I look at my father in the hospital bed, sunken cheeks and gray stubble, sleeping heavily. I don’t want to talk about this when he’s there, in this state. It feels disloyal. But I guess I’ve opened a can of worms with Candace, because she’s got no such compunctions.“He talks about you kids a lot. About mistakes he’s made with you both.”
He doesn’t talk about it with me, I think, but I don’t say this. Instead, I opt for a re-direct.“Why did he move in with you?”
“I asked him to,” she says placidly.“The place where he’s been working is closer to my place—”
I hold up a hand.“I’m sorry.He’s been working?” At this point, it feels as though she’s angling for me to be disloyal, to get angry, dropping these revelatory bombs about my father’s life that I know nothing about. My father has had jobs before, off and on, but not since Alex and I left the house for good. Given that Alex and I both have been sending him checks, it would’ve been nice to know that Dad himself could have supplemented.
“Yeah, at a dry cleaner in town. Four days a week, and before this happened he was going to start learning how to run some of the pressing machines.”
“Well, that’s—that’s just great, I guess.” I shift in my chair, reach for the remote that’s on the windowsill. Mostly we’ve kept the TV off in here, but right now I don’t care what awful thing is playing. I only want the distraction.
“He’s been saving the money you and your brother send him, for the last six months or so.”
I have to look at my dad again, to remind myself that it’s colossally shitty to get angry with a man in a hospital bed. It only half works.“Well, Candace, that’s really great for him. Maybe he can use it on his hospital bills.” Even as I say this, I know it’s ridiculous. I’ll be paying every one of those hospital bills, and I wouldn’t have it any other way.
“He wanted to give it back to you on the one-year anniversary of his sobriety.” Maybe this should make me feel warm and fuzzy inside. Maybe I should be celebrating the fact that my dad was in a place to think of this kind of gesture. But it makes me somadto hear this, to hear that he’s been going along, getting better at his life, making some grand gesture plan for me and Alex when all we’d really want was a bit more kindness from him. Maybe it’s progress, but it’s still selfish. It’s still 100 percent the dad I know, him choosing whatever feels good in the moment. It feels to me like a bet he made with himself, rather than a real commitment to change.
“Do you know he has a gambling problem?” I ask, and it sounds so harsh, so snappish. As if I’m trying toassertmyself in front of her, to get back at her for all this knowledge she has about my dad with something of my own, even if it’s something terrible.
“I do know that.He hasn’t gambled since the night he took his last drink.”
“You ought to make sure about that.He can be really sneaky about it. And he never lasts long.”
Candace gives up a little cough—she’s got that smoker’s raspiness too.“You’re a good person to be here, Ekaterina,” she says, surprising me.“My own kids, I put them through a lot, and I don’t think they’ll ever forgive me. I’m not here to defend your father to you. That’s work he has to do himself, and I know he’s not doing a good job at it. But I think he was trying.”
I don’t know what to say to this. This is—it’s all such amess, this thing with my dad. It’s chaotic and conflicting and terrifying. I hate that he’s sick, and I hate that I’m so scared about that, about the thought of him dying. But I’m angry with him too—about the last eight months of him getting his shit together and yet still being mostly difficult and recalcitrant with me and Alex, about all the years before that when he wasn’t even trying to get his shit together. I’m angry that I don’t trust a single thing Candace is telling me, that I don’t trust her or my father, and mostly that this distrust might say as much about me as it does about them.
“Hey,” says Alex, coming in with bags of food from the bagel shop down the street, and thank God for that, because however strained it is between me and him right now, it’s not worse than the situation I’ve worked up with Candace.
“Why don’t you two take your food outside and eat?” she asks.“It’s so nice out there today, and we’ve all been so cooped up. You two go first, and I’ll go once you get back.”
“You sure?” Alex says, right as I’m saying,“Oh, no, that’s okay.” We look across the room at each other, and I roll my eyes and push myself up off the chair.
“You’ll call us if the doctor comes in?” I ask.
“Of course,” she says. Alex crosses the room to give her one of the sandwiches he’s brought, then pauses to take a look at Dad. He straightens the bedclothes around my dad’s sleeping form—quick, efficient, again that vague frustration with everything. It’s this that gives me an unwelcome flash of Ben. A few times, Ben had told me how hard it was, sometimes, to be his dad’s caretaker, how stubborn and willful his dad could be, especially during the long recovery process. But in front of Henry, Ben was patient and gentle, never condescending. You watched him and thought,he doesn’t want to be anywhere else but here.
It’s not fair to judge Alex by these standards. Beneath my brother’s gruff attentions there’s a kindness, or at least an awareness of my dad’s humanity. Sometimes I forget that Alex had years with Dad before I came along, that his relationship to him is different than mine, and I’ll bet this whole experience is hard for him in a different way. It’s been tentative with Alex and me, these last few days, and I’m suddenly seized with an urgent feeling that I have to fix this, whatever this is between us, because we’re family, and my father’s sick, and ridiculously, maddeningly, without Ben, I feel more alone than I have in years.
* * * *
We find a mostly quiet spot on a wood bench that’s set under a huge horse chestnut, its leaves fat and summer-green. The air is muggy, the sun too bright, but it all feels good. I hadn’t realized how tired I’d gotten of the dry hospital air, the fluorescent lights. We both sit crooked to the side, so we can lay our food out on the expanse of bench between us, and it reminds me of our many living-room picnics, messy and haphazard, but somehow comforting.
“Thanks for this,” I say, once we’ve both taken a few bites, and once I feel desperate to break the silence.
He shrugs his acknowledgment, wipes his cheap paper napkin across his mouth.“How’s the house coming along?” he asks, and I know this is his peace offering, this attempt at conversation.
“It’s all right. I had some unexpected repairs to do upstairs,” I say, swallowing back a fresh wave of pain when I think about the plaster, about the day Ben first kissed me.“But it’s all set now. Should be starting on the kitchen pretty soon.” Even as I say this, there’s unwelcome, stomach-turning thoughts about whether I’ll even be in the house, whether I’ll have to pick up and move to help Dr. Singh.
“That’s great.”
It’s my turn, but this is harder than I thought. I’m out here to try and make things better, but I’m still mad about last month. I’d been so excited to show Alex every single thing about my house, to get his input, to have him be excited for me. Now I don’t want to talk about the house at all, and especially not with him. Whether that’s me protecting something that matters or me punishing him is too complex a problem for me to sort out on such little sleep.
We dither our way through various other dead-end topics—what we think of Dad’s doctor, our shared impressions of Candace, even, God help us, the weather. We’ve both balled up the trash from our meals and I’m packing it all back into the bag for disposal when Alex stills my hand and says,“Tool Kit.”
I have to look down, give my eyes a minute to fight back the wetness that springs up there.“Yeah?”
“I need to tell you I’m sorry about last month. For everything I said, and for leaving the way I did.”
