u/DeliveryGuilty3679

The old man walked to the car on arthritic reeds.

This is what they rent you? I hope you didn't pay full price.

Hi Dad.

What is this? A KIA?

BMW.

German car.

Yes.

Hmm. Your mother's in the back. BECKA!

YES?

YOUR SON IS HERE.

I'M COMING!

She's been talking about you coming all week. The arrival of the prodigal son.

You mean only son.

Well she's been on about it all week.

And you haven't?

What is this? Blue?

They call it gunmetal grey.

Grey is grey.

Unless it's gunmetal grey. If you ordered this car in grey it would be a decidedly different color.

I'll look it up.

You can't take my word for it?

I'll look it up.

My mother burst through the side door and ran toward me.

HONEY!

I braced myself for impact but she stopped right at my feet and grabbed my hands.

Oh you look wonderful. Doesn't he look wonderful Mel?

He looks better than his age.

I couldn't say the same about my parents. Both looked terrible. In the two years since I'd been home age had snuck up on them and had perpetrated a kind of environmental devastation that to me seemed insidious and unfair. My parents had once been strapping, beautiful people. Now all that remained was an animalistic sense of survival. The sense that they were two bears caught in a trap, withered and starving and working on their legs just to get an extra couple of drops out of a life that for all intents and purpose was as prevalent as the noxious odor of old age. Yet they held on. I couldn't see any chance for improvement. I could feel the depression crawling through my bones. It was for this very reason I'd been reticent about returning home. If it wasn't for my mother's pleading and the last ethical bastion of guilt pooling in my psyche, I would never see them alive again.

The house smelled like cake. As was often the case with my visits my mother baked a cake. This had been a tradition that for the past fifteen years was rooted in some sort of misguided assumption that I was a big fan of Duncan Hines double chocolate cake. It wasn't that I disliked cake, but my tastes had moved beyond the boxed variety and settled nicely in the gourmet big city dessert equivalent of HoHo's, Ding Dongs and Suzi Q's. If it wasn't for the constant eye I kept on my weight, I would be down at Joan's On Third every day to devour without conscience their scrumptious cream filled chocolate cupcake. But here was a thing that was doted on, cared for, designed specifically for my refined palette while my mother's cake, though baked with love, presumably, was thoughtful only in that it was there, steaming up the crystal cake plate and gathering more moisture on its surface than leftover pasta. There was no measured love in the batter, no delicate refining of the icing. The cake was packaged as my recollections of my youth. Boxed memories with sugary labels to make them look better than they tasted. The cake rested perfectly in the center of the table in the family room.

I baked you a cake, Sweetie. Do you like strawberries?

This had become a pattern with my mother. Despite her knowledge she always insisted on garnishing the cake with something that I disliked.

No, Mom. I like strawberries, but not on cake.

Ida's boy, Doug, you remember Doug, is horribly allergic to strawberries and anything cooked in an iron pan. He goes into antiballactic shock.

I think it's called anaphylactic shock.

My father walked in struggling under the weight of my bag.

Mel, Carter says it's not antiballactic shock, it's antafallactic.

I don't know. I'll look it up. What do you have in here? Bowling balls?

I can grab that, Dad.

I CAN DO IT.

My mother stepped in. A fighter pilot performing an evasive move.

Would you like some cake, honey?

It's nine o'clock in the morning.

Your mother got up at six to make you that cake.

I don't know. Cake for breakfast?

Do whatever you want to do.

Thanks Dad. I was planning on doing what everybody else wanted me to do. But now that you said I could, I think I might actually do what I want to do.

Are you starting already?

Mel!

My father dropped the bag at the base of the stairs.

Here. Take your bowling balls upstairs. Your bed is the one that's made.

Walking into my old room had become ritual over the years. I would place the bag on my bed. I would open my closet and take inventory of how many of my father's clothes now resided with my ancient wardrobe. His old robe bookended by a very small cub scout shirt and a rack of thin leather and satin ties. A faux leather jacket, something undoubtedly bought on sale and rarely used once my father realized that plastic made to look like leather collected the fall chill like water in a freezer. I could see my father wearing the jacket on a crisp day, waiting for the warming properties of the jacket to kick in and never getting there and not admitting how cold he was and simply putting the jacket away for another day that would never come. Going back to the blue wool zip-up that he'd bought in the winter of 1979 and avoiding my mother's questions when she'd ask why he never wears that lovely leather jacket with the fur in the sleeves and the button up collar until he tells her that it's too tight and he'll get to it next fall after he loses a few pounds over the summer and keeping secret that the shell was frozen vinyl and the fur in the sleeves collected sweat and transformed it into a vaporous wet bath that would cling to his arms and drill a chill into his joints like daggers of ice. I pulled out my white linen sportcoat cut straight out of Miami Vice. I put it on. It was too tight. I stood in the mirror and thought about my girlfriends, flipping through them in my mind until I came to Allisa Reilly, the one whose fingerprints and traces of DNA could still be found in the linen construction of the jacket. I pondered her existence. Where was she now? I took off the jacket and hung it back up. I was about to close the closet when I noticed a glint of chrome at the far end and opened the other side to reveal an IV stand. Gross, I thought, and shut the closet door.

There was much work to be done around the house and although I had prepared myself for the usual load, I always found myself surprised by the intensive labor. It wasn't so much the climbing on ladders or disconnecting the drainage pipes along the perimeter of the roof or flushing out the perpetually clogged gutters or hacking down branches or putting up fences or moving rocks, cutting grass, digging holes, cleaning the pool, checking chlorine, filters, oil, stucco, wires, tires, windows, the attic, the basement – it wasn't any of that that exhausted me. It was the completion of these tasks under the watchful eye of my father. My father, who somehow thought at his late age that he could accomplish the gargantuan amount of household work vicariously through his son and therefore spent his day dedicated to telling me how to work through each and every task at hand.

If you can't do it properly then don't do it at all.

You say you know, but you don't know.

Give it to me…

These directives echoed through my head at an increasing volume. Later that day I sat on the porch eating a sandwich my mother made me as my father caught up with the paper in the living room. It was the Sunday Times and it proved to be quite a burden.

The damn paper is so big it takes me a week to read it.

Yet, the old man was a room away breathing heavy through his nose as he tackled the equally gargantuan task of information ingestion. I chewed the bread, tasting sporadically the spattering of peanut butter and jelly that gave the sandwich its name. I stared at the backyard and wondered how my father could have something like this and enjoy it so little. My mother opened the sliding door and placed the cake plate on the table in front of me.

A little cake?

Sure mom. Mom? You know you could put a little more PB&J on the sandwich. Might give it a little more flavor.

That's a tuna fish sandwich, honey.

I lay the sandwich on the plate.

Cake?

Please.

My mother cut a wide slice and placed it next to the half eaten sandwich. I ate the cake with glee. After the amount of work I'd accomplished around the house my blood sugar had spiked and I could feel the shakes coming on. I knew I should pound some protein, but the rich chocolate cake provided the illusion of satiation. I finished the slice and nodded when my mother asked me if I'd like another piece.

I made this cake with love, dear.

It's good, mom.

Wonderful. I was thinking we could go out to dinner tonight. We could celebrate daddy's birthday before you leave for California.

That would be great.

I put down the fork.

I should save some room.

No, sweetie, finish it. Or it'll go bad.

While this made little sense to me, nevertheless, I finished the cake. It wasn't until I was halfway through a particularly tough piece of meat at my parents' favorite steak house that I regretted the indulgence earlier that afternoon. I was sawing at the gristled grain of an unfortunate slab of New York Strip when my mind and stomach began a test of will. I desperately wanted to finish the steak, if anything than for the sake of nostalgia, this having been a birthday destination for countless years, yet, my entire torso seemed to fill up with a dense gas at the suggestion of a swallow. I was convinced that if I put the forkful into my mouth and attempted to choke it down, my body would expel the meat with such force that I might kill one of the many geriatric patrons spooning at their entrées around me.

The thing I regretted most about feeling this ill was that my father then insisted on driving from the restaurant. The trip home was a twenty minute drive by normal standards. However, with my father behind the wheel having shouted before getting in the car…I CAN DO IT…the drive home would be marked by survival at the very least. I lay my head against the rear headrest and hoped for the best. By the time we reached the house, having missed the turn into the driveway three times, the journey had taken thirty six minutes. But by then I no longer cared. I lost interest in my father's outburst and the way my mother held onto the armrest with white knuckled anticipation of a metal twisting, gravel spewing, Taurus exploding wreck. By the time we pulled the tin box into the garage I only wanted to be put to bed.

Dreams pelted me like east coast mosquitoes. The Jersey type, small, merciless and infectious. In California there were few mosquitoes. I lived life soft on the west coast. In New Jersey the air hung heavier than an auto accident and life left a stain on the skin. When I woke, the dreams from the night clung to my memory and haunted me. There was the one in which I was trying to save a struggling fish and put the critter back in its tank. Yet, however hard I tried, there was no getting my bony fingers around the fish's slippery scales. It wasn't the innuendo of the dream that bothered me…man drowning outside his environment, etc. etc., but the imagery of those bony fingers. I always had a great appreciation for my hands, that said, and feet. In the dream my fingers were bone thin and perhaps even thinner considering that the bones themselves were abnormally thin, much like bird bones that bent in their unnaturally hollow way. There was the dream about the man who kept poking himself in the eye. The one where I couldn't turn on the basement light and went downstairs knowing full well that I'd be trapped in the dark. The dream where I dove into a long pool and skipped across the surface like a thrown stone. But the dream that haunted me most of all was the cake eating dream. I was sitting at home, California home, watching the local news. The newscaster, who in the dream was my ex-girlfriend, Melanie, kept putting huge slabs of cake in front of me, somehow reaching out through the TV screen and placing plate after plate of my mother's chocolate cake on my coffee table and I without a fork or spoon was forced to eat the cake as if I were a hog at a trough. After my sixth slice a deer was led over to me, the very deer that scratched the hood of my car, and my father, standing next to the deer, produced a very large knife and began to slowly saw the deer's head off. I screamed and tried to get up, but my legs were too weak and stomach too full to rise. I woke before the deer died.

How are you feeling, honey?

Not so hot.

I don't think you're going to be able to catch your flight.

No, I don't think so. I should call the airline.

I'll call. We can play your flight out by ear.

I should be fine tomorrow.

Of course. But still, just to be on the safe side. Don't you think?

It got worse. This must be what cancer feels like, I thought. That unknowing kind of illness that felt neither like a cold or flu or a painful blood curdling sickness like kidney stones or a bad spleen. No. This was different. I felt like there was a balloon in my chest and snakes in my stomach. My legs twitched and were cold and I couldn't feel the tips of my fingers or toes. It was when I held tightly onto my testicles and failed to elicit any pain that I got worried. I demanded that my mother call a doctor.

Well why would you squeeze your own testicles?

I couldn't feel them.

It just seems like an odd thing.

Lookit doc, I'm in an odd thing. I don't know what's wrong…

Yes?

Wrong…

Carter?

With me. God, I'm so tired.

Bed rest, son. That's what you need. I would say that your symptoms sound more like stress than anything. Anxiety can do strange things. Is there anything you're feeling anxiety about? How's work?

But I was dozing off.

Still, I could hear the doctor downstairs chatting with my parents. I heard certain words. Quickly. Deterioration. Worry. Nothing to. Rapid. Good as new. I fell asleep before the doctor left the house. When my eyes fluttered open it was pitch black in my room. I couldn't move my arms or legs and when I tried to shout only air wheezed through my lungs. I lay perfectly still and heard breathing. Someone was in the room with me.

Mom?

I strained, my eyes barely becoming accustomed to the darkness, and I saw the outline of a man standing against the far wall of the room. The man stepped forward.

Carter, you should really be sleeping.

My father hadn't been upstairs in ten years. He just couldn't get his legs to cooperate with his back, something he always referred to as broken, and to get up the flight of stairs that led to the nether regions of the house should have been a monumental achievement. And here he was, hovering over me and instructing me to sleep.

Dad, what are you doing up here?

Just checking on you. Your progress.

I don't feel so good.

I know. Carter, part of me is very sorry about this.

Part of you?

Your mother is terribly upset.

It's fine. I'll be fine.

Goodnight, Carter.

Dad, I can't move my arms or legs.

Try harder.

Nothing.

Terrific.

I kept calling for my father as the old man descended the stairs. I tried to raise my voice, but couldn't, succumbing to the weakness that overtook my body. I kept saying, Dad, while listening to my father effortlessly reach the landing at the bottom of the stairs. Dad. Dad. Dad. It was this constant repetition that ultimately lulled me back to sleep.

I woke up the following morning to the soft patter of rain outside my window. I glanced to my left and recognized through a haze of delirium the IV stand from my bedroom closet erected next to my bed. A bag of solution dripped through a clear plastic tube into a blue syringe connector that was plugged into my arm. The word that crossed my mind was, "generic".

It wasn't until later in the day that my mother and father entered the bedroom together. I looked at them, trying to distinguish them through blurred vision. The process was frustrating, like trying to catch a final glimpse of a sinking stone. They looked drastically younger. Twenty, maybe thirty years. My father stood up straight and my mother had lost a considerable amount of weight and no longer seemed to favor her left hip.

Son, your mother and I have something to tell you.

I tried to speak but couldn't.

Carter, this might be difficult for you to understand…

But, your mother and I are…

Getting a divorce.

I drooled at this news.

It's not a calamity, dear, it's just the way things are.

It occurred to me suddenly what it was that I felt like. Old age. Natural death. Life's ultimatum. My mother changed the bag of solution. She looked down at me and smiled.

I only wish you could have given us grandchildren.

That night the rain had stopped. I heard commotion outside. Voices. Mel Torme blasting scat though my father's prized loudspeakers. Laughter and…splashing.

I knew an attempt to muster the strength to get to the window would kill me. My breath grew rapid and I reminded myself of my panting cat, Joe, when Joe was dying from that urinary tract infection. Looking at Joe there on the hot floor of my kitchen, sandpaper pink tongue trying to catch air, and then glancing at all the ruined furniture. The mid century finds that I so treasured and then back at Joe. Maybe this was payback for never taking Joe to the vet. I made my move.

The I.V. stand fell over and the blue syringe tip tore from my arm. The blood that gushed formed a blooming slick in my wake.

I fell off the bed and searched for the strength that would allow me to get to my knees. I'd been through so much shit in my life. I got this far through sheer determination and I could make it to the fucking window. Cartilage crumbled in my shoulders and knuckles and I could feel my muscles popping off their ligaments like guitar strings. As I crested the ledge, Mel Torme shuffled on to Tony Bennet and upon looking out the window I saw what must have been me in college, possibly after a tough semester and likely after my parents were gone for some stodgy weekend. The young man on the diving board looked vaguely like me, was built like me. He was twenty if a day. It wasn't until the man opened his mouth that I heard my father's voice.

Cannonball!

My father launched off the board and created a beautiful splash. The other guests screeched with delight. I saw my mother, just a girl barely out of her teens, jumping up and down. Everything in slow motion. Her drink spilling in crystalline droplets.

Do it again, she said. Do it again.