Calypso(59)

“That person might rip him off,” I whispered.

“Why are you whispering?” Hugh asked.

“So the people in the next car won’t know there’s a broken stove at my father’s house they can steal.”



Even if conditions hadn’t grown worse over the past two years, my father would need to make some sort of change. “What I can’t understand,” I said to Amy on the beach one afternoon, “is not wanting to move! Who wouldn’t prefer a new environment, a clean slate? He can afford to keep his house exactly as it is—could pay someone to drive him over every day and wait outside while he stacks up junk mail.”

“You’re trying to convince me?” Amy asked. “The one who has a second apartment two blocks from her first apartment just so she can get away from her rabbit for a couple of hours a day?”

According to Kathy, Lisa took my father to look at two different retirement communities not far from his house in Raleigh. “Not nursing homes,” my sister assured him. “There are people as young as sixty-five living here.”

“Your dad said he liked the first place, but when an apartment opened up he claimed he couldn’t possibly move until he fixes up the house he’s living in.”

“He’s been saying that for fifty years,” I told her.

Amy reached for her water bottle. “Dad refuses to move, and when I tell his neighbors that, they say, ‘Well, then, you need to make him.’ They’re all thinking we don’t care, but how do you make Dad do something?”

“Part of the problem,” I explained to Hugh, who was stretched out beside me with a floppy hat over his face, “is that our father hates old people—always has. If everyone else in the retirement home was twenty, he’d be a lot more likely to give it a try, especially if they were all girls and all they were allowed to wear were bikini bottoms.” I rubbed some sunblock onto my reddening forehead. “I can’t believe we missed James Comey.”



Two days later, Amy, Hugh, and I headed to Raleigh, the plan being to drop by my dad’s place before continuing on to the airport. At a Starbucks a few miles from his house, we picked up four cups of coffee. I was holding one for myself and another for my father when we walked through his front door. “We’re here!”

He wasn’t in the kitchen, so after pausing to note the pair of briefs balled up and lying on my mother’s beloved butcher-block table, we moved down the hall and looked into bedrooms I hadn’t seen in years. Each was in the same state. His first step is to move in a table he can use as a desk. This will eventually be piled so high with papers that the stacks will topple onto the floor or, likelier still, into boxes that sit on the floor and have even more papers in them. The beds will have towering stacks upon them as well, and the various mounds will continue to grow until he crowds himself out and moves on to the next bedroom. There are five of them, including his own, which is at the end of the hall.

“Dad?”

Ten years earlier, my father, Amy, and I attended a wedding in Florida and stayed at a hotel in Delray Beach. “How did you sleep?” I asked over breakfast the next morning.

He thought for a moment. “I slept like a doll.”

Perhaps he meant “I slept like a baby” and it came out wrong, but ever since, it’s what everyone in my family says: “I slept like a doll.”

My father so loved his bed at the hotel that Amy and I bought him one, explaining that what made it nice wasn’t just the mattress but the sheets, which were high quality and, more important still, clean. The bed my father slept on in Florida would have vomited its stuffing had it seen its filthy twin in North Carolina. There was a narrow space for a person to lie on, but the rest of it, like the rest of the room itself, was piled high with bank statements, along with catalogs and belts and pages torn from newspapers. It was hard to pick out any one thing—rather, it blurred into a continuous mass, sort of like a glacier.

Overlooking it all, balanced atop a stack of twenty-year-old golf magazines on his highboy, were a half dozen photos of the family taken on Emerald Isle in 1981 and arranged under glass in a single frame. In them, Lisa looks amazing. All us kids do. It was that moment in a family’s life when everything is golden, literally. Our tans were phenomenal, but so was our outlook. Ranging in age from twelve to twenty-four, my brother, sisters, and I gazed into the future and saw only promise.

It’s not like we don’t see it now. We’re not pessimists, exactly, but in late middle age, when you envision your life ten years down the line, you’re more likely to see a bedpan than a Tony Award. That our younger, cuter, infinitely more hopeful selves oversaw such total chaos made it all the sadder. I was just wondering what the house would look like had my mother been the surviving parent when I noticed my father on the deck just off his bedroom, staring into a tree. I’d last seen him a month earlier and had noticed how hunched over he was—not bent into the shape of a question mark, the way some people his age are, but still it made him look frailer. “Hey!” he said as I opened the sliding glass door. “There you are!”

He wore white tennis shorts with a beige T-shirt and matching socks. Everything looked too big on him: his watch, his glasses, even his teeth—which is odd, as they’re completely his own. When he stepped forward to hug me, I noticed four mean-looking bruises on his arm. They weren’t purple but black, and had cotton balls over them held down with masking tape.