CHAPTER 10

“Got it,” I said. “They fed you at the orphanage, but not enough. So you went hungry anyway.”

“Don’t be a wise guy,” my father said. I hadn’t meant to be. For a few minutes he’d been animated, like his old self. But I sensed his headache coming back, a shadow lengthening across his face. He buckled his belt on the last hole. “So Evie, I’ll let you know when I get down to 127 again.”

My mother murmured a laugh and tilted her chin down, her signature look of affection, then left Cedar Drive clasping her clump of jailer’s keys, and my father’s burst of energy fizzled completely. He slunk back to the table. “I can’t read,” he said. He looked me plainly in the eye. He had his glasses off, lying next to his plate—the weight on his nose and temples was intolerable. I’d hardly ever seen his eyes not through a lens. He blinked. They were sad eyes. All those years, I thought, it might have been only a pair of glasses that kept me from knowing him. “I can’t eat, I can’t do the crossword. It hurts.” He held his head between his hands, a cigarette poking out between his fingers like a unicorn horn.

“How can you bear to see him like this?” I said.

“I’m used to it,” said Brenda.

I made my bed on the sofa and lay with my arms folded behind my head. I’d try to be helpful and not get in Brenda’s way. I’d do the dishes, run errands, walk the dog. I’d be there, camped out on the sofa. For a week at least, Brenda could go to work without worrying that he was going to fall asleep with a cigarette and burn the house down. But that was it. I wasn’t signing up for anything more. I had no experience with doctors or sickness, and I didn’t want any. I was young. I hadn’t taken care of anyone before. Why would I have? The thought was gruesome and horrifying. Needles and bedpans. Let Brenda do it, or my sister. Susan took care of her kids. It was the same thing, sort of. She was organized and he favored her, so let her pay him back. He’d always been deaf to my needs, shutting me down enough times that I stopped asking for anything. We were supposed to feel lucky for having a father at all. It was already better than he got. We were supposed to be grateful. Our father was there, even more than the other fathers on our block, the salesmen and Westinghouse technicians. A teacher was home by four o’clock. He was there, bigger than life, meeting the day-camp bus in gardening clothes—cut-offs, no shirt, a gondolier’s hat—waving with a cigarette in his hand. Singing to embarrass us. I saw him every day. I was grateful. He didn’t see me, though.

Hoffman’s tag jingled as he shifted his weight on Brenda’s bed. A car door slammed across the creek on Dalton Drive, and then it was quiet. I was sound asleep when a sharp cry pierced the night. I shot up and bolted out of the covers and rushed to his room.

“My TV!! Where’s my TV? She took my TV! Why? Why?”

Brenda was sitting on the edge of the bed in a pool of orange light tenderly rubbing Lanacane on his right temple where he felt the most pain. I was about to tiptoe away, thinking I had dreamed the cries, when my father noticed me standing in the doorway. He struggled to a sitting position.

“Joanna,” he said. “Where’d she put my TV?”

“She’s right here,” I said. “Ask her.”

“The damn thing was in my way,” Brenda said. “Try giving Dilaudid injections with all that junk on the bed. It did nothing for him, the Dilaudid. Which, by the way, Dr. Cromwell says is impossible.”

“But you’re not giving injections anymore. Can’t he have his TV back?” All he got now was Tylenol with codeine in tablets that he couldn’t swallow.

Brenda screwed the top onto the Lanacane tube. “You try dealing with him,” she said, and went across the hall to her room. Uncle Harry had sent the little TV. Uncle Harry who hadn’t been speaking to my father for a couple of years because of some slight, real or imagined. But then Harry heard about the headache and forgot about the slight and started calling and sending expensive presents—a juicer, a short-wave radio kit, the TV. My father loved that TV. He couldn’t see the big one in the living room clearly from his reclining chair without his glasses and his glasses hurt his head. But the one Uncle Harry sent was so small my father could have the TV in bed with him. He’d pull it close to his face, careful not to yank the plug out of the wall, and Harry’s gift became his connection to the world.

After a lengthy search with no help from Brenda, I found the TV on a chair in the corner. She had hidden it under a pile of clothes. “My TV from Harry,” he said. “From my brudder.” I plugged it in and put it down on the rumpled sheet. He wrapped his arm around it.