Chapter 31
DEB
“IT’LL BE OVER SOON.”
I’ve always offered this phrase to my family when something is unpleasant, because life is short and soon is always.
It’s meant as comfort, but it doesn’t feel that way as I offer it to Billy along with a bagged lunch of beef jerky, raisins, and cashews.
He’s doing a root canal this morning, which is his least favorite.
But it’s his last week as a dentist, so the tolerated thing is suddenly a thing we would gladly keep, if only we could.
He accepts the lunch and platitude. “Thanks.”
“Maybe you can help the tooth fairy in your retirement. She seems to need it.”
This wins a weak smile. I hand him a pill, and he swallows it dry.
He is walking to work because his bike needs a new inner tube, so he ambles off toward reamers and files and drills and tubes of fluoride.
For the last time, he will dig into the thicket of a mouth, remove infected pulp, and save a tooth.
His procedures now have several attendants.
A week from now, his practice will be in someone else’s name.
Otto is dropping Cheerios one by one onto the kitchen floor as Cameron rounds the corner, having slept through the tooth fairy fiasco. He grabs a boiled egg, taps it on the counter, and starts to peel. “So, I’ve got news.”
Oh good Lord, I do not want more news.
I fix my face. “News?”
“Yeah, I just heard.” He fills a mug with coffee. “I got a job at Kimberly-Clark.”
Oh! Good news. And it’s in Dallas, which is great news.
I clean a stray piece of eggshell. “Kimberly-Clark, is that diapers?”
He laughs. “It’s a twenty-billion-dollar Fortune 500 company with tens of thousands of employees. But yes, one of their many products is diapers.”
I blink. He sounds like a snob. But he’s a snob who is staying in town at what is apparently an impressive job selling diapers, so oh well. I congratulate him, stepping through Otto’s Cheerio minefield for a hug.
I get a flash of Billy at Cameron’s age, parting the lips of his first patient.
“Gramma Deb?” Sadie tugs my shirt.
“Hm?”
“Are Mama and Daddy at the smokehouse?”
I grin. “They are.” At some point over the summer, Sadie started referring to the Argyle house as the smokehouse and nobody corrected her.
It’s fun to imagine Leo and April eating smoked pork rather than sorting through smoked rubble.
Cameron knuckles her hair and congratulates her on the tooth, so she launches into the whole saga of it.
By evening, Rachel has arrived and heard the saga too. It has evolved to include delays in China, India, and Germany, and Sadie has laid out a map to track the fairy’s flight path.
Five-forty, five-fifty, six o’clock pass without Billy’s baritone voice, and I get a sinking sensation. Not again. I call him, but he doesn’t answer. So I abandon a chicken casserole and grab the keys. Cameron cocks an eyebrow.
I explain, “It’s after six. I need to go find Dad.”
Rachel stays with the kids while Cam and I go to the car.
Unlike last time, we find Billy quickly, one street from where he should be. And unlike last time, he’s upset. At himself. At the streets for shifting. At everything and nothing. Cameron tries to help him to the car, but he elbows his son. “Stop that. I’m demented, not crippled.”
We drive home in silence. How demoralizing it must be to know your mind is going but have no power to stop it, even as your body is still healthy.
At the house, Rachel waits with her rosy disposition.
The kids are snacking on popcorn, and Sadie runs to us excitedly.
“Gramma Deb, don’t you think the wedding should be at night because of twinkly lights?
” She takes my hand in her little buttery ones as though this is the most important question to ever be asked.
“Sounds lovely to me.”
Rachel and Cameron smile at each other, and I get a pang. I want a wedding. Youth.
They talk about catering options as Billy paces morosely over to his fiddle-leaf fig.
Rachel finished making the casserole, bless her.
When we’re done eating, Cameron says, “I have some thoughts, Dad.”
Billy lifts his eyebrows as he stacks plates. “Do I want to know?”
“Probably not.”
This gets our attention.
“So, I know you guys don’t like your phones, but—”
Now that’s a bit of a stretch. We simply prefer to catch up in person at the end of the day rather than constantly texting like our kids do.
“—we should definitely share Dad’s location,” Cameron says.
He sees the blank expression on my face and explains how it works.
With a good-natured sigh, Billy relinquishes his phone to our son. “All right, Big Brother.”
“Relax, it’s just Mom.”
“Not sure that’s any better.” He winks at me, and I relish the return of his humor.
Just like that, Billy is tracked, his phone returned to him. Cameron took the opportunity to change the lock screen, which now displays his full name, address, and my phone number.
Billy mutters, “You sure you don’t want to add my social security or bank account number?” But he accepts it, and I squeeze his hand in consolation.
Cameron leans against Rachel, who asks gently, “Wasn’t there something else?”
“Right.” He darts out of the room and returns with sticky notes, ripping off the clingy plastic packaging. “One”—he sets a neon pad in front of his niece—“for Sadie bug.” She squeals and hugs them to her chest. Then he hands the rest to Billy, whose expression is puzzled.
Our son grabs a pen and jots Cameron loves you on a sticky note, placing it on Billy’s medical bag, explaining, “For reminders.”
Until he was four years old, Cameron referred to himself in third person. Camwon wants food. Camwon is sleepy. Camwon loves you. Sandwiched between times, I can almost hear his little voice.
He writes on another note: If it’s dark outside, go back to bed. He sticks this one on a kitchen cabinet, and I kick myself for not having thought of it sooner.
Billy clucks his tongue. “Is this really necessary?”
So I add some reminders for myself too. “Can’t hurt.”
As we walk around the house considering where stickies might be judicious, I pause at our entry table, which is crammed with family photos.
There’s one of Billy beside his bike the first time he completed a long endurance ride.
Another of our kids from a long-ago Halloween.
Josie was wearing a giant homemade coffee cup around her torso, her top half sticking up in the center.
A cup of Jo—her idea. Ten years old. Cameron was Pikachu, and April was a witch.
I smile as I remember the perfect night.
The weather was chilly, and our kids were finally old enough to trick-or-treat without my chasing them around the block.
I had a white wine spritzer with a neighbor while our gaggle of kids traded Ring Pops and Fun Dip, their mouths turning bright blue.
Curious, I tilt the frame toward Billy. “What do you remember from this Halloween?”
He comes closer, looking down. “That was the night Josie called Cameron ‘a soprano’ as an insult.” He chuckles and says, “April gave him a jumbo Snickers to stop his tears. Jo said she didn’t know Pikachu was such a crybaby, and April said she didn’t know coffee was so stupid, and you said something about how they needed to be kind to each other or their candy would be seized by management. ”
I had completely forgotten about all that.
He adds, “It was hot that year.”
I don’t know whose memory about the weather is accurate, but it doesn’t matter. I smile and interlace my fingers through Billy’s. “Want to go out back?”
He nods, and we turn from the photo.
When we open the back door, we’re met with a metallic scent.
We squint up at a pewter sky, anticipating a spit of rain.
It’s only when we look back down—dark disks swelling on the deck—that we realize it’s already raining.
Some things are seen more clearly at their end than at their start.
So we stand at the threshold as rain washes the world clean.
If it’s not one thing with this house, it’s another.
The laundry machine is screeching, and I glare at it while it hurricanes.
No one else is home at the moment. Billy normally fixes this kind of thing, but he keeps forgetting—not forgetting to do it but forgetting that it needs to be done.
Several times already, he has said something like, “Uh-oh, machine’s on the fritz.
” Or, “Yikes, when did that start?” And I’ve had to bisect my thoughts from my words, like egg whites from yolks.
It started before you asked me the last time, and the time before that. “Not too long ago.”
I shut off the malfunctioning machine and scowl at the soaked clothes. I could do the wash by hand; there are worse things. Or I could call a repairman. But it feels futile, because there will be something else after the laundry machine, and something else after that.
I turn my back on the wet socks and underwear for now, and I meander through our quiet house, seeing Billy’s fingerprints everywhere.
He’s the one who waters the fiddle-leaf fig, sprays for bugs, and unclogs the disposal.
He changes the fridge filter, puts up the Christmas lights, moves seasonal accoutrements to and from the attic, and installs anything that needs installation.
He mows the grass, touches up scratched paint, and checks the roof after hail.
I wonder what will break next and how much of our precious time I might spend watching YouTube videos about something like how to adjust a fill valve in a toilet tank.
I can do it all if necessary. But if I’m doing it all, will that be all I’m doing?
The doctors were noncommittal with the timeline.
They said it could be three years, four years, five years, ten.
Which told us so little. He was already “fairly progressed” at the time of diagnosis, they said, and there’s “no way to know” how aggressive Alzheimer’s will be in each individual case.
But Billy was young and fit, they pointed out.
It was cold comfort, and we drew our mouths into lines that weren’t quite smiles.
I walk now past the back door, where the weather stripping needs to be replaced.
Our home is a body of sorts, a protective casing for its most vital parts.
It’s a brain that holds memory after memory: the stairs beneath April’s heeled feet as she came down for prom.
Josie’s room, where she sequestered with reams of script pages.
The windowsill that held Cameron’s toothpick-maimed potato with its wispy legs. Our kitchen, where—
I stop myself. Because if I open the floodgates of kitchen memories, I might drown. And because this home is also a mouth, filling with cavities.
In the kitchen, among a scatter of sticky neon reminders, I rifle through the junk drawer for the latest edition of Best Picks, and I flip to find a repairman.
I love our home, but I have to admit that there’s been a certain sadness since April, then Josie, and then Cameron packed up their things and left.
The day after we settled Cam into his dorm in Oklahoma four years ago, I thought I would come home and do a little dance through our house that was finally clean.
Instead I wandered the halls, forlorn and teary and aching for one more frustrated huff about muddy shoes that I had already told someone three times to clean up.
Memories pulsed at me from the empty bedrooms, and I longed to squeeze Josie’s cheeks or have a late-night talk with April.
But my kids left me for healthy reasons. They had lives to live.
This is different. It’s my husband leaving me while he’s still here, staring blind at memories that stand in front of us like ghosts.
I imagine us here with screeching appliances only I can hear and ghosts only I can see.
I shudder and circle the name of a random repairman, wondering if this house will be the best place to do this. To watch my husband die.
The doctor spoke with me privately after the diagnosis. She said it would be imperative for me to take care of myself, to get support. That Billy will become a shell of himself. She handed me a pamphlet.
I dial the repairman. We set a time for him to come next week.
That moment with the doctor, with the pamphlet in hand, was when I asked, How long?
Part of me wanted her to promise that it would be fast, but her eyes were full of apology.
Could be three years, four years, five years, ten.