mind.”
“God, no. Just promise you won’t laugh at me.”
“I won’t. Or if I do, I’ll go outside where no one can see me.” I leaned over and kissed her. “What brought on this sudden desire to return to the stage?”
“The way your dad died.”
I stared at her. Ever since the night of the call I had tried not to think about the manner in which he’d died. Dad operated a massive punch-press. It had all but cut him in half when he’d fallen in. I knew that everyone said he’d died instantly, but what the hell does that mean, really? If he’d lived long enough to see those teeth grind down a second time, it was too long. It had to have been agonizing, the pain and fear. Laying there with your guts oozing out, watching as this massive roof of iron teeth came down at you.
“I don’t understand.”
She squeezed my hand. “Remember how you told me he’d wanted to raise chickens for a living, be a farmer? I kept wondering if that was the last thing that went through his mind when he died: ‘I should have raised chickens like I wanted to.’ And it made me so damned sad. To die knowing that you were never really happy, feeling like maybe you’d wasted your life and no one would give a damn or remember you.”
“Please stop,” I said.
“What is it?”
I was starting to cry again and didn’t want to. I’d wondered the very same things. Maybe if he’d gone ahead and tried his hand at farming, he would have been happier, would have felt that his life was worthwhile, wouldn’t have started drinking so much.
“Just… don’t talk about Dad anymore right now, okay?”
She reached up and wiped a tear away from my eye. “Okay.”
We sat in awkward silence for a few moments, then-for some reason, maybe because it was the first non- Dad related thing to pop into my head-I asked her something that had been on my mind, off and on, for a while: “What was in that package you mailed?”
She tilted her head and blinked. “What package? When?”
“The day we took the dogs out. You went in that back room and you had a package when you came out.”
She gave a slight shake of her head. “I don’t know what you’re… are you sure I had something?”
“Yes.”
She thought about it for a moment, then shrugged. “Sorry. Parts of that day are fuzzy. I was pretty upset.”
There was something she wasn’t telling me, and I knew it.
Of course, since we hadn’t so much as kissed over the past few weeks, it wasn’t hard to figure out.
“So, who is he?”
“Who?”
“The guy you’re dating? Someone who’s trying out for the show, as well?”
She sipped her root beer and shook her head. “I don’t want to talk about him with you. I don’t like talking about other guys with you, okay?”
“Okay…?”
“I’m sorry I brought up your dad, but I just don’t want to reach the end of my life and have only regrets. Does that make sense? Acting is something I’ve always wanted to pursue, so I’m going to. And don’t you worry-I’ve got no illusions about going to Broadway or being in the movies. Community theater is the ticket for me.”
“And I can come watch you rehearse?”
“And you can come watch me rehearse.”
I couldn’t come watch her rehearse; the director-a pretentiously flamboyant small-town ar- teest who was so enamored of his own incomparable brilliance it was everything he could do not to fuck himself twenty-four hours a day-wouldn’t allow it. Beth got the female lead and was scheduled to rehearse four nights a week, then-as opening night loomed closer-every weeknight and Saturday evenings, as well.
I took a part-time janitorial job to fill the evenings. I liked janitorial work; you were alone, it was quiet, no one was breathing down your neck, and at the end of the shift you could actually see what your labors had accomplished: a disaster area was now rebuilt and tidy, things shone where before they looked lightly sheened in rust, the smell of the bathroom was pleasant and clean, nothing crunched underfoot as you walked across the carpet, the windows now glistened. Let’s hear it for the bad-ass with his mop bucket and Windex.
I finished each night in plenty of time to take Mabel to work. On nights when I knew Beth’s rehearsal would run late, I stopped in and talked with Whitey so he could update my growing list of character flaws. At home, I took care of dinner and laundry and paying the bills and making sure that Mom didn’t discover where I’d hidden the rest of her medicine; after the first time I caught her trying to take a triple dose of sedatives-“Oh, hon, I didn’t think it would hurt anything, I’ve just been real jumpy” (which I didn’t buy for a second)-I made it a point to get one of those pill trays and fill only one compartment at a time with only the prescribed doses. I did this three times a day. I wanted to trust her, wanted to believe that she’d never try taking more than she was supposed to… but I didn’t.
I started to understand why Mabel sometimes seemed so depressed at the end of her shift; despite telling yourself you were doing this for someone’s good, you felt somewhat like a captor.
The week Beth’s show was to open, I picked up Mabel after I got off work, as usual. She said hello and asked me how my night had been, then sat staring out the window, nervous and tense, chewing at her thumbnail. I asked her if everything was all right and she mumbled something that was supposed to be in the affirmative, then returned to silence for most of the ride. As the nursing home came into view, she cleared her throat and said: “You won’t have to do this anymore after tonight.”
“I don’t mind, Mabel, really.” She’d been doing this a lot lately, telling me how bad she felt about imposing on my time, how she’d just find another nurse to ride with; for a while that’s endearing, then it just starts to offend. I did not want anything bad to come between us. “You don’t have to find someone to ride with, I-”
“Oh, no, it’s not that at all.” She smiled at me, a full, cheek-to-cheek smile that should have been radiant but instead seemed an affectation. “I’m buying a new car tomorrow morning. Got it all picked out, have the down payment, the whole nine yards.”
I pulled into our usual parking space, killed the engine, and looked at the building. The Cedar Hill Healthcare Center no longer looked like the same place; two new additions (a larger and more up-to-date Physical Therapy unit, as well as a second-and nicer-visiting area) gave the place an almost regal, ersatz-exclusive appearance, and a third addition-what would be a friendlier employee break area, complete with a bunk room for those working double shifts-was nearing completion. Whoever had taken over the place was making serious changes.
“The new owners must have some capital behind them,” I said.
“You have no idea.” Her smile wavered for a moment, then came back just as bright and twice as phony as before. “Beth wants the station wagon for God only knows what reason, so we’re going to get that fixed up, and I’ll have my own car. Do you know this is the first time in my life that I’ll have a car that’s all mine? The very first time. It’s nice to able to afford new things, better things. For the first time in my life I don’t go to bed worrying about having enough to pay the bills at the end of the month. You have no idea how good that feels to an old gal like me. So I figure I deserve a new car. You can come over and see it. Maybe I’ll even drive you around.” Cheerful words, mundane words, words you hear in various combinations every day from various people; someone’s getting a new car, independence, go where they want when they want… nothing special in these words.
Except that her inflections were all wrong. I don’t want this to sound histrionic, because there was nothing overtly dramatic about it; it’s just that as I’d come to know what Beth was feeling through her body language and silences, I’d come to know Mabel’s moods through her speech patterns, her tones and inflections and pauses, and that evening they were wrong; her tone would rise where it should have lowered, she’d stretch out syllables for no reason, her volume would sometimes go from a normal conversational level to a near-shout to a conspiratorial whisper in the same phrase, once even in the same word. A stranger meeting her for the first time would assume that she was just a little tense and distracted; I knew that something dire was going on and she wasn’t talking about it, and it was going to end badly. I had seen this happen enough with Mom to know when someone was about to implode.
“Okay, Mabel, c’mon. It’s me, okay? What’s the matter?”
