Still, I wasn’t all that surprised when, after my brother graduated from high school, he told me he was putting off enlisting in the military for a while to stay home with the old man.
The summer between my junior and senior years, I stayed on campus because I had a chance to work in a local law office. Before the summer started, though, I did get a chance to go home once. It was then that I began to see a marked change in Dad’s appearance. He’d lost weight and his skin didn’t look right. I made a point of getting home every other weekend, and it seemed that Dad had plateaued. He didn’t look great, but he didn’t seem to be getting worse. I remember saying so to Tommy one night late in August after the three of us had gone out for some beers at a bar near our house. Tommy and I were sitting together on the picnic table in our small backyard. It was after midnight, and the sky was brilliant with stars.
Tommy raised his head for a long moment and looked back at me, hard. “But he is worse, Mick.”
January of my senior year, Tommy called to tell me our father had retired and hired a lawyer. When I asked why, Tommy answered with a single word: “Asbestos.” It was only then that I put two and two together and realized that our father wasn’t suffering emphysema from smoking. I called one of the lawyers I had worked for in State College that summer, and he told me all about the massive asbestos litigation that had been going on around the country for years. I drove home that night and, after our father had gone to bed, pressured Tommy to tell me how bad he really was.
“Come on, Mick. Open your eyes! Or your ears. He coughs nonstop. He’s lost thirty pounds. He’s bad. You already know that. Stop bullshitting me—and yourself.”
“I’ll withdraw from school. Help you take care of him.”
Tommy snorted, an angry sound. “You have one more semester. Go back to school. Finish up. Graduate. Then you can help me with Dad.”
Tommy and I spoke to our father, who said he agreed with Tommy. “After you graduate, the three of us will take a road trip together,” he said. “I always wanted to rent one of those big Winnebagos, go to the Grand Canyon.”
So I went back to State College for my last semester. The second week of April, my phone rang at two in the morning. I leaned over in bed and picked up the receiver. The air at the other end of the line was dead for a full five seconds. “Hello? Who’s there?” I asked impatiently, my eyes still closed.
“Dad’s gone.”
I bolted up in bed. “What happened?”
But Tommy had already hung up.
The next few weeks were a blur. The long drive home. My father’s lifeless body in his bed. The funeral. The wake. The meetings with the lawyers. I floated through it all in zombielike numbness. The only thing I can remember with any clarity is my brother. As distant from the ordeal as I felt, Tommy seemed to me to be wholly present, wholly in control—of himself, our relatives, the attorneys, funeral directors, caterers. Me. I think it was the first time I’d ever seen my little brother as a grown-up, as a man. It startled me. I was twenty-two years old, a senior in college with three years of law school ahead of me. I was a student, and I saw myself that way. Not a child but not fully an adult yet, either. I had the body of a man, the face of a man, but hadn’t even begun making my way in the world. My twenty-year-old kid brother, on the other hand, had been working for two years at the local ball-bearing plant. He’d become the caretaker of our ailing father. He paid the bills. Painted and rewired the house. Took our father to his doctor’s appointments, nursed and entertained him at home. And when Dad passed, Tommy took control of the situation like an old-time party boss.
But then, a few weeks after I’d graduated and come home for the summer, Tommy fell apart. I turned in early one night. Tommy was sitting on the couch, watching TV with a beer in his hand when I went up to bed. The next morning when I came downstairs, Tommy was still sitting there. The TV was still on. Tommy wasn’t holding the beer anymore, though, but an empty fifth of Jack Daniel’s. Half a dozen empty beer bottles littered the coffee table. I asked Tommy if he was all right. He ignored me, kept staring at the television. I cleared the coffee table, removed the whiskey bottle from Tommy’s hand, and turned off the TV. Tommy closed his eyes but otherwise didn’t move a muscle.
Tommy didn’t leave the house for three days. He didn’t bathe or shave, either. Or change clothes. His eyes grew hollow. Because he wasn’t eating, Tommy began to lose weight. His chiseled face grew gaunt, his skin turned sallow. The thing that frightened me most, though, was what I saw in his eyes. Tommy was afraid. More than afraid. And I thought I’d figured out why. After our mother died, Tommy had latched on to our father like a barnacle on a keel. Wherever Dad went, Tommy went. Whatever Dad did, Tommy was there helping him. When Dad worked on the car, Tommy handed him his tools. Tommy accompanied our father to Home Depot and Lowe’s, the grocery store, beer distributors—everywhere. And it dawned on me, finally, that Tommy was hanging around our father for protection. Whatever had seized our mother and killed her before our very eyes had left our father standing. As strong as death was, Tommy had believed, our dad was stronger.
Dad’s invincibility, I decided, had become a core tenet of young Tommy’s belief system. But that a priori principle had just been shattered. Death had come for our father, just as it had hunted down our mother. The only thing Dad’s gargantuan strength had bought him was a long, slow demise. Death couldn’t knock the old man down with a single blow as it had his wife, so it picked him apart, piece by piece, pound by pound, and ate him alive. Tommy had witnessed it happen, and he was terrified. And there was something more. Tommy had stood shoulder to shoulder with my father through the whole thing, tried to fight off the old man’s death himself. But he’d failed. And Tommy’s failure to save our father, I decided, filled him with guilt. I could see that, too, in Tommy’s eyes. Bottomless guilt.
I congratulated myself for figuring it all out, and I fed Tommy every timeworn bromide I could think of. There was nothing Tommy could have done. It was just Dad’s time. Tommy had his whole life ahead of him. Dad was now with Mom, and they both wanted Tommy to be happy.