A Different Kind of Normal (11 page)

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Authors: Cathy Lamb

BOOK: A Different Kind of Normal
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His daughter, Kendra, was at the mansion that morning. She’s tall, blond, forty-one years old, and wears animal-print heels. Kendra is a CEO of a major corporation. Young, famous, and competent. I’ve seen her pictured in different magazines, in tailored suits, impeccably groomed.
She was drunk as a skunk.
“Hello, Kendra,” I said. “How are you?”
She raised a shot glass toward me and wobbled on over. “Sleeping Beauty and elephant’s knees, I say cheers to you, Jaden. I am here with my father all day today. All day! All day! You know, that man in the bed who still tells me I’m a disappointment. This is what I’ve heard all my life.” She scrunched up her face, tried to stand still, and barked out, “You are a disappointment. With a
D,
Kendra!” She waved her hand in the air, as if dismissing me. “Disappointment! You always have been! You could never get it together. Everything is hard for you to understand!”
Kendra took another drink and yelled, “To victory! To mice! To butterflies that do not get drunk!”
“I see you’re practicing self-relaxing techniques.”
She burped. “Glorious burp! I’m in the Disappointment House. It was Shaina’s turn yesterday, and Tony’s before her, and they left me liquor.” She tried to stand nice and tall, then intoned, “Liquor Picker Poker Rum, I’ve got room for my big fat bum!” She burped again. “Ha! I’ll bet Daddy would not click a dick with that one. How about this one? Scotch Potch Hopscotch One, I’ve got a dad that’s just about done!”
I walked over to her father’s bedroom door and shut it before Kendra trip-tropped into another rhyme. Too late.
“I’ve got tequila, I’ve got pie, I’ve got a dad who’s about to die!”
“Okay, Kendra, nice rhymes. Perhaps we should keep it down? Can it for the moment?”
“Nope,” she declared. “Not now. He already hates me, what’s a teeny more hate? Hey! I’ve got another one.” She snapped her fingers. “He’s been mean, he’s been sly, I won’t shout, but I won’t lie. He’s rung my bell, and he’s going to hell!”
“Did you study poetry in college?”
“No! No poetry. I went to Yale and I studied economics and finance and business and I was a Rhodes scholar and I married the right guy, the guy that Daddy picked, and he ended up being a gay guy, and the gay guy was cutthroat and nasty and ambitious, a younger him, and now we’re getting divorced and I did what Daddy told me to do in the futile hope he would approve of me and I am”—she tipped her head up toward the ceiling and started plucking through the air with her hand, as if she was trying to find words—“I am pissy wissy! And screwy wrewy! And not happy!”
“You’re not screwy wrewy, Kendra,” I said softly. I had spent a lot of time with her, her sister, and brother, all who were struggling with their father’s death. Not because they would miss him, but because he was miserable as a father emotionally, and physically abusive when they were young, with a fondness for spanking them with his belt. Sometimes, in my experience, the people whose grief is the worst are the ones who lose someone with whom they have unfinished business, or with whom the relationship has disintegrated.
When the relative dies they’re left with broken glass, emotionally speaking. It cannot be resolved. The ones with the strong relationships, there’s nothing there but clean grief, as I call it. Clean grief. Tears, but no regrets, resentments, or fury.
That was not the case here. The disappointed daddy was dying and there was no resolution, no needed apologies, no forgiveness.
“See here, Jaden. I believe the circus has come to town and there is a lion in the pantry.” Kendra took another swig, then clicked her teeth together. “Also, there is a mean monkey in that bedroom. Don’t go in unless you want the monkey to bite you. Don’t get bit. The monkey’s name is Dad. Dad is bad. Dad bad. Bad Dad.”
“Kendra, how about if I make you a sandwich?”
“A sandwich! Ha and ha. That would be dee-lish-us. I’ll have a sandwich with popcorn and tequila with a side of a Mona Lisa and Les Misérables, because I’m miserable. You want a bite?”
“No, thank you. Come on, Kendra. Bring yourself to the kitchen. I’ll check on your dad and then make you your tequila and popcorn sandwich.” I would not be making her a tequila and popcorn sandwich. Turkey and ham would do. Maybe mayo if we wanted to live on the edge.
“Yum!” she said, rubbing her stomach. Her hand stopped abruptly and she said, ever so clearly, “I believe I am now going to puke.” She stumbled to the bathroom, crashed into a wall, then hit the toilet, possibly with her head.
“See ya in a minute,” I called to her.
“Yuck duck!” she said. “Ew yucky!”
I entered the bedroom.
The bad monkey was in a bad mood. He threw a pillow at me.
“Good morning, Mr. Bonaparte.”
“Not a good morning, Jaden. I’m dying,” he wheezed out. “How can it be good?”
“Hello, Mrs. Bonaparte.”
Mrs. Bonaparte looked worse than her daughter, but she was not drunk as a skunk. She was only sixty-two. She married him at twenty, had Kendra at twenty-one. For an inexplicable reason, she allowed herself to be stuck. The woman didn’t leave. Verbal abuse scrambled her brain, smashed her self-esteem, and locked her up as if she were in prison with a bloodsucking gargoyle standing guard.
“Hello, Jaden.” Her platinum-blond hair was all over her head, her mascara smeared, her lipstick smudged. She’d lost about ten pounds in the last month off her skinny frame. Mr. Bonaparte despised fat women and hammered the mother and daughters with that degrading fact.
“Don’t hello Mrs. Bonaparte,” Mr. Bonaparte snapped from the bed. “It’s me you need to be talking to, missy. Me. She can’t do anything. This medication isn’t doing shit. The doctors know nothing. Now you get me something that works, or I’m going to get your ass fired.”
“Some days I think that would be a fine, freeing event.”
Mr. Bonaparte was shrunken and wrinkled. He said, “Maybe you deserve it.”
“Maybe I do, Mr. Bonaparte. Balls and tarnation, maybe I should wish for it.”
“You still have those fake diamonds in your hair. Fake! Fake diamonds! I buy my wife real diamonds!”
“I wear my fake diamonds to annoy you.” I loved my crystals from Tate, so my temper was now piqued.
“They do annoy me. They’re annoying!”
“I know, but it gets your heart rate up, which is helpful. Want to sit up so you can shout at full throttle?”
“I don’t want to sit up and I don’t want help, and where did you get all that red hair?”
“Rumor has it there’s some Irish blood in the line.”
“Irish blood! Bloody Irish, not for me. In my company, I hired men. Didn’t need women driving my rigs with all those hormones. Women can’t drive at the same level as men. They get distracted easily, can’t take corners, emotional! Weaker sex. My daughter, she deserted me! She works for another company, not mine. Said I didn’t respect her. My wife never worked. She knew to stay home, do what she was told, and take care of me.”
“That must have been a hellaciously hard job for her.”
Out in the living room, Kendra started singing a beer-drinking song. She went on about stalking the town criminal and stuffing him into a trunk and pushing the car into a lagoon. “And he sang with the fishes, he sang with the fishes, oh how he sang with the fishes for the rest of his life. Kaboom and boom and there he loomed.”
“Bah! It wasn’t hard for her! I worked all the time. She stayed home on her fanny. Didn’t do anything.” Mr. Bonaparte still had a shock of white hair. “I want to get up now, I want to get up.”
He swung his legs over the bed.
“Sir, please don’t. You’ve had a hip replacement that didn’t work, remember, and you have cancer all over your body. You need to stay in bed. I can’t support you.”
“I don’t need support! I’m getting up, damn it, and I’m going to tell Kendra to
shut up.
”
Kendra chortled out a new song. This one was about a woman who decided that she was going to explore the world without a man, carefree, and drinking whiskey. “Whisky this, whiskey that, I ain’t going to get caught in the corporate trap! Whiskey this, whiskey that, I’m going to Paris, you can kiss my ass!”
“Shut up, Kendra!” her father bellowed.
“Shut up, Dad, you old fart!” she bellowed back, then sang a song called, “My Little Titty, My Little Kitty . . .”
Her father’s jaw dropped, his face turning purple. “Kendra, shut up!”
“No, Dad, you
disappointer,
you shut up and soon you’ll be shut up forever!” Kendra came to the door and burped. “I’m a disappointment. I didn’t do it right. But you know what, Dad? I don’t care!”
Kendra couldn’t see it, but I could. Mr. Bonaparte’s face fell.
“My little titty, my little kitty . . .” she chirped.
Mr. Bonaparte leaned back in bed, stared at his wife, and bit out, “Why is she talking like that to me, Joyce? I’ve been a good husband, a good father. She’s ungrateful. Her and her siblings. Ungrateful, miserable, spoiled. Disappointments! Capital
D!
”
Joyce did not respond. She was a sticky white color and one of the most run-down people I’ve ever seen.
“Joyce!” Mr. Bonaparte shouted.
“What?” she clipped, short and impatient.
His dark eyes opened wide. “Joyce?”
“What?” She crossed her legs, and I noticed she was trembling. She was a skeleton. Anorexia happens at all ages. I had talked with her about this, but she denied there was a problem. Perhaps the problem would end in about a month. I eyed Mr. Bonaparte. Maybe less than that.
“Don’t use that tone with me, Joyce. What’s gotten into you?” Mr. Bonaparte jabbed a gnarled finger at his wife. “What? You having one of your moods again? I won’t tolerate it, Joyce!”
“Nothing has gotten into me. Lie back and relax.” Mrs. Bonaparte swayed in her chair.
“Don’t tell me what to do, I won’t be bossed around by you or any other stupid woman, you two together, you and Jaden, you do nothing for me, nothing! Standing there, staring at me, what am I, a snake in an aquarium?”
“If you were a snake in an aquarium, you’d drown or the other snakes would eat you so you’d stop biting them,” I said. “Mr. Bonaparte, I’m going to take your vitals, talk about how you’re feeling, then later you can have lunch.”
“Lunch, I don’t want lunch. Joyce can’t cook at all. Did you order out, Joyce? Did you? What did you get this time? I don’t want that Chinese crap from the other day! Dumb choice! Dumb!”
Joyce stood up, pale, white, shaking.
“All these years, you never had to work a day in your life and I ask that you get my meals on time, too hard for you, too hard, Joyce. And I gave you servants and cars and clothes, you damn near spent all my money.”
“I never did that, George, never.” Mrs. Bonaparte put her shoulders back.
“Sit down, Joyce, no one needs you standing up. Don’t you stare down at me, woman!” He pounded a fist into the pillow. “Damn it, where ya goin’?”
Joyce put her hand out to mine. “Thank you, Jaden. You’re a saint.”
I shook it, gently. She was a tiny slip of a woman. “No, not a saint. Dealing with irascible people is sometimes part of my job.”
“He makes it miserable.” She turned to her husband, flailing around in the bed. “Good-bye, George.”
“What? What the hell do you mean, good-bye? Get the lunch and bring it in here, woman. I need my socks changed, I’m gonna get another disease on my feet if you don’t take care of me better. This is your fault, Joyce!”
“I’m done, George.”
“What do you mean? Speak up. I can never understand you. It’s her background. Poor family. Dad never made much of himself. Uneducated. Never went to college.”
“I can’t take this anymore.” Mrs. Bonaparte swayed on her feet, and I moved pretty quick, thinking she was going to fall. “I’m sorry you’re dying, but you’re mean. Belittling and condescending and rude. To me, to the kids.”
“No, I’m not! You’re too sensitive. You make me say the things I do. You don’t know when to shut up. You do things to make me mad. The kids are Mommy’s boys and girls. You did that to me, you did that. That’s why they cringe when I’m around. They never come home to see me. I have to die before I see my kids!” He leaned over and coughed, a messy, harsh cough.
“It’s you, George. You’re at fault. It’s always been you. I should have left years ago.”
Kendra sang out in the living room, top volume, “A one, two, three . . . down down down into the earth he’ll go, a coffin here, a coffin there, grass growing ’round his knees. . . .”
Mr. Bonaparte gasped.
Mrs. Bonaparte stood taller, but a couple of tears fell.
“You’re crying, Joyce!” George blustered. “Close off the waterworks, you know I can’t stand a weak woman! I don’t need to see you being a baby!”
“I’m crying because I can’t believe how many years I’ve lost, how many years I’ve cried myself to sleep, cowered from you, been scared, and I didn’t leave. And now, you’re dying, and you’re still trying to control me, and I still stand around and take it, and I can’t take it anymore.” She burst into tears. “I can’t take it. I’m supposed to be here until you die, but if I have to sit here one more day and listen to you—”

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