Betty, October 21, 2007

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Seeing him at the grocery store—it's surprising, really, now that I look back, that there haven't been more awkward moments. We've been living here, in the same neighborhood, driving on the same streets, for twenty-five years now. Longer than that, of course, especially for him, but twenty-five years since.

"Betty," he said. "How nice to see you."

Our houses are less than a mile apart, but maybe, except for the brief period when we were actually pursuing each other, maybe we live in different worlds, move in different networks. Maybe the gradient in housing, from his sprawling brick tudor, every bedroom with its own bathroom and a few more just for the convenience of one's visitors, down the scale to my tidy bungalow with its vinyl siding—maybe that's the leading indicator of a different social ecosystem—different dry-cleaners, different auto mechanics, different florists. Different friends, that's for sure.

"Raymond," I said. "What a surprise."

And now, after twenty-five years, here in this aisle. My only indulgence—this expensive little store with its great produce section. Why did he show up now? He never did any of his own shopping, I'm know he didn't, even after his wife left him.

When did she leave? '84 maybe? No, it was at least '87. A good five years after we broke up. So I wasn't the direct cause.

"Are you still working?" he said.

Of course I always liked to think that I was more dangerous to him—to his equilibrium—than any of the others. A single woman. Perfectly happy with my lot in a modestly paid helping profession. He preferred married women, that was clear, or at least he felt more comfortable when the culpability was symmetrical.

"I still have a couple of years to go," I said.

We each had a bottle of red wine in our carts—Australian shiraz for me, Chateauneuf du Pape for him.

"Ah," he said. "About a week ago, I was having lunch with the new Superintendent..."

He paused, inviting me to interrupt. I thought for a moment, then accepted the invitation.

"You asked after me," I said. "That's nice. But the Super wouldn't know me."

He nodded, very thoughtfully, and then, like everyone else, I answered the question he hadn't even asked.

"That administrative job—" I said. "I gave it up a couple of years ago. I'm just a school nurse again. Prospect Elementary. I missed the kids."

"Good for you," he said.

"Yourself?" I said.

"Well, my name's still on the shingle," he said. "And my former partners let me use my old office. I sit on several boards, and there's an old client or two who insist on occasionally giving me a call."

He reached toward the shelf, picked up a can of Spanish olives, and studied the label, tilting his head back to position the small text in the appropriate part of his progressive lenses.

"Are these any good?" he said.

When did he become interested in ingredients? I shrugged my shoulders.

"I was reading recently," I said, "about your daughter. You're on the board of that nature center, aren't you?"

He put the olives back on the shelf.

"Yes," he said, "that was difficult. But it's a wonderful organization, still very much worthy of my support. And Lisa will certainly find a new project. I'm very grateful to her for getting me involved with the Tangled Bank in the first place."

How does he do it? He could walk out of prize fight and make it sound as if the knockout was the first step toward an amicable partnership.

"Raymond," I said, "I hate to ask you for legal advice, but there's a situation that's beginning to trouble me. It's about my father."

Arthur, September 28, 2007

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Dorothy needed someone to take her shift at the center, there was a funeral she had to go to, Louise's friend Marian or Marianne or something like that, I'd never met the woman, not much point in me going to the funeral, so I said, Sure, I'll take your shift. Volunteer Greeter, they call it, you just sit by the door and say hello to anyone who comes in, they want the center to be open to drop-bys, even the teenagers in the park, and apparently having an old fart at the door prevents vandalism, I don't know how, I sure as hell couldn't stop those teenagers from indulging their destructive tendencies if they were so inclined, but you know, it works, you just look 'em in the eye and say Welcome to the Tangled Bank, have a look around, and the kids calm right down. That's only when they come in, of course, the rest of the time you're on your own, this was the 3 to 6 p.m. shift and there was one kid playing the ecology video game for a while but then his friends came and got him and that was that. When the place was empty I walked around, straightened up a little, I wasn't going to get out the spray bottle like Dorothy does but I do my part. I found a book on one of the tables and I was going to put it back on the shelf where it belonged but it wasn't a science or nature or ecology book, it was some sort of adventure book for girls, Wilhelmina and the Cro-Magnon Cave, maybe it was Cavern, I figured it must belong to that girl, the daughter of the director, she was always hanging around reading, kind of a sullen girl, but maybe all girls are sullen at that age, about the same age Betty was when she decided the neighbor lady was her best friend, going over there every night to help her with her collections, never understood what that was about, tearing pages out of magazines and cataloging them, now I don't think that neighbor lady was a bad influence, what was her name? there were a lot of people in Terre Haute who worked at the Federal Prison, we were very tolerant of those occupations, still a forty-year-old divorced woman, what was she? A nurse? A librarian? hell, I suppose she was alright, a little eccentric, said my wife, and Betty will have plenty of time for boys later on. I read a few pages of the book, there was nothing else to do, I didn't expect it to be be my cup of tea, but they got right to the cave drawings, I've always been partial to cave drawings, and it was set in 1918, the year I was born, Austria or Switzerland or some such place, but then they came out of the cave and went back to the boarding school and started giggling and that was enough of that book for me. A few minutes later the director came down the stairs, carrying one of those white bankers boxes, I didn't have any idea she was up there in her office, she must have been working there the whole time. I offered to carry the box for her, it never hurts to make the gesture, and she stopped and looked at me funny and eventually smiled and said no, no thanks, she had it under control. So I showed her the book and she said, Yes, that would be Samantha's, and I put on top of her box for her and asked if she would be locking up at six o'clock because I didn't have any keys. Then she finally put the box down and found some keys in her pocket and handed them to me and said that I could lock up, that would be good, and she picked up her box with book balanced on top and headed for the door, kind of in a hurry I'd say, but I called after her and asked, What should I do with the keys? and she turned and said I could keep the keys, for all she cared, because she didn't work there anymore.

Jacob, September 19, 2007

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I'm okay... I just ran too hard... I told her... I don't need... to go to the... nurse's office.

Yeah. It's... in my backpack.

Okay. It's... it's... in here....

No, I'm... okay. This isn't bad. I can... still play.

Here it is... Okay.

Hhheewwwww...

But I only do it once. My dad says...

Okay. Hhheewwwww...

I used the nebulizer this morning. My mom makes me do it before breakfast. She makes me blow into the tester thing and if the needle doesn't go far enough she makes me do the nebulizer.

The inhaler? I dunno, I just put it in my backpack. For Emer...Gen...Cies.

Yeah. I remember. You said... I should use my inhaler before recess...

But I can't let the other kids see it.

They won't pick me for the teams. My dad said you can't show them any weakness.

I guess so. Ashley... and Brandon... and Mathew... They all have 'em.

I dunno, they get picked, I guess... but they aren't good.

At sports. You can tell who's good and who isn't... and the kids with inhalers, the way they hold the bat, you can tell.

I just have to try harder. You get asthma from sitting around too much watching TV. My dad says Teddy Roosevelt had asthma until he became a cowboy.

I dunno, he was a president or something. He's the one with the moustache on the mountain. My dad wants me to go out to a dude ranch next summer and get over my asthma.

It was great. Yeah we saw the presidents and my dad and I went hiking, up on the big rocks. We saw a prairie dog, and a bison, all by itself, and a tiger salamander on a rock and some mudpuppies and a tree frog and my mom didn't believe us but we saw a bobcat. In the afternoon. My mom says no one ever sees bobcats in the afternoon but we saw one. My dad took a picture on his phone but it was blurry. My mom said she wished we had taken a picture of the tree frog instead because it might be in danger specie.

No, I didn't need it at all when we were camping. It was only on the way back, at that motel...

My dad says they didn't clean right the room right. He's gonna sue the owner for cost of the emergency room and for him and mom staying up all night, or if he doesn't sue them he's going to call the agency in South Dakota and get their license in trouble because he knows someone.

No, my mom doesn't think I should go. She says I need to do what the nurse at school says before I can go to any dude ranch.

Yeah, I know. You say...

I should use my inhaler before recess.

Okay. One more time.

Hhheewwwww...

Samantha, September 9, 2007

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Where's your mother? said the old guy, he just came up to me and asked, I mean this was like a really, really old guy, way older than Grandpa, older even than the Prefect from the Class of 1827, the one who was haunting the boathouse on the secluded lake in the Tyrolean mountains, of course the Prefect had been young and handsome in 1827, that was the big question about the ghost, whether he kept getting older after he died which would have made him like a zillion years old, my mom always gets mad me when I say a zillion because it's not a scientific number, so she makes me do the math and figure it out, if my mom were here she'd make me say that In the book, which is set in World War I, they just call it the War in the book, but none of the characters has to go anywhere near the battles or the trenches which were totally gross, the ghost would be like exactly 110 years old, which is 1917 minus 1827 plus 20, which is the age the Prefect was when he mysteriously disappeared and probably drowned at the bottom of the lake. Which is so stupid of my mom, because she can't do any math in her head herself, she's always asking me questions like What's 63 minus 47?, she should really just get herself a calculator instead of interrupting me all the time when I'm reading, and anyway it might as well be a zillion because in the opinion of Wilhelmina, the main character, ghosts don't get any older, they always stay the same age as they were when they died, or if they do get older, it's like what actually happens to their bodies, which means if you drown that your ghost would first get fat and bloated and disgusting and then get eaten by fishes, so Wilhelmina was like way, way more afraid of the school of fish with intelligent eyes that looked at her when she fell out of the boat and sank way down into the lake, but she didn't drown that time because she managed to take off the heavy shoes she was wearing and swim back up to the surface and get rescued, and they rowed her back to shore with her bare feet, which were totally scandalous because these were the old days when girls were expected to wear stupid heavy clothes which caused lots of unnecessary drownings. So if it wasn't a ghost, Wilhelmina figured there must be a real old man hanging around the boathouse and she made a plan to catch him by hiding overnight behind an old piece of sailcloth, and I was just reading that part, which sounds scary but it wasn't really because I'd already read the other books in the series and Wilhelmina always knows what she's doing, and that's when the real old man, I mean like really real, in my world, not the book, he came up to me and started asking me where my mother was, and I could tell he didn't really want to find my mother, he was worried about me being there by myself. So I was like, my Dad's up on the roof, I'm totally okay, just leave me alone and let me read, really I just said my Dad was around somewhere but that's what I meant, and the old man just looked at me and the old ladies started to come over and get him and he just shook his head and said, Nose always in a book, you should go out and play, and it was like I knew he wasn't talking to me at all, he was talking to someone else, a long time ago.

Arthur, August 8, 2007

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I've never had much use for people who leave notes on my door, there was this fellow in the Navy, not on the ship, mind you, you couldn’t get away with kind of nonsense at sea, he was a petty officer third class I believe, I was only a seaman at the time, this was in one of the stateside ports, Portsmouth probably, but this fellow, we were always finding notes from him on doors, stuck there with thumbtacks, nobody ever saw him coming or going, how the hell did he do it we used to wonder. And the other guy, this was years later, at the store, after the Groeschlers had sold the business, sure I hoped the new owners would let me run the store by myself, and eventually it did work out that way, but right after the sale, this kid from Indianapolis, a college kid, he'd taken a course in efficiency or some damn thing like that, of course he didn't know shit about the lumber business, he made us all line our desks up in a row, and we all had to get inboxes and outboxes, every damn salesman had to put an inbox on the left front corner of his desk and an outbox on the right front corner of the desk, do you get the picture, can you imagine a lumber salesman with a desk like that, I gotta tell you, one thing about the Navy, it gives you a damn good preparation for putting up with guys like that, not that there's any comparison between keeping your ordnance in a nice tight pattern when the shit is flying all around you and making sure that your inbox is exactly one inch from the left front corner of your desk, so your college-kid boss can drop off purchase orders without looking you in the eye, no comparison at all, except that in both cases, you just say Yes Sir and you do it, and if you're lucky you survive. At least for a while it seems lucky, surviving one thing and then another, although my wife made it very clear that she was the lucky one, the one to go first, she didn't want to be a widow, not at all, she didn't think much of surviving for survival's sake, unless she was just saying that to make me feel better, though how it would make me feel better I don't know, telling someone they are unlucky for being alive, no consolation there, still it hasn't been that bad, living without her, I've still got my health, except for forgetting a few things and not keeping the old house clean enough for my daughter's standards, good riddance to that place, my social life, if you know what I mean, it's been much livelier here, I never thought I'd put on a pair of hip waders again in my life, and the apartment itself is alright, a pretty good place to live, except that I can't understand why that new case worker needs to leave so many notes on my door.

Raymond, July 23, 2007

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It was on a Wednesday night, a couple of weeks ago. Melissa and I had had a brief meeting, a sidebar if you will, in preparation for the full board meeting the next day. I was escorting her out to her car, when suddenly her back stiffened in fright. A figure was stepping out of the shadows—a tattooed arm, a cordless drill—and speaking my name. Melissa cursed at the figure, who responded in language equally vulgar but far warmer in tone, and in a moment the situation dissolved, as such situations usually do, into hasty acknowledgements of recognition and breathless apologies.

The figure was Gary. It's not unusual to find Gary around the Tangled Bank at odd hours. He displays a certain—let's call it a proprietary tenderness for the physical structure of the place, and far be it from me to challenge his feelings of ownership, particularly when they manifest themselves in frequents acts of unbilled light maintenance.

On this evening, he had stopped by to fix a piece of molding, to which he referred as if I would undoubtedly know which piece of molding, and why it needed fixing. I did not disabuse him of this impression, which encouraged him to mention additional maintenance projects, projects which would require specific budget items, as he no longer had the spare time to devote to such matters, the demand for his art work having taken off.

Of course I understood. And I was happy, and I wanted him to know I was happy, that he chose to keep coming back to the center and keep things in fine shape, but however happy I was, there was no trace of complacency in my happiness, no expectation—

A car door swung shut. Headlights came on. The lights swung to and fro as Melissa backed out of her parking space. She called out to us her sorrow at having to leave so quickly, but her son was waiting. Gary called back his complete understanding. I simply waved.

Gary and I watched her drive off, insects sparkling in the torches of her headlights, a glimpse of the glistening river as her tires caught the dip in the gravel.

I turned back to Gary and reassured him that we on the board understood that we could not count on his continued in-kind donations of skilled labor, and that if we came in under budget in the building maintenance account, it was because of his continued generosity, and that we all understood how his gifts were as good as cash.

He did not respond immediately, and for a moment I had the unusual feeling that I was the one who had been talking too much. Sometimes it seems as if you are negotiating about one thing, when in fact an entirely different issue is in play. In such cases it's best to let the other party tell you what's going on. They always do.

Gary shuffled for a moment, the cordless drill swinging in his hand, a useless tool for the current task.

Eventually he set the drill down on a window sill. Then he turned to me and asked if I meant that the debt had been paid.

There was never a debt, I explained. Samantha was my granddaughter, and it had been my privilege to contribute to her support.

Betty, June 30, 2007

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I was at Van Buren Hill—a nice place, my first choice among all the places I'd been looking at, not disgusting or depressing, but not full of Republicans either. I was doing quick calculations in my head—multiply dollars per month by twelve to get dollars per year, then add years—how many?—to eighty-nine, when the case worker asked for proof of residency.

"What do you mean?" I said.

"Usually a utility bill," he said.

"Is it required?"

"Well there's a different fee structure for out-of-state residents." He looked at me and smiled. "We do get some funding from the state."

I smiled back. "Really. What's the difference?"

"Oh, at the level of care we're setting up for Arthur"—he used Dad's name as if he were talking about a kindergarten student—"the difference would be about five hundred a month. At the assisted living level—let's see, that would be about twelve-fifty. Two thousand for in-state, thirty-two-fifty for out-of-state."

I thought for a moment.

"All the utility bills are in my name," I said. "Except for his cell phone."

"Cell phone?" he said. "Do the bills have the street address?"

"I think so," I said, but in fact I knew so. I had bought Dad a cell phone and a national plan five years ago. The bills had his name on them, but they came to my house, and I paid them.

"That'll do," said the case worker.

And so I needed Dad to be discreet. For a month or so. Till he settled in.

"Try not to talk about Terre Haute." I said. "Or the house."

"What else will I talk about?" he said.

"You don't have to lie," I told him. "Just... push that stuff back into the past. Act as if you've been living here for a few years."

After all, he has spent at least five or six weeks a year visiting me. For a good decade or so. It's not as if he's unfamiliar with my house, my neighborhood, and therefore, ipso facto, his new official state of residency. And people know him around here—in a way. The clerk at the bakery would see him every day for a week, she even got to know his breakfast order, coffee and a scone, no butter, and she would recognize him when he returned, two months, three months, four months later, and joke with him about having his breakfast somewhere else. He enjoyed that.

Of course, there's a lot of turnover at that bakery. There was only the one clerk who remembered him, and she's gone now.

Ten years he's been coming, or, actually, ten years I've been going to get him. Every school vacation and twice each summer.

He moved into Van Buren Hill today. One day before the end of the month—no extra charge, said the case worker. They call them case workers but they're really sales agents. This guy was okay, though.

The movers were carrying the flattened cardboard boxes out of the new apartment and I was taking care of the last few bits of paperwork when I noticed that Dad wasn't around.

"Don't worry," said the case worker. "He's probably meeting his neighbors. Everyone's very friendly here."

We found him in a little alcove near the elevator, sitting on a bench, talking with two women about ten years younger than himself.

"That's wonderful," he was saying as the case worker and I approached. "We don't have anything like that in Terre Haute—"

"There you are!" I said, maybe too loudly.

"You must be his daughter!" said one of the women. She stood and shook my hand. "My name's Dorothy," she said, "and this is my friend Louise. We've just invited Arthur to join us on an expedition."