It probably wasn’t the best day to spend together. My dad and mom were bickering all day – or to be honest, my dad was doing most of the bickering. I don’t know why, but he was picking on my mom over the strangest little things, like the milk wasn’t where it was supposed to be in the refrigerator. Or she’d left the clean laundry in the laundry basket instead of putting it away.
Late that afternoon we sat down in the family room, and I looked out the sliding windows at the thirteenth green. It was vacant right at the moment. Dad stretched back in his leather recliner and started telling me a story about the time he was eighteen and went on a NOAA ship to Alaska, to map the bottom of the ocean, at about the time a volcano was erupting there. Only, he couldn’t think of the word volcano. Suddenly, he started acting angry at me: “Randy, what do you call that thing, for chrissakes?”
I don’t know what freaked me out more: the fact that he was cursing (because he never cursed), the fact that he called me by my brother’s name instead of my own, or the fact that he couldn’t think of a simple word. It was scary, but I just let it go. “A volcano, Dad,” I said. “Right. A volcano,” he responded. “Well, you can imagine how excited I was. Eighteen years old and headed for Alaska! What an adventure.”
As I listened to him spin the tale, my mother came in with a couple of cold glasses of water. As she bent over to put one on the little table next to Dad’s chair, she paused, for just a second, and gave me a look, as though she was trying to tell me something. When I drove home that night, I remembered that look. I wondered what she was worrying about, and whether it was the same thing I was worrying about, too.
Lately, I’d been kind of impatient with my dad. I was just miffed at him. I couldn’t put my finger on why exactly, but as I’d started the project in Ballard, I’d been getting more and more calls from my mom about him. Little things, mostly – the things couples argue about when they’ve been together, like my parents had, for more than fifty years – but it seemed like in the last few months there’d been more arguments than usual, and they’d gotten a little more serious. She noticed that he was flying off the handle more, over nothing, like I’d noticed when I’d been at their house. I’d tell him a story, and he’d mention it a little later, and my mom would correct him because he’d get the story mixed up, and out of nowhere he’d start yelling at her. It would just last a second, and normally you wouldn’t think anything of it, but it was a little different from the way he usually was. My dad was the kind of guy who was always in control of everything.
I wouldn’t show him that I was miffed, of course. I was raised to respect my elders, and that carried through to when I was an adult. I always did what he told me. I didn’t always like it, but I didn’t talk back. It’s just the way we were raised. So even if I was getting pissed off now and again, I didn’t say anything to him about it.
I don’t think any of us is prepared for our parents to start to decline. I know I sure wasn’t. It’s denial, I guess. It’s not that I didn’t know what was happening to my dad. It was that I didn’t want to know.
It was about six weeks after I took Edith to her first hair appointment that she asked me to take her again. I went over early that afternoon, and from the moment she entered the living room, I could tell that she was loaded for bear.
“I just want you to know I didn’t appreciate that call this morning,” she said, her voice full of venom. “You boys just keep hounding me to move, don’t you? Well, I’m not moving, so you might as well stop bothering. Save your breath!”
I had no idea what she was talking about.
“Your friend over there at the company,” she said. She was bundled up in a big brown sweater, and in her anger she seemed more hunched over than usual, like she was a snake all coiled up and ready to spring. “He tried to sound all polite. But I know what he’s up to. I know what you’re all up to. Forget it! I’m not moving. Why should I!”
Now, I’d been nothing but a perfect gentleman to Edith since I met her, but for the first time, I started to get angry. I know a lot of people saw Edith as a symbol of someone standing up for what’s pure and true, or something like that. But that’s not my battle, I thought. Don’t make me the bad guy.
I’d been polite, and helped her out, and was taking her to her hair appointments and whatnot, and now I felt a little – betrayed, I guess.
“Listen up,” I said. I was kind of surprised at how loud my voice was, but you know how it is: once you’re on a roll, it’s hard to stop. “None of this makes any difference to me. I work by the hour. If you stay or if you go, there’s no benefit to me one way or the other. The job is the same number of hours either way. I build to the property line all the way around, no matter what that property line is. So don’t put me in that.”
I felt bad as soon as I let all that out. I mean, what am I doing, going off on some eighty-four-year-old woman? But Edith seemed almost relaxed by what I’d said. She moved forward, from the shadows in the corner, into the beam of light, flecked with dust, that streamed through the window. “All right then,” she said. “Well, I apologize for that. I understand your position. I suppose we should get going now, shall we?” She seemed very calm. I guess she was trying to figure out just how far she could push me, and now that she knew where that line was, she could work from there. It was like we were both pushing right up to the property line. We just had to know what the boundaries were.
We went out to the car, and started up past the bridge. The sun was reflecting off the canal, and I put down the visor. A few fishermen passed in front of us at the stop sign near the Salmon Bay Café. That café’s been there a long time but seemed a lot busier than I remembered it. There was a little traffic jam of people getting into the parking lot for lunch.
I felt like Edith and I had crossed a certain barrier that morning. By letting out our anger over the subject, we made it a little easier to talk about. So as I swung the car onto Market Street, I broached the subject again.
“Now, you know that I don’t care one way or the other if you move, right?”
“Yes, I understand that,” she said.
“Well, then, can I ask you a question?”
“Sure, sure,” she responded.
“Why don’t you want to move?”
She looked out the window.
“Why should I move?” she said, that crotchety tone creeping back into her voice. “Where on Earth would I go? I don’t have any family. There isn’t anywhere for me. This is my home.”
“So it’s not what people think, is it?”
She turned toward me. “It’s never what people think.”
I figured that was the end of it. But later that morning, after I brought her back from the hairdresser’s, she opened up to me one more time.
I’d walked her back into the house just to make sure she’d gotten settled okay, reached down to turn on the lamp on the little side table, and was getting ready to go back to work. Edith was sitting on the couch and looked up at me. She seemed smaller, somehow; curled up quietly on the couch, not hunched or coiled like before.
“Barry, I want to tell you something,” she said, her voice cracking a little bit.
I just