“My father,” she says, as if this is something I didn’t already know. “He’s misplaced a check from the tenants,” she tells me. “Their rent payment. He endorsed it and left it out to deposit, but now it’s gone.”
For years Tom has hung on to Clara’s childhood home, an old farmhouse that was fully renovated and rented out for an additional income for Tom and Louisa. It isn’t too far away from our own home, in an unincorporated part of town, one of the few areas left in the community that hasn’t yet been overrun by new construction and big-box stores. From the front porch of the farmhouse, you can see cornfields still, horses, the occasional John Deere driving down the middle of the road. But it became too much work for a man of Tom’s age and Louisa’s health. At Clara’s suggestion, Tom made the tough decision to lease it out and move to the retirement community where they now live, though Tom hates it, the kind of community with Bingo night and bunco games. Newlyweds rent the farmhouse now, a couple by the name of Kyle and Dawn, who I met once when I helped Tom with some electrical issues in the home. Tom used to handle the upkeep all on his own, but these days and at his age, there’s not much he can still do.
“Your mother?” I ask because this isn’t the first time we’ve heard of Louisa losing things. Louisa loses many, many things, and half of them they find later, hidden in strange places, and the other half they don’t find at all. My stomach churns, and I try to remember what I had last night to eat, or whether it’s all anxiety and nerves. I feel for Tom, knowing what it feels like to lose money. I’ve been losing my fair share of things, too.
“Seems so,” Clara says, and then she tells me how she plans to go there today, to comb through the house and see if she can find the check. It’s the least that she can do, she says, shaking her head, saying, “I just feel bad for them. What if they’re having money trouble, Nick?” she asks. “My father would never tell me. He’s too proud to ask for help,” she says.
“You want me to talk to him?” I ask, but she shakes her head and says no. We all know how Tom feels about me. The last thing any of us needs is me checking up on Tom’s finances. But I ask anyway in the hopes that Clara won’t think she’s in this alone.
And then, rising from the breakfast nook, Clara changes the subject and tells me how she’s gone ahead and hired someone to paint the baby’s room. They’re coming today. By the time I arrive home, the baby’s room will be gray. This is supposed to make me happy, but instead all the air gets sucked from the room and I snap.
“I told you I’d take care of it,” I say to her, more angrily than I wish I had, and she comes back with, “The baby is coming soon, Nick. We can’t wait anymore.”
The baby is coming soon. I can see it in Clara, in the way Baby Doe has moved inside her, dropping down into her pelvic area so that she’s in noticeably more pain. She waddles when she walks, the baby’s head shoved somewhere into her crotch. The heaviness of the baby is tangible, even to me. I can feel him vicariously through Clara’s trudging movements.
“Do you have any idea how much professional painters cost?” I say, my voice elevating as I move toward the coffee maker and reach instinctively for the fully caffeinated coffee grounds.
“We have money,” she asserts. “It’s not like we don’t have money.” And then, “I thought we weren’t drinking caffeine,” she says, standing before me in her nightgown, her belly as fully extended as it can possibly get. She looks tired, hand pressed to the small of her back as if she can carry this baby weight no longer. Across the taut nightgown I spy ripples of movement, our baby reaching his hands and toes to get out, alien-like. He’s ready. I look down at the bag of coffee grounds in my hand. Dark roast, it says; not the decaf. “Have you been drinking caffeine all this time?” she asks, and I almost laugh at the inanity of it, how I have an illegitimate son, my practice is in shambles, I’m being sued and I almost plowed down a neighborhood kid, but what Clara is concerned about is my caffeine intake. But I haven’t even been drinking caffeine. Of all the things I’ve done wrong, this is the one thing I’ve done right. I stayed true to our vow. I didn’t drink caffeine.
And then I do laugh, this odd, manic laugh that doesn’t sound like me, tossing the coffee to the floor so that the bag cracks open and grounds spill out everywhere. “What has gotten into you?” Clara asks, her face shrouded in worry and disgust.
“Into me?” I demand. “Into me? What has gotten into you?” I ask, using some sort of defensive tactic of spinning the conversation in my favor. “I told you I was going to paint the bedroom. Why in the hell would you hire someone else to do what I can clearly do?” I grab a dustpan and broom from the pantry wall. I drop down onto all fours to clean the mess.
“Stop being an asshole, Nick,” Clara growls, holding Harriet back as she tries to get at the coffee grounds, to lick them up off the floor as she licks everything up off the floor.
“Oh, I’m being an asshole?” I ask. “I’m the one being an asshole?”
“Yes, Nick. You’re being an asshole,” Clara asserts before she gathers Harriet and leaves the room.
I try to follow her, to reach for her, but instead feel the cotton of her nightgown slip through my hands as she disappears.
CLARA
“What’s going on?” begs my father hours later as I step into the kitchen to see him standing before the stove, pouring a box of uncooked pasta into boiling water. I notice how loosely his pants fit, hanging on to near nothingness, merely skin and bones. He’s becoming too thin. His eyes look tired, his skin aging quickly, getting covered in liver spots and wrinkles. His hair thins with each visit, the fatigue weighing heavily on him. My mother no longer sleeps, which means my father no longer sleeps, and they’re both aging far more quickly than I’d like them to. I’ve told him before, Your health is important, too, but my father rejoined with, This is what people do when they love each other. Self-sacrifice, he said, telling me how there was nothing for my mother he wouldn’t do.
In the next room, Maisie watches TV. I’m not sure how, but somehow or other she’s no longer stashed under the guest bed. Now she’s out, her face radiated by synthetic light, and on her lips is a smile—not for me, but for the characters on TV. She clings to her scruffy teddy bear, one of its decrepit ears stuffed inside her mouth, wet with saliva. She doesn’t see me as I pass by. I pat her head; I say hello. On the floor, spread across a hand-knit blanket, Felix is asleep.