The reason I’d told Cindy I needed the truck that day was so I could go check on Pops after work. And she said, “You’ll see him Sunday. Can’t it wait till then?” Which caused me to have to make up another lie. I told her I’d had a bad dream about him and I couldn’t get it out of my head. So she made plans during the day for another teller who lived not far from us to give her a ride home in the evening. Meantime she called the daycare and let them know I’d be a half hour or so late picking up the girls.
So after work I went to the dollar store in town, then straight to the Brookside seniors’ home. Pops was in the dining room when I got there, halfway through his meatloaf. I sneaked up behind him and slipped the bag of chocolate-covered peanuts onto the table while he was talking to the old guy sitting beside him. Pops didn’t notice the peanuts till he went for another forkful of meatloaf. He looked at the bag for a few seconds, then he laid down his fork. “Screw this mystery meat,” he said. “I been blessed with some manna from Heaven.”
I never could surprise Pops, no matter how many times I tried. So I gave his shoulder a squeeze, then slid around to an empty chair. He never even looked at me till he had the bag open and a pile of chocolate-covered peanuts dumped out onto a saucer. Then he popped a piece of candy in his mouth and looked up at me and grinned. “Christmas came early this year,” he said.
I said, “You think maybe you should finish your dinner first, Pops?”
“I think maybe you should finish it,” he said. “Then you’ll see why I don’t plan to.”
The two other guys at his table both laughed, and neither one of them said no thanks when Pops passed the bag around. He asked about Cindy and the girls and how everything was going, and I asked the same, and then he smiled at me and waited.
So I said, “Would you mind if I stored the bike out in your unit this winter?”
“Why would I mind?” he said. “You get another car already?”
“Thinking about it,” I said. “I got caught in that cloudburst yesterday. Nearly laid the bike down. It got me thinking that maybe it’s time I stopped riding it so much.”
“Long past time, if you ask me.” By then he was already fumbling with the key chain on his belt loop. It still had eight or nine keys attached to it. It took him a while to get the right chain off the metal loop and hand it to me.
“You’re going to have to move some things around in there,” he said.
“That’s what I want to do tomorrow. I’m not quite ready to put the bike away yet.”
“I’d let you have the Lumina, but Art got us hooked up with a couple of nurse’s aides for tomorrow night. We’re taking them to the drive-in.”
I looked across the table at Art. He has the baggiest old hound-dog eyes I’ve ever seen on a man. He shook his head no.
Pops said, “They claim the smell of Bengay turns them on. I plan to find out if that’s true or not.”
I said, “You better hope Gee isn’t watching.”
“I already took care of that,” he said. “I lined the Lumina’s ceiling with tinfoil.”
Everybody else laughed a long time at that one, and I smiled too, but my stomach felt like I’d swallowed a brick. Since waking up I’d already lied to two of the four people I loved most in the world.
I stayed with Pops a few minutes longer, but made my goodbyes as soon as I could. When I stood up, he crimped shut the top of his candy bag and handed it to me. “Stick these in my fridge on your way out. I don’t like the way Art and T.A. are eyeballing them.”
The dining room is at the rear of the building, so I had to walk past a dozen or so rooms to get to the front door again. All of the rooms are alike, maybe 15 × 12, a bed, a couple of chairs, a dresser and TV and a bathroom. For obvious reasons, the residents aren’t allowed to cook in their rooms, but lots of them, like Pops, keep a little refrigerator filled with whatever they like.
It was only after I put the candy away and noticed the telephone on top of Pops’ fridge that I thought of what to do next. I wasn’t going to use Pops’ phone, that was too dangerous, but there are lots of other phones in the building too, one in nearly every room, in fact. And as far as I could tell, every resident in that wing, plus all the attendants, were in the dining room.
I picked the library because it’s down a side hallway away from the front desk. The front desk was empty at the moment but there was no telling how long that would last. Plus the public restrooms are across from the library, so if anybody looked up from the front desk to see me approaching, she’d probably think I’d been in the men’s room.
I was in and out of the library in less than two minutes. Dialed 911, told the operator there was a meth lab out on Route 218 about six miles north of town, little white cottage on the east side of the road, pit bull chained to a tree in the front yard. I didn’t even give her a chance to ask my name or anything else.
Then I was back behind the wheel and driving. I thought about stopping long enough to throw up, but then I swallowed it down. I still had things to do.
First place I stopped was the little hardware store down from the Dollar General, where I made myself a copy of the key to Pops’ storage unit. Then I drove out of town to the storage place. I got the big LED flashlight from my toolbox, plus a utility knife, a roll of duct tape, and the shoebox full of cash. Then I unlocked the unit, went inside and pulled down the door.
By this time I knew where I should put the money. Even if Pops came into the unit for some reason, and I had the feeling that maybe sometimes he did, probably to sit by himself awhile and be with those old things and all the memories in them. I mean I had no proof he ever did that, but I saw Pops and me as alike in many ways, and I knew if I was him, on his own now for the first time in fifty-some years, living surrounded by sickness and idleness and slow-moving people on the fast track to death, I would need a place like this to get away to every now and then, a place where it’s easier to remember what you used to have. Hell, I’d probably move my bed and mini fridge in. In a way it would be a lot like dying the way those old pharaohs did, surrounded by all the things you would drag up into Heaven with you.
But the one thing in here I figured he would leave alone was his MISCELLANEOUS box. You don’t use half a roll of duct tape sealing up a box if you plan to open it frequently.
But first I counted the money. All this time I’d been trying to keep numbers out of my head, but of course I’d been a miserable failure at it. And for some reason, fifty thousand was the number that kept flashing like a neon sign in my brain. Then I’d think, naw, maybe ten, fifteen at the most, but that neon sign had its own power source and the light had been impossible to extinguish.