Devil's Plaything - Matt Richtel [7]
With my dad living in Denver, I’ve taken primary duty for Grandma’s care, becoming the face of the family. I’m also responsible for transferring money each month from Grandma’s meager trust to the assisted-living facility, and timely bill paying has never been my strong suit. Still, the chip on Vince’s shoulder is hard for me to understand. Once I said to him: “Usually, I don’t irritate someone that much until they’ve known me for a while.” He responded: “I’m a quick study.”
I am relieved but also a little surprised by Vince’s absence; he’s a retirement-home fixture, synonymous with this quirky, sometimes sad, place.
I take Grandma to her room. I sit by her bed and read to her from Mark Twain’s A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court while she falls asleep. At one point, she jars awake and smiles.
“Get married and have a family,” she says. “You’re not getting any younger.”
Grandma Lane never used to give me advice—certainly not to conform. One time, she asked me to take her to a Tracy Chapman concert so she could see what all the hype was about. Just before the encore, she leaned into me and whispered that she and I were birds of a feather—“iconoclastic romantics,” she said.
Nearly a decade ago, she was the first person I told I was quitting medicine to be a journalist. I was well more than $100,000 in debt when I exchanged stethoscope for reporter’s notebook. The medical life felt too rote, black-and-white, like I was a glorified auto mechanic, performing Jiffy Lube diagnoses of the corpus. Journalism let me roll around in life’s gray areas and emotional muck.
“Question your government and your spouse. Trust your hairstylist and your gut,” she told me at the time.
But she’s right; I’m not getting younger.
At thirty-four, I’m a standard bearer for what pundits call The Odyssey. I’m exploring still, enjoying it some, not like I used to. Critics who like to see life packaged up neatly would say I’m thrilled by the chaos, using an endless search for a perfect landing spot as an excuse to not settle down. Some of those critics are close friends and family.
Physically, I’m aging more traditionally. I’m having more trouble getting up and down a basketball court. My five-foot, eleven-inch frame isn’t metabolizing snack foods the way it used to. My haircuts come less frequently. But when I have a good one—haircut—I can pass myself for my late twenties. I have a strong nose, like Grandma. Pauline, who runs Medblog, says women find me attractive because I listen. With a little carpentry, she says, I could make someone a good husband.
My phone rings.
It’s Pauline. The phone clock reads 8:52.
“I was just thinking about you,” I answer. “Your phone must be reading my mind.”
“You didn’t respond to my text. Under company rules, you can only do that if you’re dead.”
“What if I was busy avoiding death?”
“What?”
“I’ll tell you later. What’s up, boss?”
“You’ve received a mystery package.”
I don’t know what she means and I’m feeling impatient and desperately uninterested in work. I shouldn’t have answered the phone.
“It’s a manila envelope,” she continues. “On the front, it says: ‘Nathaniel Idle. For your eyes only.’ It’s written in thick blue ink and rotten cursive, the kind of penmanship you’d find on the prescription pad of a drunken doctor. Or a sober one, actually.”
She intends a joke. I don’t laugh.
“Nat, do I detect you’ve lost your sense of humor?”
She sounds hurt.
“Long day.”
“Everything okay?”
I look at Grandma. “Fine, now.”
“I’m insatiably curious about the package. There could be some incredible scoop on the thumb drive,” she says.
“Thumb drive?”
Pauline laughs. “Did I forget to mention that I opened the package? Inside is a two-gig memory stick. I hope you’re not going to nail me for mail tampering. I did it in the interest of journalism. And I was bored.”
I finally laugh. “Pauline, you are one seriously impatient quasi-journalist.