Calypso(58)

“Guess who’s staying twelve houses down? James Comey, that’s who! He came into the office earlier this week and had his picture taken with Sherry.”

I went out to the deck, where Gretchen was hanging up her wet swimsuit. “You’ll never believe who’s staying eight houses away. Jim Comey.”

She pulled a clothespin out of her mouth. “Wow, you’re kidding!”

Next I told my niece, Madelyn, who is fourteen. She looked up dully from her phone and said, “Who?”

The woman behind the counter at the post office responded the same way.

“You know,” I told her. “The guy who’s all over the news lately?”

“Oh my God,” she said. “How long has he been here?”

I had no idea but didn’t want to sound like I was out of the loop. “Five days. And he’s only a few houses away from me!”

I could practically hear the phone being dialed as I left. “Guess who’s on the 7400 block of Ocean Drive?”

“You what?” Hugh said when I told him I’d told the postmistress. “Now everyone will know!”

I wrote my friend Lynette and was about to write our neighbor Lee when I found Hugh writing him. “It’s my news, not yours,” he hissed.

Late that afternoon we rented a golf cart. The girls took it out just before sunset and turned around in James Comey’s driveway. “At least I think it was his,” my sister-in-law, Kathy, reported at dinner that night. “There was a black SUV with Virginia plates and dark windows parked out front.”

After eating we all jumped into the golf cart and drove by the house twice. “Look, lights are on!”

Rental units turned over at noon the following day, so we never got a chance to see him, this former director of the FBI whom we all hated until someone we hated even more fired him.

“Oh well,” Amy said. “It was fun to be excited for a while. Now we can all go back to doing nothing.”



Aside from Jim Comey, the big topic that week was our father, who was supposed to join us but had to cancel when his ride fell through. He’d lost his license earlier in the summer, and we’d all heaved a collective sigh of relief. Now we learned that he’d returned to the DMV with a letter from his eye doctor and gotten it back. “I followed him home from a dental appointment last week and couldn’t believe it,” Kathy said late one evening, lighting a cigarette on the deck that overlooks the ocean. “He has double vision and was all over the road. It’s a miracle he didn’t hit someone.”

My father lives on his Social Security. He won’t touch his savings or investments, which are substantial, as he wants to leave as much as possible to his children. It’s what kept him alive during the Obama years, the hope that whoever succeeded him would eliminate the estate tax. It would be the perfect irony, then, for him to get into an accident and lose everything in a lawsuit. Lisa’s fear is that he’ll kill a child. None of the rest of us have gotten that specific, though I suppose she has a point. Killing a toddler sounds a lot worse than killing a fellow ninety-four-year-old.

“I’m getting regular calls from the neighbors now,” Amy told me. “So are Paul and Lisa. ‘Y’all need to be doing more for your father,’ they say. ‘He’s too old to be living in that big house all on his own.’”

I thought of the last time I’d visited him, two years earlier. Hugh and I were driving from Emerald Isle to the Raleigh airport and thought we’d drop in before flying back to England. I phoned again and again to say we were coming and left any number of messages. He hadn’t responded, though, and because of his age, I started to wonder if maybe he was dead. On the three-hour ride to his house, I considered how probable this actually was. “Why don’t you go in first?” I said to Hugh when we got to the house.

“Hello?” he called, sticking his head in the door. I stood behind him and looked through the window to see my father scuttling around the corner. “Hey, now, this is a surprise!”

I followed Hugh into the kitchen. “I left five or six messages,” I said, relieved by how relieved I felt.

I’m guessing he’d set his air conditioner on ninety-eight—two degrees cooler than it was outside—which I didn’t even know was possible. The heat and stillness made everything I saw look worse. My father’s stove stopped working years ago, so he used his microwave to boil water and make us cups of instant coffee. We stood by the refrigerator, sweating. Then he asked if Hugh would advise him on a painting he had. “It’s just here, around the corner,” he said, grabbing a flashlight and stepping into what used to be a hallway but now had a chair and a table loaded with papers in it.

“Is the overhead light out?” I asked. “Want me to change it?”

“No, it’s fine,” my father said.

“So you use the flashlight…?”

“To save electricity,” he explained.

We saw the painting my father was referring to the way a burglar might, the beam roving from spot to spot before sliding to the floor.



“If he won’t move, why won’t he at least get a housekeeper to come in once a week?” Hugh asked after we’d left and were on our way to the airport, me so depressed I was finding it hard to breathe. “Better yet, he could hire someone to live with him.”