Where the God of Love Hangs Out - Amy Bloom [30]
“Fine,” I said. “I’ll be there Saturday and we can do the … handoff.”
Beate understood well enough what I meant and her voice brightened as we went back to her plans, which included dry-cleaning her raincoat, buying a pair of good boots, laying in a supply of frozen lamb chops and clean boxers for my father for a week, and bringing peanut butter to Ruda Slaska.
“Janek will take me to airport,” she said. “Newark.”
My cab pulled up in front of the house at four o’clock. Beate showed me the eggs, the sliced American cheese, the rye bread, and the fourteen frozen lamb chops. She handed me the keys. She gestured toward my parents’ bedroom.
“He naps,” she said. “I see him Sunday. Seven days.” She held up seven fingers and then she picked up her suitcase and waved good-bye. As she stepped onto the porch, a car appeared, and my guess was that her cousin had parked up the street and was just waiting for my cab to leave.
Beate was out the door, and it would be just me and Alvin for the next seven days, unless I killed him, in which case I would spend at least half the week in jail. The house looked, somehow, more like my childhood home than it had for the last twenty years. Beate had found my mother’s old spring slipcovers and covered the cigar-burned navy couch with pink and yellow chintz and she’d even found the yellow chintz pillows and the yellow-and-white-striped slipcover that went on my father’s armchair. It was all aggressively and hopelessly cheerful, and I expected my mother to walk out of the kitchen, wiping her hands on a clean apron, and saying either, “Who wants quiche?” which was a good day or, “There’s no reason to upset him,” which was not.
“Bea? Bea?” My father was yelling, pretty loudly.
I opened the door a crack. I had no wish to be in my parents’ bedroom with my father, where he still slept on his side of the bed and where there was still, on my mother’s nightstand, a box of tissues and a paperback.
“It’s me, Dad. It’s Alison. Beate’ll be back in a week. I’m here in the meantime.”
“What?” he said and he sat up, patting his nightstand all over for his glasses, which were lying on the floor. I handed him his glasses.
“Thank you. You’re a good kid,” he said.
His hair was going in four different directions and there were little scabs on his chest and the backs of his hands. He scratched a scab until it bled and he pressed his bleeding wrist against the sheet.
“Where’s Bea?”
“She’s gone to see her mother. In Poland. Her mother’s not well,” I said, and I was trying not to yell because I knew that yelling did not help people understand you better.
“That’s a shame,” he said. “My mother died when I was nineteen and my father, I don’t think he got over it. He became an old man overnight. You know what I mean?” I did know what he meant, of course, but since I had never heard my father mention his mother or his father or the emotional state of any living being, I was speechless.
“An old man overnight, Alison,” he said.
“I know what you mean,” I said. “You want some lunch?”
I made two grilled cheese sandwiches and I wondered whether I should offer my father a beer, since on one hand, I had no idea who he was and in his altered state, alcohol might be bad for him, and on the other hand, what the hell. My father and I had our sandwiches. (“Burn it,” he said. “That’s what they used to say in the diner. Put a farmer on the raft and burn it.” “What diner?” I said, and my father said, not unkindly, “Well, you’re no Julia Child.”) And we drank our beers.
“Salud, amor, y dinero,” he said and clinked my bottle. “Is everybody okay?”
“Sure,” I said. I didn’t know who everybody was. He called Andy Fatso, he called Michael The Faigele, he called Jay Babe, the Blue Ox, and my mother had been dead for two years.
“I’ll take a grilled cheese sandwich,” he said.
“Another? Okay.” Was this good? It could be good, an appetite for life or something like that, or it could be that he didn’t know if he’d eaten