.”
“A jerk how?” Sam pictured the boy hitting on Zoe, even though they’d been friends since kindergarten days of painted macaroni necklaces and Cookie Monster lunchboxes.
“About immigration reform. He wants to send all the undocumented workers back to wherever. Like that’s worked so far.” Zoe swiveled away and headed down the hallway toward her bedroom.
“Goodnight,” Sam called after her.
Zoe had her grandmother’s liveliness. Maybe the girl also inherited Flo’s attitude about changing the world. Sam wondered what a twenty-first century Stalinist would believe and shuddered at the possibilities.
He checked his watch. Only 9:30, not too awful. Flo would no doubt get home soon and call. In the meantime he couldn’t stop thinking about her stubbornness, trying to come up with a strategy to change her set-in-concrete mind. Maybe Mimi could help. She and Flo had been friends forever. Last month when Flo tried to take a bus to the mall, she ended up in Agawam and called Mimi. Mimi was stuck in the dentist’s waiting room and sent Sam to the rescue. Mimi must have noticed Flo’s decline. He touched the phone screen and listened to the dialing beeps. Would Mimi feel disloyal talking to him? Probably, but it was worth a try.
Mimi did sound uncomfortable when he explained his purpose. “I don’t know about this,” she said. “Your mother is my best friend.”
“I know,” he said, “and I hate putting you in an awkward position, but I’m really worried about her. Have you noticed her, um, odd behavior recently?”
“She’s more forgetful,” Mimi said, “but so am I. It goes with the territory.”
“Yeah.” Flo would kill him for this. “I guess maybe she hasn’t told you that she has been diagnosed with Alzheimer’s?”
Mimi didn’t say anything for a long time. Then she sighed, loud enough to create a breeze in Sam’s ear. “She didn’t mention it. But she wouldn’t.”
“I don’t think she remembers the doctor telling her. When I reminded her, when I tried to talk to her about moving into Assisted Living, she looked at me like I was hallucinating.”
Mimi sighed again. “The thing is, your mother has always been such an outrageous person that it’s hard to know what’s her normal quirkiness and what’s something worse. Her mind works in odd ways. A few weeks ago she announced that she had given names to the three bridges in her mouth: the South End, Memorial, and the North End.”
Sam laughed. Those were Springfield’s bridges over the Connecticut River. That was just Flo’s eccentric brain at work, not dementia. “Naming the dental work—that’s Ma all right. But other things, like getting lost all the time and some belligerent behavior, that’s what got her banned from Food Castle.” He paused. “I’m afraid she’s not safe living alone any more.”
“I can’t conspire against Flo. What are you asking me to do?”
“I’m not sure. Talk with her, maybe. Come with us to visit this place I found?”
“I can do that if Flo agrees,” Mimi said. “And Sam? I’m so sorry.”
From her bedroom, Zoe eavesdropped on her dad’s side of the conversation. He had been pretty distracted since the Food Castle debacle. Zoe couldn’t imagine her grandmother in a nursing home, or whatever new kind of place Sam was talking about. Flo would rather ride her clumsy old bike down Sumner Avenue off into the sunset.
Zoe transferred onto her bed and dumped the contents of her chair-pack. Fifteen minutes writing up the changes in their civics project and then she could put on her headphones and relax.
Her cell phone buzzed and Gabe’s photo flashed on the screen. The kid lived downstairs; why was he calling her instead of talking in person?
“Hey, Gabe.”
“Hey. Listen. I’m gonna have a birthday party here, Saturday after next. Dancing, you know, boy-girl and everything? My parents and your mom say they’ll butt out if you and the twins are here to be, like, you know?”
“Chaperones?” How weird was that, being considered mature enough to be a chaperone. Except that some people didn’t think a girl in a wheelchair could get into much trouble. She’d do anything for the opportunity to prove them wrong. Like tonight, working on their immigration project, she kept looking at Xander’s scowling profile and wondering what it would be like to touch the fine brown hairs sprouting on his upper lip.
“Yeah, chaperones. Will you?”
“Boy-girl, huh? Is there a girl you like?” Zoe teased.
“Not really. Will you do it?”
“Did Tim and Jeremy agree?”
“I haven’t heard back from them yet,” he said.
“Well, if they say yes, I’m in too.”