Where the God of Love Hangs Out - Amy Bloom [28]
“Please sleep in here,” I said.
Andy patted my hand. “We didn’t say good night.”
“Good night,” we both yelled through the closed door.
“Good night, kids,” he yelled back. “I’ll be back for lunch.”
We took a walk in the morning and threw some bad costume jewelry (Boca Bohemian, Oaxaca Farm Girl) into Long Island Sound and cried and talked while the gulls circled and we waited until my father came back. I made three corned-beef-pastrami-and-cole-slaw sandwiches and we each took an A&P diet soda from the case on the kitchen counter.
“So,” Andy said. “No service, no interment, no obit, and no visiting. Is that it?”
“That’s it,” my father said.
“Do you need anything?” I said.
“Like what?” my father said.
“We’ll head to the airport this afternoon, then,” Andy said.
“Sure,” my father said. “You’ve got jobs, don’t you?”
I didn’t stop speaking to my father. I did what my mother would have wanted me to do. (I like to think that her wish was for my father to have slipped painlessly and just hours after Andy was born into a deep crack in the world and never return, but I could never get her to say so. What I wanted was to have come out of her womb armed to my little baby lips and killed him with my superpowers before the cord was cut.) My weekly phone calls had none of my mother’s social flourishes. (It doesn’t hurt to be nice, she said, but that wasn’t true in this case.) I did make sure my father wasn’t dead and that he was not, with his driving, a danger to others or, with some old-man slippage in hygiene or nutrition, a danger to himself. I hired Delphine Jones to keep the house tidy and to look in on him three times a week, and when she couldn’t stand him anymore (“Your father is a very exacting man,” she said, her island lilt just about knocked flat after days and weeks with Alvin Lowald), she would pass him on to a colleague for a week of R & R.
Delphine called me on a Wednesday afternoon in January.
“I see the pipes have burst,” she said. “Your father isn’t sure who to call.”
I called Andy, and he called a plumber, who, for only fourteen hundred dollars up front, would make things right, and I found the Cutler Brothers Catastrophe Company, whose receptionist said, very kindly, that they specialized in “this kind of thing,” and I canceled my appointments and got back on a plane to make sure that things were okay. (“I’ll give you a million dollars if I don’t have to go this time” Andy said. “Seriously. I will give you a weekend at the spa of your choice. I will buy you diamond earrings.”)
I rang the doorbell and my father let me in. Aside from needing a haircut, he looked good. The house did not. And it smelled the way it had forty years ago, when our whole family sat on the kitchen porch and watched Long Island Sound rise past the pear tree and onto the driveway and then into the TV room, which had never really recovered.
“Better late than never,” he said. “The girl left a note for you.”
The note said, as I knew it would, that Delphine found herself too busy to clean for my father, and it was her distinct impression that he actually needed more than a cleaning person since, as she wrote in her neat, curvy handwriting, there was an exceptional amount of filth and personal uncleanliness accumulating from week to week (she itemized the most offensive occurrences at the bottom of the page). She was happy to recommend Beate Jaszulski, a Polish person who had been a nurse in Poland and whom she had met at adult education. She left me Beate’s number. My father and I ate the only things in the refrigerator, hard-boiled eggs and American cheese, and he asked why Andy hadn’t come. I said Andy was very busy, and my father snorted.
“Busy sucking