“For scrap. He sold it for scrap. Can we discuss this somewhere else? Or not at all?”
“Oh, he can’t hear a thing, can you, Dad?” said Pamela. “And if you could, you wouldn’t mind, would you? He certainly can’t take care of all these details himself, Freddie.”
“We’re being practical,” Laurel said. “Someone has to.”
Freddie went to the hospital every day, too, but one day slid seamlessly into the next, her father the same, his chest moving up with great effort and, then, with equal effort, down. His cheeks had sunk into his skull, he got no better, he got no worse. Her sisters had moved out of their hotel room into his room at Green Garden.
“I know they’re going through his things,” Freddie told Molly. “It’s ghoulish.”
Molly was kind and distracted, the distraction perhaps making her kinder than she would ordinarily be. The argument with her mother had shaken her.
“It was only a day, only a little quarrel, I know, but it was almost as if she had died. I don’t want her to die. I don’t want your father to die. It’s a very messed-up system, death. I don’t like it at all.”
She was gone a lot of the time, too, taking her summer field session students to Catalina Island to drag sensors behind kayaks, measuring the temperature, looking for fresh water feeding into the ocean. The first year she taught this class, one of the students had asked her which ocean it was. This year the group was smart and dedicated, although when she pointed out the bay where Natalie Wood drowned, they asked who Natalie Wood was.
“It made me feel so old,” she said.
But she and Freddie both knew that until their parents died, they would still be the children.
56
Joy discovered that she rather liked Manhattan in August. She could see the lightning and hear the thunder and not worry that her power would go out. She could watch the raindrops stain the pavement from six stories above and not wonder if the basement would flood. The early mornings were bearable, and she took Gatto in her bag in one hand, the other bags hooked on Aaron’s walker, just to be safe, you never knew, and made her way to Aaron’s park to mourn him and, now and then, to silently rail at him as the pigeons cooed and the sparrows chirped. No other people were there, in the park, or on the streets. The city was as quiet as a small town.
The invitations to the bat mitzvah had been sent out last month, but Danny made sure to tell her that one had now been sent to Karl, too. “My response was a little out of proportion” was his way of apologizing. Joy said, “We all mourn in our own ways, Danny. Some of us regress, that’s all.”
Karl had called her from his son’s house. They did not stay on the phone. Men so rarely did. He asked her if she had thought any more about what they talked about. She said she had, and that was true. She had thought about it a great deal. And the more she thought about living with Karl, the more she enjoyed living with Ben. Ben was never there. He went to work during the day and to class in the evening. At night, he was out until the wee hours. Joy saw traces of him, reassuring traces. A mug in the sink. An empty carton of milk put back in the refrigerator.
So when he arrived at the apartment unexpectedly early one afternoon, Joy was surprised but delighted.
“Did you get the afternoon off? We can go out to the early-bird special!”
“My life is ruined,” he said, flinging himself onto the couch. He thrashed around a bit, then said, “They want a urine sample.”
“For DNA? But they saw you, Ben. The police know it was you. What a waste of city resources.”
“No, Grandma, not the city. The law firm. They want a urine sample.”
“You and your urine, Ben. Really.”
“I have to give it to them today, and you know, I was out last night and so there might be, you know, traces. Of stuff. They’ll fire me and I’ll never get into law school.”
“Stuff? Like drugs? You take drugs? Bennie, Bennie…”
“Just weed, Grandma. But it’s against their policy and…” He took an empty plastic specimen jar from his pocket and looked at it sorrowfully. “I’ll have to be a bartender forever.”
“Oh, for heaven’s sake,” his grandmother said. “Give me that.”
She went in the bathroom and filled it up.
“Here, take this.” She was really angry. “Marijuana! As if it’s any business of theirs.”
57
In the baking, desiccated air of September, Duncan sat up. He demanded to see all his children just once more before he died.
“Die? You just woke up. Slow down, Dad.” Freddie was so happy she felt almost sick. She had not expected to hear her father’s deep, smooth voice ever again.
The doctors were stunned. He’s a tough nut, they kept saying. A tough nut.
“Do this for me so I can die in peace.”
Freddie had already called her sisters, still encamped in Duncan’s room at Green Garden, and they were on their way.