The Forgetting Time(46)
He ducked his head and began shoveling the bacon into his mouth. “No.”
“’Cause you know you need to do better than that if you want to get into a good college. That’s what the college counselor—”
“I got it under control.” He glanced up at her, then down at his plate again, scraping up the rest of his food. Who knew what the truth was? Charlie had always been a pretty good student, but kids that age were unpredictable once the hormones started hitting; Maria Clifford’s son, down the road, had gone from the honor roll to flunking out and working at the gas station as soon as you could bat an eye.
“Here, Mama, have some bacon. It’s good.” He dumped a morsel on the table in front of her and watched her until she picked it up.
“Why are you at me this morning?”
“’Cause you don’t eat.”
“I eat. See?” Denise took the spike of bacon and put it on her tongue. Her mouth filled with the taste of something burned. She moved it to the inside of her cheek; she’d spit it out when he left. “Look. I’ll try to get out on time today and we’ll have a proper dinner together, okay?”
“Can’t. Got practice.”
“Practice.”
“Yeah.”
“Shouldn’t you be studying instead of banging drums in someone’s basement?”
“Garage.”
“You know what I mean.”
He shrugged, pushed himself away from the table. Grabbed his backpack from the floor. The neighbor’s dog started barking again. You could hear it all the way down Asheville Road, probably as far away as the highway.
“Someone should kill that thing, do the world a favor,” Charlie said. He was already moving toward the door.
“You be nice,” she said.
He grinned at her through the dangling veil of his dreads. “I’m always nice.”
And he was gone.
First thing she did was spit out the bacon. Second thing was shut off the radio. How she hated that music. They played it all day in the home, too, forcing the old people to take their music like their meds. Swallow it down, good for you, even if all it did was numb you through your day. At least the Hispanic people brought their own music, drumbeats and brassy melodies you could dance to, not that she’d ever do such a thing. Still, she knew she lingered too long in Mrs. Rodriguez’s room, washing down those plump tan limbs with that music playing and the flowering plants on the table and the woman’s daughter sitting there placid as you please doing crossword puzzles right next to the bed, though Mrs. Rodriguez hadn’t recognized her own kin in at least two years. She liked the washing up. She’d inured herself by now to the smells, and Mrs. Rodriguez’s flesh was less fragile than most; she didn’t have to worry about every fingerprint leaving its mark the way she did with so many of the white people. There was something calming about being able to touch someone this way, without any hunger or discussion. Just skin on skin. A body and a washcloth and usefulness. So she lingered. It wasn’t fair, she knew, to the other patients, who had no relatives, or plants, or music. She made a mental note to move faster today.
She stood now, relishing the silence, washing up the dishes, picturing Mrs. Rodriguez’s room. Once she put the dishes away, she leaned against the counter and watched the clock, trying not to think of anything. 7:00. 7:30. She knew the name was still running loose somewhere in the back of her mind, but the pill muffled it enough so that she couldn’t hear it. When the second hand at last hit 7:55, she finished her cup of coffee and exhaled with utter relief.
For it had begun. Her long, long day.
*
The Oxford Home for the Aged had once had aspirations. Anyone could see this from the tall fake plants and the columns and the pictures on the walls of mountain vistas—even from the name itself, which had no relationship to the institution of higher learning; someone had thought it sounded good. But somewhere along the line, something had gone terribly wrong. The linoleum floors were violently patterned by scuff marks from too many wheelchairs and stretchers and canes; the lobby smelled only a little like Lysol and the cigarettes the security guard smoked and a lot like the stale, slightly rank skin of the very old and the very sick. The ceiling directly above the elevator bank hung in strips from water damage, which had gone unrepaired for so long that the wound itself had turned black, like a skinned knee gone gangrenous.
A question of care, Denise thought. No one cared, so nothing happened. The management had changed so many times no one was sure who or where the current owner was, and the patients weren’t with it enough to complain, and there weren’t many family members that made it out there, though it was only fifteen miles from town. A vicious cycle: the place was so depressing that no one wanted to come, and because no one came and complained, the place got even more depressing. At another point in her life Denise would have taken it upon herself to get the place cleaned up, to start by talking to the janitors about what sort of cleaning solution they were using, if any, but she had no interest these days in taking on responsibilities that weren’t hers.
She did her part; she kept a pleasant expression on her face and did her job the best she could despite the absolute storm of shit that sometimes came down on her (she didn’t like to swear but some situations called for it). She kept on going despite the rotting ceiling and the rampant understaffing that left patients unobserved, sometimes for hours at a time, and the way the storeroom always seemed out of Dilaudid and morphine when it was needed the most. She was grateful for the job, grateful for the salary and that it took so much of her body and her attention and engaged so little of her actual mind. And yet: lately she was feeling her mind going off on its own a bit more than she was comfortable with. For instance, Mr. Costello, who was dying of lung cancer. Why did she ask him if he was scared? Where had that question come from?