“Your guilt’s got nothing on my guilt,” Franny said. “Your guilt isn’t even in the ballpark.”
Caroline and Franny lost their father’s eighty-third birthday. The traffic, which had been manageable driving over to Teresa’s, was at a standstill going out to the beach from Torrance, and so they got home well after dark. The consequence of their kindness was that Fix had been too long in his wheelchair and too long in the car. His pain radiated out to his feet and hands and into the bones of his face, though it was nothing like the pain that concentrated into the white-hot center of himself.
“Just let me go to sleep,” he said to Marjorie when they got him in the house. She had to bend over to hear him he had so little voice left. “I can’t stand this,” he said. He was tugging at his shirt, trying to get it off.
Marjorie helped him with the buttons. During the course of his illness, Fix had lost his reserves. He had no buffer to carry him through the unexpected. They had stayed out too long and now he was bone on bone.
“You were with Teresa Cousins?” Marjorie said to Franny, in the same way she might have said,You took him to South Central to smoke crack?
“Her son called right after we got out of the movie. She had to go to the hospital,” Franny said.
All she had to do was bring him home first. They were practically at the house when Albie called, but it hadn’t occurred to her that she was the one to make that decision, not Fix. “We didn’t know it was going to take this long.”
Caroline put a Lortab in a tiny spoonful of applesauce and gave it to her father. The pills were easier to swallow that way.
“Doesn’t she have her own family?” Marjorie had always been so patient with the girls, right from the beginning when Fix used to bring them over to her mother’s house to take them swimming. But dragging their dying father along on an errand of mercy for someone they didn’t know was tantamount to trying to kill him.
“She does,” Franny said. “But none of them live in town. Dad said he wanted to see her.”
“He didn’t know her. Why would he want to see her?” Marjorie ran her hands across the shoulders of his rumpled undershirt. “I’ll get you to bed,” she told him.
Franny looked at her sister, the two of them still standing in the den once Marjorie had rolled Fix away. “If there’s anything else I can fuck up today you let me know.”
“It wasn’t your fault,” Caroline said, and rubbed her face. Neither of them had eaten and neither of them would. “You didn’t know. And anyway, we had to go, all three of us. We owed her that. I understand that it makes no sense to Marjorie, but even if it was a mistake, we owed it to Teresa.”
Franny gave her sister a tired smile. “Oh, my love,” she said. “What do the only children do?”
“We’ll never have to know,” Caroline said.
Caroline went up to the bedroom they shared to call Wharton and say goodnight. Franny went into the backyard to call Kumar.
“Did you find the checkbook?” Franny asked.
“I did, but you could have texted me back six hours ago when I asked you.”
“Really, I couldn’t have.” She yawned. “If you’d been here today you’d be overwhelmed with sympathy for me right now. Did the boys make it home from soccer practice okay?”
“I haven’t seen them,” Kumar said.
“Don’t give me a hard time. I’m not up for it.”
“Ravi’s in the shower. Amit is pretending to do his homework on the computer but he switches over to some horrible video game whenever I stop watching him.”
“Are you watching him now?” Franny asked.
“I am,” her husband said.
Marjorie tapped on the kitchen window and waved her inside.
“I have to go now,” Franny said.
“You’re still coming back?”
“That’s one thing you don’t have to worry about,” she said, and hung up the phone.
“Your father wants you to come in and say goodnight,” Marjorie said, looking tired. “I can’t believe he’s still awake.”
“Is Caroline in there?”
