Funny Once (23 page)

Hannah kept muttering, “Sorry,” as she jammed the gearshift into her sister’s leg, and Holly kept replying, “It’s OK.”

“Why in hell would you prefer standard?” Hannah demanded of Hugh.

He shrugged. He liked shifting gears? He liked old-fashioned things? He was stubborn? Mostly, he enjoyed the sensation of neutral beneath his palm, the way the knob floated briefly in between options while the engine took a breath and then he smoothly gripped and chose. None of this could be explained to Hannah. She continued to upgrade his life for him, bestowing upon him her secondhand laptop, gifting him with a laser measure on his last birthday, hauling both him and their father off for their annual flu shot.

Hugh opened the passenger-side window (crank handle), letting in more of the warm August evening. They might be making a tortured journey, but Wichita was peaceful enough tonight. Perhaps it was best that they’d been detained in their errand; rush hour had ended, and the cicadas sawed on tiredly, the shade trees heavy with deep green leaves. Summer had had enough of itself, was just about to give up and let go. Riding three abreast in the front of Hugh’s truck reminded the Paniks of high school, as did the sound of the pavement beneath the spongy tires, the wind in their hair, dusk settling its melancholy self. Even the radio played the songs they’d known back when.

“Just imagine,” Hannah said, “just imagine this was the first time you heard this song”—Tina Turner, “What’s Love Got to Do with It”—“and somebody told you that in, oh, twenty years or so, you’d be listening to it again while your dad was riding in the grody bed of your truck, duct-taped into an easy chair. Would you believe them? Could anyone ever predict this was where we’d end up?”

“I’m glad Mom’s not here to see this,” Hugh said. “She’d say, ‘Shame on you.’”

“I hated how she said that,” Hannah agreed. “It might be the worst thing to say to a kid. I would never say such a thing to mine.”

“I probably would. Have. Will. Right?” Holly said, looking freshly guilty. She was exempt from exactly nothing, when it came to feeling bad. “And I sure wish we’d given Papa a haircut,” she went on. “He looks crazy back there with his hair flying around.”

“A stylist comes to the home every week,” Hannah reminded them. “One of the perks, Day of Beauty.”

“Friday,” Holly added miserably.

“He is so going to hate it there,” Hugh said.

“Say it enough, he will.” But none of them felt like arguing. They’d already done that. This was the result. What
did
love have to do with it, anyway? Despite loving their father, they were taking him to live with strangers, against his will. It was a one-way trip; the police, upon bringing Sam Panik once more to his and Hugh’s door like a wandering dog, had specifically threatened legal intervention. With the exception of perhaps passing the place on long aimless drives (sitting inside, in the passenger seat, like a normal doddering old father), he would never visit his home again. This year, Hugh speculated, would most likely be the one in which he died.

And if he didn’t, finances dictated that Hugh and his sisters would have to move him somewhere worse, downgrading all the way to the hot, hot oven where he would eventually arrive.

“Hell,” Hugh said.

“It’s not hell,” Hannah corrected. “It’s the best possible solution to an insoluble problem. Deal with it.” She was practical, his sister Hannah. Practical like a kitchen tool, dispassionate as an appliance. She made Hugh want to try to make her cry, just to see if he could.

Holly changed the radio station. “Buttons! Your car is so old!” she informed him. “How can you stand not having ‘scan’?”

“You would love XM,” Hannah added, and Hugh could almost hear her congratulating herself on solving the problem of this year’s Christmas gift to him: satellite radio. Hannah was the mother of two teenage boys; she knew a lot of things about the contemporary world. Nobody was going to pull a fast one on her.

Hugh wasn’t as aware of that world. Certainly he didn’t seem like somebody eager to embrace the twenty-first century. He felt comfortable dwelling not in the past, exactly, but in a familiar place that happened to be the past. Since high school he had lived, off and on, in his childhood home with, until this very day, his father, and, when she was alive, his mother. He’d brought no wife into this arrangement, spawned no offspring, opened no savings account, planned for no retirement from a job that paid an hourly wage and provided no health plan. So no, he had no XM radio. His job beeper still alarmed him when it went off in his pocket, an exciting little surge in the groin.

Every few years he took himself to the mall and bought six pairs of khaki pants. When J.C. Penney had quit carrying the ones he liked, he’d switched to the Gap. That was as much progress as he had made, evolutionarily. A woman in his past had believed the source of his trouble to be metabolic; she’d thought he ought to medicate. Hugh hadn’t had enough interest, or energy, to pursue the matter—exactly what she’d meant to cure him of. He lifted his ankle to check the status of his pants cuffs, reassuring himself that he was still presentable.

Slowly, they left Riverside behind, crossing the river at McLean, then sneaking down the winding residential streets to the home, which was a one-story, sprawling suburban-type place three miles from the Panik family home. It was located in a neighborhood not physically far from their house, but not in any important way close to that landmark. Hannah took the last corner faster than she should have, and they all felt the weight in the rear lurch ponderously as the chair tilted. “Sorry!” Hannah said savagely. She was always anticipating criticism, even when none was forthcoming.

“They’re gonna think we’re awful,” Holly said, meaning the keepers at the home.

Hannah tapped Hugh’s instrument panel, pulling out the keys. “Your odometer just flipped.”

“Damn,” Hugh said. He’d meant to be paying attention when that happened. Two hundred thousand miles. And he’d driven most of them.

“Back to zero,” Hannah said. “A clean record. Papa?” She called to him as she climbed from the truck. “We’re here. Your new home.”

“
This
is my home” had been his simple plea. In the face of every piece of evidence presented, every argument laid out, every solid illustration of logic, his line had remained the same. It could have broken your heart, to hear him. Without Hannah’s relentless reminding, Holly and Hugh would have succumbed to that voice, that simple plea, his case for convenient inertia. He’d have eventually wandered into traffic naked and been rolled over by a bus, or simply disappeared, had it been up to Hugh or Holly.

“Don’t cry, Holly,” Hugh said. She now sat with one leg on either side of the gearshift, hunched forward, a palm over each eye. Outside, Hannah was laughing with the aides, gesturing toward the truck. Hannah had enough maternal instinct to lead an army. That seemed to have left Holly with a serious deficit. Although biology had handed her a son, her very own, she often had no idea how to proceed. “Let’s get Dad out,” Hugh prodded gently.

Like the hippies next door at old Mr. Roosevelt’s, the nursing home staff didn’t seem all that shocked to see a man riding in the bed of a truck in his recliner. Stuffing was escaping along both faux-leather sides of the chair. The ride hadn’t improved the looks of it or its passenger. “Hello, Mr. Pa-
neek
,” called out the buxom aide named Brenda. And, in unison, the siblings corrected her pronunciation.

Someone had to have died to make moving in possible, Hugh thought suddenly. Just yesterday, he’d been called: an opening. He hadn’t quite put it together that an opening meant, for someone else, a closure. His father had been next on the waiting list. The waiting list: there was a big one in the sky, and everyone was on it.

“Oh, we’ll be so glad to have a
man
around the house,” claimed Brenda, holding open the front door. It was wider than the one at the Panik house, fitted for chairs and walkers and apparatuses of all stripes, including the gurney from the morgue. Through it the Paniks passed, Hugh once more gripping one side of his father’s chair, his sisters the other. “Over there,” directed Brenda, scurrying after them. They’d chosen this home for its homeyness. And so it should have been comforting to see the space that had been made, in the circle of similar chairs arranged around the television, for Mr. Panik’s. That must have been where the dead woman’s chair had sat. “We haven’t had a man since Junior.”

“Junior,” scoffed a different scrub-dressed aide, crossing her arms, curling her lip.

The circle was made up of old women, six of them. They shared the three other bedrooms at the home. Each and every one of them had a memory problem, victims of stroke and Alzheimer’s and other flavors of dementia. Hugh had visited last spring, when his father had been hospitalized after a collapse and the inevitable had suddenly been upon them. He recognized a few of the women—the one with the unidentifiable plush toy she petted and praised; the one who’d thought he’d come to visit her and named him her son Sonny, reciting to him all of her pertinent, contradictory data; and the one who’d sat at the table with her forehead on its surface, crying softly, unreachable.

Last spring, there’d also been a chatty woman named Mary, one who’d cheerfully rolled her eyes and thrown up her hands when she’d forgotten what she was saying. She’d been the liveliest tenant, treating her role at the home as that of hostess at a cocktail party, the person who’d convinced Hugh that his father would have some worthy company, should he move in.

“Where’s Mary?” he inquired.

“Oh, she passed,” said Brenda serenely, smiling benignly, saintly as a nun. “Just yesterday morning. That’s her room your dad will have. A single.” She added, “It’s usually the men who prefer it. They find it harder to live with others, I think. But Mary liked her alone time, that’s for sure. Sometimes she needed to get away from the other girls.”

Hugh hadn’t really known the woman, but like all the dead he was aware of, she turned in his mind from substantial to opaque, wavering there like a sheer curtain with her image sewn upon it. When he closed his eyes, the faces of the dead would appear like this, a laundry line of windblown sheers, sepia toned. He watched them, behind his eyelids, he listened, he concentrated, he guessed at what these phantoms would think. They were his audience, his attendants, his witnesses.

His father’s delusions featured these same players. He was simply more receptive to their demands.

“He’s a good roommate, aren’t you, Papa?”

His father turned his acid gaze on Hugh. His eyes were still furious, burning embers in his gray stricken face, but he was obviously straining under the burden of rage. It was exhausting to be as angry as he’d been, as forsaken. Hugh felt sorry for him. Surely he’d like to surrender, get untaped and explore the new digs. Settle at the plastic-covered table and eat something that hadn’t come from a can or takeout box. Change the channel, perhaps, flirt with Brenda and her chubby coworker, who seemed so prepared to do his bidding. He’d always been a curious person, quick to find the humor, easy to live with.

“You can relax,” Hugh whispered into his father’s ear. “They’re going to be nice to you here.”

Very softly, nearly inaudibly, his father said, “
Fuck you
.” Hugh literally stepped back.

“I hope that’s not the last thing you say to me,” he said.

“What’d he say?” Hannah inquired.

“Papa?” said Holly. But the old man had turned his evil gaze toward the television screen.

On it he was greeted by a black-and-white movie. This boded well, Hugh would tell his sisters later, at the bar. At least the old ladies weren’t watching the usual drivel, the humiliation shows. No embarrassing dirty laundry being aired here; no judge scolding a feuding set of neighbors, no smarmy talk show host keeping at arm’s length family members who wished to kill one another. Instead, the gals were watching a movie. And an old one, at that. The past would comfort his father, Hugh would say to his sisters, although he and his father had rarely watched old movies at home. They’d tended toward historical material, documentaries and nature shows. At a certain age, Sam Panik had grown impatient with make-believe. He wanted facts, history and nature. Period.

Fuck you
. In the immediate wake of those stunning words, Hugh left his father with the women—all the women: residents, aides, his own sisters—and padded down the hall to the room at the end. Unlike the three other bedrooms, it was undecorated, tiny pinpricks in the walls where tacks had held up mementos. Until yesterday, someone else had lived in this room. And then had died there. Like in a hotel room, you had to make peace with its publicness. It was not like your house, exactly. But, unlike in a hotel room, you weren’t going to get up in the morning and drive away from the temporary squalor you’d indulged yourself in. No, his father was not “passing through.” Not passing through, but passing, as Mary, its latest inhabitant, had just done.

Hugh sat on the bare bed; a puff of scented air wafted up, something familiar and sad. Mary’s lotion or perfume. He pulled a hip flask from his khaki pants pocket and slid it between the mattress and the box spring. Irish whiskey, better quality than what his father generally drank. He’d brought it so that he could make a guiltless exit. He’d imagined the gesture—his leaning close to his father’s ear, whispering into it, letting him know that even if Hugh weren’t here, even if they were no longer roommates and drinking companions, Hugh had not forgotten him. He’d not forsaken his father; his father was wrong on that count. But then his father had preempted Hugh’s ongoing fantasy, uttering those awful words.
Fuck you
. Everyone said it—teenagers, women, office managers, radio DJs, professors, delivery boys—everyone except his father.