“He’s pretty clear today,” the woman says. Hoskins can’t remember her name. She’s the latest in the many women he’s hired to care for Joe, mostly retired nurses, someone to hang around during the day and keep the old man out of trouble. “He had eggs for breakfast. A cup of coffee.”
“Decaf?” he asks. If Joe has any caffeine, shit gets hairy, but they have to hide it from him. Replace his regular coffee with decaf without him seeing, dump most of the beer out of the bottles in the fridge and water it down with apple juice. It seems stupid, and it’s a lot of work and sometimes feels pointless, but those little tricks make it easier to live with Joe. That’s what his life has become these days—careful deception.
“Yeah,” the woman says, slowly, so Joe must be sitting right there, listening. He’s a different man these days, not the same father Hoskins had always known. Joe’s like a kid sometimes, childish and demanding, other times he is silent and angry. He’s not often sly, but when he is that worries Hoskins the most, when he looks in Joe’s eyes and can see the wheels turning, see some plan coming together. When his father looks like that it reminds him of Seever, before the arrest, when he thought he was invincible, that no one could ever touch him.
You hear about that gal who disappeared down in the Springs last year? Seever had said once, when he’d sauntered up to where Hoskins and Loren were parked, a cigarette stuck delicately between his pointer and middle fingers, the way a woman would smoke. Anyone ever find her?
They did find that girl, later, down in Seever’s crawl space, but it’d all been a good joke for Seever then, a real chuckle factory, as he liked to say. And Seever was sly, sly as a fox, as a goddamn weasel, and there were times when Joe would look that same way, like he had some tasty secret he was hiding, and Hoskins would feel a cold trickle of fear on the back of his neck, and he’d feel bad; it’s his dad, after all, but there’s something about that look that makes him afraid. And what else was he supposed to do? His father’s crazy, Joe’s losing his fucking mind and it isn’t his fault, it’s the shitty luck his DNA had dealt him, but he’s still his father.
Still, Hoskins sleeps with his bedroom door locked.
“Did he take his pills?” he asks. Same questions, same phone call, every day. He’ll call again, in a few hours, to make sure Joe has eaten lunch, that he’s taken a nap in front of the TV. “Did you give him the paper? He needs to do the crossword.”
“I know,” the woman says flatly, and he can hear the impatience in her voice. She’ll quit soon, he thinks, and it won’t be long before he’ll be searching for someone else. Another name he won’t be able to remember. “He’s doing it now.”
“Does he have his slippers on? It’s cold in the house.”
“Yeah.”
“And he keeps scratching that spot on his arm. Could you put some cream on it?”
“I already did.”
“Okay.”
This must be like having a kid, he thinks. Calling the babysitter to make sure everything’s going all right, no one’s playing with matches or shit in their pants, worrying over everything. It’s been this way since his father fell off the ladder while pruning a tree in his backyard, and there hadn’t been any broken bones or damage, not even a scratch, but there’d still been a brain scan, just in case, and the doctor had thrown around lots of big words and charts and had shown them the X-rays on his laptop, and Hoskins and Joe had nodded and pretended to understand, although they had no clue what the fuck was going on. And afterward, when his father was at the front desk scheduling another appointment, Hoskins asked the doctor to explain it all again, in a way he could understand.
“There’s calcium depositing around your father’s brain,” the doctor said. He wasn’t looking at Hoskins, but down at his phone, scrolling through his endless text messages. He was already done with the conversation, moved on to other things, and Hoskins considered snatching the phone from his hand and throwing it through the window. “If we hadn’t done the CAT scan, we might not have found out until it was far too late.”
“Found out what?”
The doctor looked up from his phone, smacked his lips together wetly. God, Hoskins hated doctors, hated everything about them. The expense of them, and the time they took, but mostly he hated the way they made you feel like such an idiot, like you were too stupid to even be worth their attention.
“The calcium is affecting your father’s brain,” he said. Slowly, as if Hoskins might be the one with the dysfunctional upstairs. “He’s going to start forgetting things, even more than he already is. Suffering from dementia. His brain impulses will slow down, so he won’t be able to get around as well. It could happen a little bit at a time, over many years so you might not notice, but your father’s got a pretty advanced case. The calcium’s been building up for a long time.”
“Jesus. What are we supposed to do?”
The doctor shrugged.