Eat Cake: A Novel (5 page)

“Sure.”

“I mean, not in front of my father. Could you go to another phone?”

“Your father is out like a light. I can’t believe he stayed awake this long. He isn’t going to hear anything we say.”

Was it possible to fall asleep so quickly? Again I saw him, small in the bed, his arms swallowed whole by his casts. I tried to picture myself inside the cake, and when that didn’t work, I tried to picture my father inside the cake, casts and all. That seemed better. “How important is it that he come to stay with us?” I said. “I don’t want you to think I’m a monster, but my father and I aren’t close, and my mother lives with us, and my father and mother
really
aren’t close, and it’s going to create—”

But Gina stopped me. “It’s not my business to pass judgments one way or the other, so let me just speak medically here. Your father is old enough that going into a nursing facility is probably going to be hard on him. A lot of people his age go in seeming pretty young and they just don’t come out. His chances for a full recovery are going to be better if he’s with family. His chances of not winding up with some problem he didn’t go in with are going to be better. Now, if you can’t do that, you can’t do it. Only you know the answer to that question. If you have to put him in a facility, you’re going to have to think about the cost. I don’t know what your father’s financial situation is, if he has good insurance, but if he doesn’t, then that creates a whole other set of problems. I can pretty much guarantee you that money is the key to good care in a situation like this one.”

“Right,” I said. “I understand.”

“You’ve got some time to think about it,” Gina told me. “At least a couple of hours.”

“I don’t even know where you’re calling from.”

“Mercy Hospital,” she said.

“No, I don’t know what state you’re calling from. Where is he?”

“Des Moines,” she said, and then added for greater clarification, “Iowa.”

“He broke
both
his wrists?” Sam said.

“That’s the story.”

“How did he fall?”

“I didn’t get any of the details.” Des Moines wasn’t too far away. He could have just as easily been in Tucson. I wondered briefly if he had been meaning to visit.

Sam shook his head. “I guess he’s coming here, then.”

“How can he?” I pulled the pillow over my head and pushed it into place.
Pull the mask down firmly and cover your nose and mouth
, a voice instructed in my head.
Breathe normally
.

“It’s not so much a matter of how can he,” Sam said, gently removing the down pillow from my head. “It’s a matter of how can he not?” His nose was only a few inches from my nose. He looked resigned but not particularly upset. I was now the one who was upset. “I may not know your dad well, but I can promise you two things: He doesn’t have supplemental health insurance and he doesn’t have anyplace else to go.”

I wanted to protest, Who doesn’t have supplemental health insurance? But the clear, unadorned truth of what my husband was saying didn’t leave me much room to argue. “How will I tell my mother?”

“I have no idea about that one, but if you promise to wait until after I’ve left the house to do it, I’ll go pick him up.”

Under normal circumstances, say, yesterday afternoon, Sam would not have readily volunteered to drive to Des Moines, but this morning was a different story. He was depressed, adrift, and he
saw my father’s problem as one that was bigger than his own. He seemed almost perky as he took his shower and moved around the room getting dressed.

“Don’t you think you should wait until the doctor calls?” I said. I didn’t want him to go until I had told my mother. I wanted to be able to present the visit as a possibility rather than an inevitability that was barreling up I-35 toward our house.

“The doctor will call and tell us to come and get him. End of story. He’s Medicare. They aren’t going to want to keep him in that bed a minute longer than they have to.”

“But you don’t know that. He could need more surgery.”

Sam looked at his watch. “I’ve been an unemployed hospital administrator for just over fourteen hours. I doubt the drill has changed too much since I got out of the business.”

“Wouldn’t you at least rather fly?”

Sam shrugged. “I have the time. Besides, the driving might actually be easier on him.”

I stood up and put my arms around my husband. “You’re an awfully good guy to be doing this.”

“An awfully good guy would stay here and break the news to your mother while you drove to Des Moines. I’m not so good.”

“It’s just that—” I stopped in hopes of finding a better way of saying this. “I know you have a lot of other things on your mind.”

Sam kissed my forehead, something he had done on our first date when he couldn’t work up the nerve to kiss me good-night. Ever since then I have found it to be a gesture of supreme tenderness. “This will give me a chance to think some things through, like where I want to work. Then I’ll come home and start looking for a job. I bet it’s all going to turn out great.”

I had to hand it to my father: He was still sedated in Des Moines and he had already managed to settle Sam’s nerves in Minneapolis. “I know it will.”

I encouraged Sam to put a couple of things in an overnight bag, even though he assured me he wasn’t going to be gone overnight. “When you get back from picking up my dad, you should take a couple of days and go sailing.”

“It’s too cold to go sailing now.”

“So don’t go on the lakes. Go down to Florida. Maybe your brother would meet you, or you could take somebody from work.”

“I know some guys who aren’t very busy.” Sam smiled. “But I think we should be saving our money right now. I’m talking about having to sell the house and you’re telling me to go on vacation.”

“It might be good. You know, relax, think things over.” Sam had grown up on the lake in Chicago and had sailed all through his youth. Being out on the water relaxed him like nothing else. There was hardly ever time to do it now, but every time he stepped off a boat he looked ten years younger.

“We’ll see,” he said, and picked up his bag.

I pulled on my bathrobe and together we went down to the kitchen. My mother was up, but as far as I knew she was always up. She was up when we went to bed at night and she was up when we came down in the morning.

“Are you going into the office?” she said to Sam. After all, he clearly had the look of a man who was going somewhere with great purpose.

“I don’t have a job,” he reminded her.

My mother was flustered and she knit her fingers around the edges of her coffee cup. “I know that. I just thought that maybe, I don’t know, that you were going back for papers or something.”

Sam assured her it was nothing like that.

“Of course, you’re not wearing a suit. If you were going to work, you’d be wearing a suit.”

Sam laughed. “Hollis, you missed your calling. You would have been a brilliant detective.” He headed for the door.

“You aren’t leaving already?” There was a trace of panic making a sharp edge around my words. “You haven’t even had a cup of coffee.”

“I’ll pick one up,” he said. “This way I’m still ahead of the traffic.”

Sam left the house every morning and I have to say his departures were hardly an event, but this morning I wanted to throw myself around his ankles.

“You girls have fun,” he said, and waved to us. Just like that, he was gone.

“Ruth,” my mother said in a low voice. “I think that something is terribly wrong.”

I looked back at my mother. I could make her a list of what was wrong. “What?”

She leaned toward me even though we were alone together. “He had a bag,” she whispered.

“A bag?”

“He had a
suit
case.”

I looked back out the window and watched Sam’s car pulling away in the bright clear light of early morning. Wouldn’t that be something if this was all a ruse, if Sam was taking his small duffle bag and making a run for it? “I know,” I said. When there is no good place to start, you just have to pick something at random. This was going to be it. “I packed it for him.”

“Is he leaving?” my mother said. There was such fear in her voice, and all at once my heart went out to her completely. How
must she have felt when my father left her? Both of her parents were dead, she had a small child, a schoolteacher’s salary. What was I thinking, telling my father he could come here to stay? But then there were those casts. I straightened up in my chair and tried to pull it together.

“Sam is driving to Des Moines.”

My mother started to react to that, a drive she would have felt was too long to make alone, whatever anxieties she might have had that this meant we were all moving to Des Moines, but I held up my hand to stop it before it started. “He is driving to Des Moines to pick up Dad.”

She cocked her head to one side like a dog that was trying to make sense of some unfamiliar sound. “Dad as in your father Dad?”

“Dad had an accident,” I said. I waited to see a flicker of pain or anxiety cross my mother’s face but nothing came. She could have cared less if my father had been run over by a bus in Des Moines and Sam was going out to make funeral arrangements. I reached over and took my mother’s hand. “I don’t completely understand what happened, but he fell and broke both of his wrists. He isn’t going to be able to take care of himself for a while and I told him he could come here. I’m sorry about this, I really am. I know this is going to be hard on you, but when the hospital called this morning, I didn’t know what else to do.”

My mother looked at me for a minute and then she took her hand away. “Well then,” she said. “I guess I’ll have to find a place to live.”

“Mother.”

“It doesn’t give me a great deal of time, but when I put my mind to something, I can usually get it accomplished. It’s not as if I’ve never been on my own before.”

“Mother, you’re not moving out.”

“What choice do I have? You invite my ex-husband in to live with us. Do you really think I can just stay here?”

“Mother, please. I didn’t invite him to live with us. He’s very sick. He needs my help. I know he’s your ex-husband, but he’s also my father, and I have some responsibilities to him.”

My mother looked at me in a way that made me shiver with cold. “He never had any responsibilities to you.”

I closed my eyes and nodded. This was a very difficult conversation to have, and without a cup of coffee, it seemed almost impossible. “I know you’re right. I will try to make this as quick and as comfortable for everyone as I possibly can. I’m really, really sorry.”

“I never would have done this to you,” my mother said quietly. On one hand she couldn’t. I didn’t have an ex-husband. On the other hand I knew what she was saying. She was always true to me. She put me first.

At the moment when I saw our conversation moving toward the more practical details of sleeping arrangements, there was a terrible scream that came from the back of the house. My heart froze. My instinctive reflex was to take it personally;
what had I done to cause screaming?

“Seven thirty-five!” Camille came into the kitchen wild-eyed, her dazzling yellow hair twisted into a plastic clip, her pajama bottoms trailing over her feet. Her face was so pretty like this, without makeup. She looked like she was twelve. “You didn’t wake me up!” She was howling.

I looked up at the kitchen clock. “Honey, I—”

“I have to
shampoo
this morning. I have a test.” She pressed her fists over her eyes while the huge injustice of her life pounded her
down. “Forget it. Forget it. I don’t know why I even bother trying. I’m going back to bed. I’m not going to school.”

“Honey, I’m sorry I forgot to wake you up. There’s been a lot going on here this morning.” Honey, I have bought you three alarm clocks and shown you how to use them. Honey, I am a human being, not an alarm clock. “You have to go to school.” I tried to make my voice peaceful, neutral.

“If you thought my going to school was so important, then you might have remembered to knock on my door this morning.”

“Camille,” I said.

“You can’t make me go to school like this.”

My mother picked up her nearly empty cup of coffee and slammed it down on the table hard enough to break the cup free of the handle. It spun around twice and then fell over on its side, making a pool of milky coffee on the table. She lifted the small ceramic U still curled in her fingers and pointed it toward my daughter. “You are sixteen years old. This is not a hotel. Get yourself dressed this instant and get out of here.”

Camille suddenly wore the same bewildered look my mother had had three minutes before, and while she opened her mouth, she said nothing. She blinked, turned, and went back to her room without so much as slamming the door.

I looked at my mother in disbelief. I didn’t even know she was capable of sounding so angry. “Thank you,” I said.

“It’s all in the surprise factor,” my mother told me. “If I did it all the time she wouldn’t listen to me, either.”

MY FATHER WOULD SLEEP IN WYATT’S ROOM. MY
mother didn’t like this. Wyatt’s room was Wyatt’s room regardless of whether or not he was away at college. She followed me from the northwest corner to the southwest corner of the bed while I stripped off the sheets. She did not offer to help.