The Most Dangerous Thing - Laura Lippman [28]
We were back within the week, with all the things he requested.
We called him Chicken George, after the character in Roots, which had aired the previous year. He never seemed to remember our names, nor notice when we slipped and used our real ones. He asked almost nothing of us, beyond the canned goods and old shirts we pulled from our parents’ homes, and each visit was the same: he would play his guitar, singing in his caterwauling style, and Go-Go would dance his dance, flinging his body around as only he could. It shouldn’t have been fun and yet it was, if only because it was a secret among the five of us. There was no one else in Chicken George’s life, no one else who knew of him or cared about him. He was ours, a new toy.
And, in time, we treated him as all children treat their toys—with increasing carelessness and indifference.
Chapter Nine
For four years, Gwen has lobbied for the right to telecommute, only to receive the most infuriating argument in the world from her boss: she wouldn’t like it. As if she were a child who didn’t know what she wants. But then, Gwen has always hated pronouncements about her character, anyone else’s attempt to define her. She tolerates this tendency, just barely, from loved ones, although Karl’s observations about her these days are hurtful. But she cannot stand it when anyone else attempts to sum her up. She would hate to be profiled in her own magazine, which allots a few breezy sentences, equal parts biography, description, and idiosyncrasy, to summing up someone’s entire character. Besides, her request should be considered on its merits, not on her publisher’s belief that he knows better than she what she wants.
But in caring for her father, Gwen has quickly discovered her publisher is right: she’s not built for telecommuting. Not that she ever wanted to work from home every day. Her work life involves too many meetings and lunches and functions for that to be feasible. But she thought everyone would thrive if she were allowed to work at home one day a week, shutting herself away with her reporters’ copy, free from the interruptions of the workplace. In her father’s house, she has discovered there are even more distractions away from the office than there, and she can’t even blame her father, a stoic patient, almost to a fault. He never asks for anything from her and can barely force himself to seek the day aide’s help.
Gwen keeps cooking, for instance, rationalizing that she is trying to find dishes that are gentle, yet not insulting to her father’s palate. Homemade puddings and soft-boiled eggs in delicate sauces, milk shakes and smoothies. She has tackled the rather messy job of dusting his books, a task he used to do every year but has clearly ignored for at least a decade now.
And then there is her mother’s closet.
Gwen was a senior in college when her mother died. Back then, she was still very much the family baby, still young enough to be allowed the privilege of falling apart while Miller and Fee, proper adults, stepped in and helped her bewildered father make arrangements, short- and long-term. Tally Robison’s end was at once shockingly fast and excruciatingly slow, six weeks from diagnosis to death. It was agreed that Gwen should stay in school, up at Barnard, until the semester ended or she was summoned home. She submitted her final paper on an eerily balmy December day, then returned to her apartment to find the message light blinking on her machine, something that had once heralded only joy, usually in the form of a new conquest: Come home now. It didn’t occur to her to spring for the Metroliner, as the fast train was known then, and the old NortheastDirect wheezed its way down to Baltimore, indifferent to her urgency. By the time she arrived at University Hospital, her mother was dead.
“She was out of it the past two days. She wouldn’t have known you,” Fee said, meaning to comfort