A Month of Summer (32 page)

“The lady got bread and pea-nit butter.” Trying to roll down the window, Teddy waved as we went by a loading dock where a service truck was delivering pallets of mystery food, while a cafeteria worker in white work clothes and a hairnet poured a bucket of water off the back steps. “She a nice lady,” Teddy added, disappointed that the window wouldn’t go down.

A sad, uneasy feeling settled in my chest as we passed by the school Dumpsters, where a homeless man was investigating the day’s leftovers. “Teddy, is this where you got the food that was in the house when I came?” Was it possible? The school was at least four miles from my father’s house, past active construction sites, through less-than -stellar neighborhoods, under a highway interchange where homeless people slept, past a shopping center, across two busy streets. Had Teddy come this far? Could he navigate through the obstacles?

I pictured Teddy at the school, wandering around the Dumpsters in the dirty clothes I’d found him wearing my first day at Blue Sky Hill. He would have appeared to be a homeless man, picking up old cups and foam containers, begging for food at the cafeteria door. How hungry had he and my father gotten before Teddy went looking? How long had they been out of food before I arrived?

A painful guilt welled in my chest.

“She my friend,” Teddy remarked.

“You know you can’t come up here again,” I said. “You have to stay in the yard, all right?”

Teddy ducked his head. He knew I was still upset about his wandering off. Nodding earnestly, he turned to watch the cafeteria and the trash-decorated fence disappear from view. “Ho-kay, A-becca.”

I felt like an ogre, his prison matron, the mean, overly controlling mommy Macey so often rolled her eyes at. Except that Teddy wasn’t a child. He was an adult. My stepbrother. He was a forty-seven-year-old man, yet he wasn’t competent to leave his own yard.

The sadness of that idea was monumental. How many times had Hanna Beth looked at Teddy and wondered what the rest of his life would be like, who would take care of him when she and my father were gone?

If the restrictions gave Teddy even a moment’s concern, he didn’t show it. As the school disappeared around the corner, we passed the little pink house with the estate sale in progress, and Teddy waved at the women running the cash table. A few blocks farther, near what used to be the park, a sidewalk snow cone stand was playing tinny music, and he turned his attention to that. My father smiled at the tune and began singing along to “You Are My Sunshine.”

I drew back, startled as much by a heavy sense of déjà vu as by his voice. I remembered him singing that song when I was little. I hadn’t unearthed the memory in years, hadn’t allowed myself to think of it. Now it came back, clear and pure, and it seemed as if I were with my father,
really
with my father, for the first time since I was twelve. The empty place created by his absence lay like the cool, still mountain craters Kyle and I had visited on our fifth-anniversary trip to Hawaii. Standing on the rim, I had the eerie sense that the peaceful appearance was a façade, a thin covering of surface matter and vegetation with something powerful churning beneath.

My father’s song, his deep baritone voice so like it had always been, cracked the surface. Warmth bubbled up. Affection, need, yearning. In spite of the passage of years, and the water under the bridge that had built an ocean between us, I still wanted to know that he loved me. I wanted to believe he was singing that song because, somewhere within the heart that had turned cold to me, within the withering body and the decaying mind, he remembered singing it as he carried me high on his shoulders, off to bed.

“Daddy . . .” The word was so soft no one could have heard it but me.

In the backseat, Teddy started humming along, occasionally chiming in on “sunshine,” “gray,” and “away.”

Clearly, he knew the words. My father wasn’t singing that song to me, remembering the special, private moments of my childhood we’d shared. He was merely replaying a tune locked somewhere in the neurological tangle of his memories. Teddy knew the song because they’d sung it together.

The tenderness inside me whiplashed into jealousy, and even though I didn’t want the sensation, I felt it burn hot and bitter in the back of my throat.
Even that one little thing—that one song—he couldn’t have saved for me?

Teddy and Hanna Beth got everything—even “My Sunshine.”

Leaning down to look in the side-view mirror, my father stopped singing. “Let’s stop off for a snow cone, like we used to.” His voice was clear, no sign of the tremors that had slurred his speech before he went to the hospital. Dr. Amadi had been pleased with his progress. The doctor was hopeful that, when today’s sedative wore off, and with some time for the new medication to work, at home among familiar surroundings, my father would continue to regain his grasp on reality.

His clarity of speech was an improvement, but it didn’t feel like a victory. There was no snow cone stand on the corner when I was a child here. My father and I had never stopped on this corner to listen to the Good Humor tune and buy a treat.

He was talking to Teddy.

“Okay, Daddy Ed,” Teddy said, licking his lips and swallowing. “I like red.”

“Maybe tomorrow,” I said, and drove on, frustrated with the situation and with myself. Would there ever come a day when my thoughts, my emotions toward my father, toward Hanna Beth and Teddy, weren’t bound in a sticky web of past transgressions and remembered pain? The memories were slick and black, agile and blood-thirsty, operating with the deftness of a black widow. They quickly grabbed anything new that fluttered by, wrapped it in sticky silk, and drained it of life.

How could I make it stop? How could I leave behind this childishness and let the future be . . . whatever it was meant to be? I wanted to heal. I wanted to stop dredging up the anger, the guilt, the pain. My stomach had been clenched in a churning knot for days. At night, it burned into my throat, waking me from a fitful sleep that was filled with strange dreams and half-conscious thoughts.

In the seat beside me, my father sighed, sank against the armrest, and sat looking out the window. We traversed the remainder of the streets in silence, then pulled into the left lane waiting to turn onto Vista.

Rubbing his knuckles across the glass as if he were trying to clear away condensation, my father craned close to the window. “They’ve torn down your old blue house.” His voice was almost too faint to be audible. In the back, Teddy gave no indication that he’d heard.

A softness bloomed inside me again, like an early daffodil probing the winter chill. The absence of the blue gingerbread-encrusted house with its wraparound porches was the first thing I’d noticed, arriving back on Blue Sky Hill. I’d never imagined the place would be gone. “I always loved that house,” I heard myself say.

My father turned to look at me then, the movement coming slowly, purposefully, as if he had something fragile in his head and was being careful not to shake it. He studied me for a long time, his lashes slightly lowered, his hazel eyes curled upward at the corners, mirroring a smile that was in his mind but hadn’t found his lips. “It always let you know where the turn was.” Chuckling softly in his throat, he extended a hand across the space between us, patted my arm. The haze lifted from him, so that I felt as if he were seeing me, really seeing me. Rebecca, a grown-up version of the little girl whose Cinderella castle was the towering blue gingerbread house on the corner. “You always wanted to know where we were going,” he added, then turned back to the window, his lips trembling with some sentiment I could only guess at. He drifted away, seeming to fade slowly from himself, until he was just a shadow, sitting there. Head nodding forward, he gave in to the sedative again and let his eyes close.

“Don’t fall asleep, all right? We’ll be home in a minute,” I said, then shook his shoulder. A gap in traffic presented itself, and I gunned the engine. The tires squealed as we rocketed through.

“Good Lord!” My father snapped upright, coming back to life as we whipped onto Vista Street.

“Wooh-weee!” Teddy made motor sounds, then imitated the squeal of the tires. As we passed the construction sites, he described the heavy equipment while waving at the workers. “There my friend,” he observed as one of the men returned his greeting. “There my friend, Daddy Ed.”

Daddy Ed didn’t answer. He was fading again. I hurried through the neighborhood, past the remainder of new construction, around the corner onto Blue Sky Hill Court, where the old houses with their iron fences and stately yards sat drowsy and faded beneath the graceful patinas of time. The man with the art portfolio was just arriving home again. Teddy waved, but the man pretended not to notice.

My father was oblivious to his presence. His head nodded forward as we reached the end of the street and pulled into our driveway. By the time the garage door closed behind us, he was almost completely asleep. Teddy led him into the house, carefully, up one step at a time to the cloakroom.

Setting down my purse and briefcase, I watched as my father stood there, seeming lost, like a guest in his own home. “I have some roast beef sandwiches for supper. It’ll only take a minute. Why don’t you go on in and sit down in your chair? It’s been a long day.”

He cocked his head, momentarily perplexed by the statement, then turned and shuffled across the coatroom, disappearing through the door without a word. Teddy’s brows formed a worry knot.

“It’s all right,” I said. “Just let him go sit down and rest a while. He’ll feel better when the medicine Dr. Amadi gave him starts to wear off.”

“Ho-kay.” Teddy’s reply conveyed complete faith in my ability to have all the answers. “I gone go my plants.” As usual, he waited for permission.

“That sounds fine. We’ll have supper in a little while.”

“Mary gone come eat supper?” He scanned the front window.

Apprehension kinked the muscles in the back of my neck, squeezed like a fisherman’s knot, causing me to wonder if a migraine might not be far behind. I realized, dimly, that I hadn’t had one since the evening I arrived in Dallas. Perhaps my body knew there just wasn’t time for it.

I hoped this arrangement with Mary worked out. Right now, it felt as if I’d invited overnight houseguests at the worst possible time. The apartment needed cleaning. There was the issue of buying more groceries—we hadn’t even talked about who would pay for what, or which responsibilities Mary would assume, or when and how Ifeoma would come and go.

The plan suddenly seemed ill-advised and likely to end in disaster. “I don’t know exactly when she’ll be here. In a little while, I think. I don’t know how much packing she has to do at her old apartment.”

“She gone bring the boy and the udder boy?” Teddy’s level of enthusiasm far surpassed mine.

“I imagine so.”

Teddy clapped his palms together, fingers stiff and outstretched.

I felt the need to rein him in, to make sure he understood the parameters of the situation. “It’s only a little while. You remember, I told you that at the nursing center? Mary’s just doing this until we can find someone to live here all the time.”

“Uh-huh.” Teddy nodded, while looking over his shoulder toward the door. The practicalities of the situation didn’t interest him. “I gone my plants.”

“All right.”

Teddy hurried off, and I proceeded into the house. My father wasn’t in the living room. A mild note of panic struck me as I checked the kitchen, the maid’s pantry, the bathroom, his office.

I found him in his bedroom, curled up atop the covers in nothing but his underwear. The clothes he’d left the hospital in were hung neatly on the dressing rack that had held his daily business suit for as long as I could remember. He’d tucked his slippers underneath, where his black wingtips had always been.

Watching from the doorway, I vacillated between waking him up, insisting he eat supper, or leaving him to sleep until the sedatives wore off. Finally I covered him with an extra blanket. Supper could wait. I needed to check the supply of groceries, maybe transfer a few starter items to the apartment kitchen, scan the e-mail from my office, let Kyle know that if my father continued improving, and Mary worked out, I could fly back to California for a few days, do a little firefighting at the office, then return here when Hanna Beth was closer to coming home. By then, perhaps, through some phone interviews, I could have a permanent caretaker lined up.

I carried my father’s new prescriptions in from the car and arranged them carefully in the back of an unused silverware drawer, where I was fairly certain he wouldn’t find them if he went looking. I left the bags and slips on the counter with his discharge papers so I could apprise Mary of all the instructions. I hoped that when she realized what she was getting into, when she actually
saw
the apartment over the garage, she wouldn’t run away screaming. Teddy and I had picked things up and moved out various stored boxes, so the apartment could be shown to prospective employees, but, like most of my plans, finding a housekeeping service to give the place a wall-to-wall cleaning remained on the to-do list.

Glancing at the clock, I realized it was later than I’d thought. Mary could arrive anytime. The sink was full of dishes, the counter cluttered, so I hurried through a cursory cleanup, stuffing the dirties in the dishwasher. My cell phone rang as I was putting soap in the dispenser. Bree was on the other end with some questions about a meeting for an upcoming Immigration Court hearing. I’d checked the client’s application for asylum that morning and e-mailed it to the office. Bree sounded frustrated. She was quick to divulge that Kyle was on a rampage because he and my paralegal would have to cover the meeting at four o’clock. My clients had already phoned in with questions he couldn’t answer, immigration not being his area of expertise.

“I’m sorry,” I told Bree. “Let him know it’s my fault. I didn’t see his e-mail until this morning. I should have checked last night.” Somewhere between the shower and computer the night before, I’d made the irrational decision to lie down for just a minute before logging on to take care of my in-box. I was out like a light the minute my head hit the pillow. When I awoke, it was after midnight, the house was dark, and Teddy had covered me with a blanket, then gone to sleep.