Body Language. James Hall

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      Mrs Scarlett Rogers, the tour guide for Sunny Pines Assisted Living Facility, was a fifty-year-old woman with a swirl of bright orange hair and a smile that was so rigid, it had to be the result of multiple failed plastic surgeries. Gritting her teeth, the woman looked like someone who’d just stepped off the ledge of a twenty-story building and was still trying to keep her composure. Lawton was crooning to himself while Scarlett Rogers described the excellent amenities package at Sunny Pines. A gym, a sauna, five coed hot tubs, a walking course on their two-acre lawn.

      ‘I want to see these hot tubs,’ Alexandra said. She had no idea why she said it. As far as she knew, her father had never climbed into a hot tub in his life, and had expressed no interest in doing so. But she didn’t like this woman, didn’t like the place, and it was the meanest thing she could think of saying.

      The woman turned her inflexible smile on Alex, lifted an eyebrow, and scrutinized her for a moment, as if Alexandra might be concealing a miniature video camera. One of those sneaky reporters the TV stations were always sending around.

      ‘Certainly,’ Mrs Rogers said. ‘This way, please.’

      She led them down the freshly waxed linoleum hallway, past a large recreation room with pool and Ping-Pong tables. Alex noticed the net was down on the Ping-Pong table, no paddles or balls in sight. The corridor was lined with women in housecoats and smocks. They sat on benches or in wheelchairs and several of the women were speaking, but there didn’t seem to be any actual conversations going on. An elderly black man was slumped over in his wheelchair near the door at the end of the hall where Mrs Rogers halted.

      She motioned at a heavy gray door.

      ‘The tubs are inside there. I would show them to you, but they might be in use, and we certainly don’t want to disturb anyone.’

      Before the woman could protest, Alexandra pushed the door ajar and peeked inside. There were four large plastic whirlpools arranged in the middle of the room. All were empty. The gray wall-to-wall carpet was soggy and reeked of mildew and chlorine. Except for the tubs, the room was bare.

      ‘This place sucks,’ her father said. ‘Like a waiting room at the morgue.’

      ‘We have a very well-trained staff,’ Mrs Rogers said, shutting the door firmly. ‘Four full-time RNs and eight state-certified orderlies.’

      ‘You’re not thinking of locking me up in this hellhole, are you?’

      ‘We’re just investigating, Dad. That’s all we’re doing.’

      ‘We have a registered dietician on staff. Our meals are nutritious and low-fat and we offer salt-free and vegetarian specialties.’

      ‘Am I here because I shot that gun?’

      ‘Dad, please.’

      ‘Send me to Raiford,’ Lawton said. ‘Christ, lock me up with the child molesters and rapists. Anyplace but here.’

      Alexandra took the brochure Mrs Rogers offered and led her father back out into the afternoon heat.

      ‘Whew,’ he said as she held open the door to the Camry. ‘What the hell did those people do to deserve getting locked up in that god-awful place?’

      ‘They got old,’ Alex said.

      ‘Then I’m staying eighteen years old from here on out. Eighteen’s fine.’

      Alexandra made it back to South Miami by four, just ahead of the rush-hour onslaught. She parked on the street out front and sat there for a moment staring down the row of identical neat white houses, all with two bedrooms and one bath. ‘Starter houses,’ they were called these days. The sterile architecture of the early fifties, when those houses served as winter retreats, little more than oversized motel rooms for the yearly crop of snow-birds. Now the neighborhood was a ghetto for university students and windows and newlyweds. No children, only a few pets. Lots of turnover. In the nine years they’d lived on Silver Palm Avenue, seven different families had occupied the house to their east. Nine years married and she and Stan were still starting out. Still exactly where they’d been.

      ‘You forget something?’ her dad said.

      ‘I was just thinking.’

      ‘Myself, I’m always forgetting things. It’s what I do now. It’s my full-time employment. I wake up in the morning and I lie there and decide what I want to forget that day. I make a list and scratch things off one by one. Forget my thirty years on the police force. Forget my wife. Forget my teenage years. It’s my job now, and I’m getting pretty damn good at it, if I do say so myself.’

      ‘Let’s go inside, Dad.’

      ‘You going to stash me in that place, that nursing home?’

      ‘No. You’re staying right here.’

      ‘You’re going to lose your marriage, Alex. You heard your husband. He gave you a choice. It was him or me – the half-wit.’