By Kim MacQueen
Wednesday, 8 a.m.
Bonny Prince Charlie curls his razorwire claws under the wood of the guest-bedroom door, hoping to come in and knock my toiletries off the bookshelves again. I’m curled up on the twin bed in the fetal position.
The cat shoves most of his face into the two-inch gap under the door and yowls intermittently for fifteen minutes. I pretend not to hear him. I pretend not to remember where I am for as long as I can get away with.
Of course, I’m in Florida with my brothers Rob and Chris. They’re staying at hotels nearby, and I’m at my friend Kati’s.
My things are shoved tight into a duffle bag lying open on the floor.
The sun streams through lace curtains and makes a golden pool on the hardwood floor, where I’m charging my clownish pink Apple Watch. That’s what finally gets me out of bed: a text from Dad at 8:20.
I need water
He’s in the hospital. Not the big white hospital six blocks from here in the center of Tallahassee, but the low-slung, creepy-looking one on the edge of town. He was home when I arrived yesterday, but not for long. We spent last night in an ER bay while he writhed in pain and we waited hours for somebody to stop by and take some interest in us. We heard the staff yell at each other over the intercom system all night, but they were never talking about Dad. It sounded, to me, like they were using walkie-talkies to set up dates for after work.
The day before that, Monday, I was at home in Vermont. My phone told me Dad was calling. But when I picked up, I heard Mom’s voice.
She hadn’t called me on the phone for, I don’t know, twelve years at least. Dad was always asking me to call her, and I always refused. She never really could work her iPhone, and she was always forgetting to pay the bill. That’s how I got away with it for so long.
Her name is Shari, and she’s descended from generations of Ohio alcoholics. She complains vaguely of arthritis pain but hates her doctor, who also hates her, so she won’t keep her appointments. She’s been bedridden for three years while insisting nothing’s wrong with her. Except that she can’t get into or out of a car and refuses to use the restroom on her own. There’s no actual physical reason she uses the living room couch as a toilet. She just prefers to use Depends and shove the used ones into a garbage bag that she hoards in the corner of her bedroom.
“I tell her, it’s fine, I don’t care, you can’t get to the restroom, whatever,” my at-his-wits-end Dad confessed to me in a desperate phone call back in 2019. “But you gotta let me clean it UP. It smells, dear God it smells, but she won’t let me touch it.” She wouldn’t even talk about it, he said.
“Stop buying the Scotch,” I shot back, startling both of us.
“Stop the what?”
“Stop the Scotch. Stop buying the Scotch. She doesn’t have a job. She can’t get it on her own.”
After my aunt’s funeral in 2000, Shari had asked me to please stop by the liquor store on the way back to the hotel and please help her out when her debit card was refused for payment of $18 worth of Vat 69. I knew she wheedled my dad the same way, and had been doing it for decades.
“Well actually, she can, she has a debit card, that’s why she orders all the Depends. She’s got these huge boxes in the back bedroom, and I can’t even get in there.”
“That’s your second problem, but your first problem is you’re supplying her with Scotch,” I retorted, like one of the TV cops on Barney Miller in the ’70s.
Fast-forward to the Monday afternoon of Shari’s first phone call to me in years, her voice psychotically cheerful.
“Dr. T. says your father has stomach cancer. There’s also pancreatic involvement. And you know what that means.”
That might have been the moment when I first felt my brain splitting into two parts. Suddenly I was two different, translucent Kims superimposed on top of each other. That might be what people mean when they say somebody has had a psychotic break.
I actually had no idea what she thought “pancreatic involvement” meant. I found out the next morning, when Rob picked me up at the airport and we met up with Chris in his Mitsubishi land yacht in the parking lot of a Starbucks. Rob got into the passenger seat, I slid into the back, and Chris said: “Three to six months.”
Thursday, 5 p.m.
Don’t get Mom a Pepsi; the ice will melt before you get back to the house. Don’t get her fries; the smell of them makes Dad sicker than he already is. Get her an Impossible Whopper and yes, okay, maybe fries; he says he’s going back to the hospital that just released him so he won’t have to smell them.
Wend your way through the pets at the door: Parker, a black retriever, sweet and old, and eats like a vacuum cleaner; Sitka, some kind of white terrier but big, and extremely nervous; Benny, the slick black cat who slinks through the rooms like a coke addict in the ’80s, aristocratic and unkempt, his constant crying an all-day opera aria. Dad says Benny’s brother, Tommy, was his favorite cat ever, Dad’s best friend. But Tommy died.
It’s actually the absence of cat wailing that’s the scariest. Benny’s silence means he’s slipped out the front door again. All three pets will have to go, but not like that.
“This cat is starving,” Chris texts me, after an hour with Benny.
“The dogs eat his food,” I text back.
Dad has made a little eating area for Benny by always leaving the dishwasher door down and enclosing the remaining foot of the kitchen area next to the cupboard with the recycling bin. He shows me when I first get to the house.
I forget five minutes later, closing the dishwasher door, exposing Benny’s food to the dogs. Dad notices before I do and remedies the situation.
I start for Mom’s bedroom with the Burger King bag. Dad is about to leave for the hospital with Chris, but he waves me into the kitchen first. He was never, ever allowed to just hand her the bags and leave the room to escape the smell of the fries, so I’m not either.
Dad shows me how to cut the burger in half and serve it on a blue Delft plate with Pepsi in a glass with ice. She won’t eat but maybe half of it; the other half is food for the dogs. He always took the fries and warmed them up in the air fryer for her, waiting and watching while it clicked and whirred. But some things I will not do.
The dogs and I all go into her bedroom with the food. She’s frozen in bed, hunched over so much she’s just staring at the sheets, delirious from another monster urinary tract infection. She moves her right hand just enough to show me where to put the plate, the Pepsi, and her pills, and tells me I can leave now. She doesn’t appreciate my coming in and taking over.
Friday, 8 a.m.
Despite being banned from the house, I stay on in Tallahassee with Kati. Dad stays in the hospital. Chris leaves me the key and goes home to South Florida to regroup for a bit. For weeks, I go by three times a day. The alarm system beeps like a car horn whenever anyone comes through the front door. Mom yells my name every time she hears it.
I let myself in and nod hello to Mom’s caretaker. I’ll call her Dorothy, because isn’t it amazing how people who are taking care of your elderly parents will say their names and one part of your brain takes note of the fact but the other is out sailing or something and you never, ever know their name again? Dorothy sits on the couch watching African soap operas, the characters’ velvety voices doing daily battle with the CNN blaring from Mom’s bedroom.
Mom finally says we can take the pets with us after Dad dies. All she asks is that we not rename them. Later, Parker—Mom found her as a puppy in a restaurant parking lot—will become Lotte. I will bring her home to Vermont, where she will follow me around silently all day long, her body a big black box I’ll trip over a hundred times. Chris will take Sitka and rename her Riley. Benny will stay Benny.
Tuesday, 8 a.m.
Back to my first day in Florida after Mom’s call. I’m in yesterday’s clothes driving Dad’s car, the car he’ll never drive again, mine now, or at least for now. The car’s transmission will fall out in Ashland, Virginia, on the drive back to Vermont with Benny and Lotte, but we don’t know any of that yet. For now, Dad is still with us; for now, we don’t know anything; two weeks ago, we thought Dad would be fine.
I am hunched over the steering wheel like a little old Italian man, and I realize I don’t know what to do. Not about the house or the inheritance or where Mom will live or what to do about Dad’s job or my job. I’m literally not sure how to move my right arm to rotate the steering wheel, and then it just seems to happen without my having to remember the mechanics, which is a kind of surreal relief.
I drive down Monroe Street past the Capitol building where Kati works, as Ron DeSantis is busy taking the place apart. I think of my sweet friend inside, having a normal workday in the same place I also worked for a while.
Meanwhile, Dad’s doctor won’t see him for another two weeks. He goes in for chemo and then goes home, never talks to a doctor, never even a nurse; they just put him in the chair and plug him in. I want him to go into hospice, but hospice won’t take him until his doctor’s done with him, and like I said, his doctor won’t see him for two weeks.
So I’m at the stoplight on Monroe and Apalachee Parkway, waiting to turn left, rocking back and forth to calm myself down. The morning news is on WFSU; I don’t know what’s going to happen; I’m nodding my head a little to some imaginary jingle.
The car in front of me is a dirty little red Honda, its back windows covered with a layer of dust. The Honda turns left in front of me, and the word hospice is written there with someone’s finger, there in the dust on the driver’s side backseat window, just the word hospice, I swear to you.
Kim MacQueen is the author of two novels, Out Out and People Who Hate America. Kim lives and works in Burlington, Vermont.