“Life’s not great right now, but I’m okay.”
“You were gone for so long.” Still looking at the sidewalk. “And you didn’t answer my texts.”
“I was in Hawaii—I don’t know why I didn’t get them, but I didn’t.” I mentally make a note to check my phone. “I didn’t mean to ignore you—not at all.”
“How did you get to Hawaii?”
“The normal way—by airplane.” I grin.
No answer.
“People donated a condo and money for plane tickets.”
“Did you see all the amazing stuff they show on ads? Was it the most incredible place on Earth?”
“Yes and yes, and please look at me. You can come over and see my photos sometime.”
“Okay.” He raises his face, and it’s a mix of emotion that I’ve not seen before on a boy: scared, happy, hopeful, nervous, and a little bit of sad.
“Hanging out is good, Sid. Any time.”
“With you. And your dad.” This time he doesn’t drop his eyes.
“Right. I’m working and doing a photo essay for the college I want to go to, plus Dad takes a lot of time, so I’m busy. Might not happen a lot.”
Sid’s face dissolves into one emotion: disappointment.
“But I’d like it. I really would.”
His eyebrows go up. “Really?”
I laugh. His eyebrows. “Yes. Hang out with us and be my friend, just like you’ve been forever.”
His eyes don’t leave mine. “I’ll play for your dad. And you and Ike.”
“We’d love it. You’re a dork.”
“A big fat music dork.” He’s utterly sincere.
“And that’s great.” I grin in response.
Then the shop door opens, and Ike comes out, carrying a table. He sees me and Sid. “Whoops. Didn’t mean to interrupt.” He grins big and wiggles his eyebrows at me. Thank god Sid’s back is to him.
I stick my tongue out. “Nothing to see here, dork. We were just talking.”
Sid blushes.
“Pop-up store time. Your dad’s coming in a second.” Ike points inside. “He’s discussing which albums he wants to sell today.”
“I saw his Gord’s Gold crate in the back. Looks like someone’s been loading it up.” I look through the window. Dad’s talking to Paul and Allison. He’s got his walker, and aside from that, they all look sort of normal. Sort of like my family has always looked.
Sort of. Definitely not the same.
Ike pops the legs out on the table, then opens the door and grabs the MAMA DUCK’S RECORD STORE sign. He places it on the sidewalk at one end of the table. “Want to help me grab the albums, Tobin?”
“Sure.”
Sid raises his violin to his shoulder. “Gotta go back to my spot. See ya.” He smiles and nods, and just as suddenly as he was at the store, he’s walking back toward the Rocky Mountain Chocolate Factory, violin under his chin, playing Darth Vader’s theme from Star Wars. People are staring, and he just nods and walks. I wonder where his violin case is. Maybe the Rocky Mountain people agreed to keep it for him, if he agreed to buy a bunch of chocolate.
I go back inside.
“Here you are.” Paul hands me an armful of albums, and I take them out to Ike, then come back in for more.
“Nice young man.” Paul gives me one of his serene but knowing smiles.
“Yes. He is.” And I mentally send Sid a big hug, for being a reliable, true friend.
Dad throws an elbow as I hold the door for him. “Out of the way, Tobin.” He grins a very pre-rickety grin as he turtles by me. “This badass is coming at you. Duluth, you better watch out.”
Ike comes back in for a chair and the Gord’s Gold crate, and then my dad is ready. There are already tourists gathering around the table.
There are worse ways he could spend his time.
What we make at Trash Box on Memorial Day and Labor Day weekends balances out what we make in January, which might be all of $100. Winter tourists aren’t big shoppers. Eight-hour shifts get long, especially on holiday weekends, but walking home is nice, once I get past the lift bridge and all the gawkers on both sides. Dad and Ike stayed until about two, then packed up their shop again. “Wouldn’t want the customers to get too used to us,” my dad said. Nope. Can’t let the magic die.
When I get a couple blocks away, I can see there are pickups in front of my house. There’s a bed in the back of one, and boxes in another.
What if he died in the last three hours? Would they wait to tell me?
I’m out of breath from running when I heave myself up the stairs. There’s nobody in the yard. “Dad!” I scream it. “DAD!”
Ike comes out of the kitchen. “Tobin, what’s wrong?”
“Where’s Dad?” I’m panting.
He points out the back door. “Sitting on the back porch, staying out of the way. Talking to my parents and Mark, another EMT buddy of theirs. Why?”
He’s not dead. That’s good.
“What’s up with the pickups?”
“He didn’t tell you.” Ike rolls his eyes. “I should never believe him when he says he has.”
“What the hell is going on?”
“I’m moving in. I hope that’s okay.” It’s clear he doesn’t know how I’ll take this. “He was good in Hawaii, but he’s getting weaker every day. His numbers are down—he’s at a 23 now.” He pauses. “I won’t boss you around and I’ll stay out of the way.”
I close my eyes. “How do we afford you in the first place?” I’ve never specifically asked.
“Your dad has a long-term care policy for some of it. I work cheap for the rest of it.”
“How old are you?”
He furrows his forehead. “Twenty-six. Why?”
“Just checking. Gracie is going to ask.”
“Your Harry Potter friend?”
“She thinks you’re hot.”
Ike laughs with a belly laugh that’s deeper than almost any I’ve heard. “She’s way too young for me. No thank you.”
“I’ll pass that on.”
“Can you help us finish bringing in the rest of the stuff? Use those photography muscles?”
“Sure. But who’s cooking now? Me? You?”
“We’ll make a chart or something.” He grins. “But you’re gonna eat some Mexican food—huevos rancheros and tacos, not gringo ones, some pozole—on the regular. Got it?”
“I’m in. Dad will love it, too.”
Dad’s on the back porch, chatting with Rich, Elena, and Mark, looking tired from his pop-up store excursion. Elena hugs me and tells me there are three dozen homemade tortillas in the fridge. I hug her again. I’d skip bread for the rest of my life if I could have homemade tortillas instead. I have no idea when she has time to cook.
Finally, we get all the stuff hauled upstairs to the spare room, and I fix burgers on the grill with some potato salad from the store. Everybody’s kind, but we have a new person in our house.
Someone who will cook now and use our bathroom all the time.
Someone who brought a small Jesus statue, photos of loved ones who’ve passed on, a rosary from his grandma—his abuela—and a tall candle with glass sides and the Virgin Mary on it, all set on a special table in the spare room. His room.
Someone who’s helping my dad die.
No matter how much I like Ike, Hawaii didn’t prepare me for this.
“Tobin, come here.” Dad calls me into the living room while I’m finishing the dishes. Ike’s upstairs unpacking boxes.
“Need something?” I wipe my hands on a towel as I go to him.
“Look. I’ve got a lot of pages now.” He holds up a stack of paper, with writing on it that looks like an eight-year-old kid’s. “Your Big Book of Advice.” He’s excited. “Ike’s going to type it. It’s going to be so good, Tobin.” Then he bursts into tears.
I sit next to him on the couch and offer my hand. He clutches it like he’s drowning, and he sobs. And sobs. And sobs. All the sobs he didn’t cry
while we were gone. All the sobs I threw in the lake the instant I got back to Duluth, right along with my heart.
When he’s down to just sniffles, I pat his shoulder. “Can you tell me one of the bad dad jokes in there?”
“It’s a surprise.” He reaches for a Kleenex and blows his nose. But then he caves. “Why do chicken coops only have two doors?”
“I don’t know. Why?”
“Because if they had four, they’d be chicken sedans!”
I smile in spite of myself. “That’s not terrible.”
He smiles back. He’s so tired. “Can you help me up the stairs? Ike can take it from there.”
“Absolutely.” I get him off the couch, and we ricket toward the stairs, leaving the walker behind in the living room in favor of his cane. “Ike! Lipstick Fish coming your way.” Hawaii’s state fish, the one with the long and wild name, looks like it has lipstick on. And they were everywhere, tons of them, every time we snorkeled.
“Ready to receive The Fishly One.” Ike’s at the top, smiling down. “You’re still miles ahead of Stephen Hawking if you can climb stairs. Eventually we’ll have to move your bedroom to the living room.”
My dad frowns. “Hell no. I still deserve some privacy.”
“Fair enough, if you don’t mind me carrying your ass up the stairs.” Ike smiles, but I know he’s extremely serious.
“Whatever, asshole. I care about not having to sleep in the middle of the goddamn living room.” The frown is as deep on his forehead as it is on his mouth.
Ike keeps smiling. Dad’s brain doesn’t faze him.
“Lipstick Fish launching.” I help Dad get up the first step, and he can usually go from there, using the rail and his cane.
Once he’s at the top, Dad turns around and looks down at me, all signs of the anger gone from his face. “Love you, Tobin. Favorite person. On the planet. Never forget.”
“Goodnight, Dad.” Smiling back at him pulls against the edges of my frozen insides.
He and Ike shuffle into the bathroom.
I leave his book on the coffee table, where he can find it in the morning. Underneath it, there’s another notebook, which I hadn’t noticed.
It’s photographs.
I flip through it. The shots are gorgeous. The lake, the bridge, the dunes. Me as a tiny baby. Me as a toddler—at the max, I’m three. Me in a pink Power Rangers Halloween costume. Me as a pumpkin. Me and Dad. So many photos of me and Dad.
In the very back of the notebook, there’s a note.
I love you, Steve. Thanks for this sweet life, this beautiful baby girl.
Meredith took these. My mom.
I look through them one more time, then slip the notebook back under his manuscript.
What happened to these people?
I make sure the kitchen is settled down, and then I get the action figures from my room, waving at Dad in bed as I go by. Ike’s door is closed already. In the living room, I manage to perch Professor X’s chair on the edge of Dad’s walker, with Rey pushing him. It takes twenty minutes and a lot of tape. Then Mystique spends some time in the middle of the coffee table, with her arm around Rey’s throat, strangling her with her elbow. Rey is on her knees. Then I make two little tiny cardboard phones, strung together with dental floss, and pose Rey and Mystique talking to each other at opposite ends of the coffee table. I shoot from both ends and then in the middle. I also make a little cardboard camera and find Little Rey. Mystique takes some photos of her. I can insert them earlier in the story.
This will be the most messed-up entrance portfolio anybody’s ever seen at that college, but I don’t care. Realism works for me, if my mother were blue and my dad were bald, that is. And they were both mutants. Or if I were a badass Jedi warrior who didn’t realize she was a Jedi.
That notebook. Those photos.
Between them and Hawaii, my insides are thawing.
I can still see my heart, on the bottom of the lake. It’s getting smaller and smaller.
Just like my dad. Just like our life together.
Dad’s Big Book of Advice #11
Always put the TP *over* the roll (Not!! Under!!).
JUNE 10
Now that it’s mostly nice outside, Dad and Ike take a constitutional—an old word for “walking around and looking at stuff”—every day they’re not running their pop-up shop, which they do at least twice a week. Allison has cleared out a lot of albums, and it’s freed up space in the back room for all sorts of new crap.
My dad loves having Ike push him everywhere, even though he said, “I was just running marathons eight months ago, and now I’m in a wheelchair,” ten times an hour for three solid days. But sometimes Ike straps him in and jogs while he pushes, so Dad can finally go fast again. That’s Dad’s ultimate. Ike wraps his abuela’s rosary around the wheelchair handle, right in front of his hand, “just for extra protection,” he says. It must work, because they never wreck.
He still walks in the house, with his walker and his cane. The wheelchair is just for outside and being away from the house. Just those times.
That’s what I tell myself.
Today, when I come out of the back room after fishing out more antique books for all the weirdos who think antique books are awesome, Dad and Ike have arrived with Subway for lunch. Mama Duck’s Record Store was outside from nine till noon, and then they got hungry. They’re going for their constitutional after lunch.
Ike holds up a bag. “Your favorite—BMT with salt and vinegar chips and a Sprite.”
“I’m all about it.”
Allison nods from behind the register. “Go eat outside. It’s gorgeous out there.”
Dad reaches out of his wheelchair for a porcelain statue of a bulldog wearing a top hat. “Where do you get stuff like this?”
Ike swipes it back from him. “We didn’t come back here to shop, viejo.” He puts it back on the shelf, out of Dad’s reach. I’ve seen Dad rearrange whole shelves of stuff, which pisses Allison off completely. Nothing like brotherly help.
“Don’t call me an old man, you young fool.” Dad smiles at Ike, and he smiles back.
Allison fixes Dad with a look. She’s been reading our Yelp reviews. “You might want to talk with your daughter about arguing with customers. Not very helpful.”
“What did you want me to do? He was going off about how Superior is a much better city than Duluth, and I couldn’t let that stand.” I do admit I’d gotten a little snippy with him, but it was after a long night of Dad’s misbehaving brain.
Dad grins. “We may be twin ports, but there’s only one win port.”
“Send that to the chamber of commerce, Dad.”
Ike laughs.
Allison frowns. “Go eat, would you?”
Ike pushes Dad back out the front door, and I follow. There are picnic tables by the restaurant next door, so we sit there. We can see Grandma’s Restaurant from here. Dad’s having marathon meetings every other day, it seems, which is good. He needs focus. Ike must be bored out of his mind while he waits for Dad to be done. They have the meetings upstairs in the bar, and it must give Dad strength to pass his photo—they have all the marathon winners’ pictures in the stairwell—because other than that, I have no idea how he climbs them.
I hear notes from a violin wafting over the summer-ish air.
Ike turns toward the sound. “Wonder how much your friend Sid is pulling down each day.”
“Fifty-ish bucks a day?” When we texted yesterday, he told me he’d earned forty-three dollars the day before.
“Puts gas in a car and buys some Subway for lunch. Not horrible.”
“Better than Trash Box.”
Dad points at me. “Allison is very kind to you, and always works around your school schedule when it’s the school year. And if you’re messing with her Yelp reviews, that’s not good.”
“But she’s crabby and bossy all the time, not just because she got a bad review.”
“And also your guardian, at some point, so get it to
gether.” Dad’s look is stern over his Philly steak and cheese.
“Why can’t Ike be my guardian?”
Ike chuckles. “Because I’m a big kid, and you’re a middle-sized kid, and people would think you were my girlfriend, and if there’s anything Rich taught me, aside from everything else in the world, it’s to be proper around women, especially young ones. So no. We don’t need gossip.”
“It’s good to be with family.” Dad chews the little bits of sandwich that Ike pulls off the big sandwich. It’s getting harder for him to swallow.
I banish that thought to the place I keep all his ALS changes: right next to my heart on the bottom of Lake Superior.
“Ike’s not family?” Now I raise my eyebrow at Dad. “He’s the son of a man you’ve known longer than you’ve had a daughter. He helps you wipe your ass.”
Ike spits his Coke. My dad frowns. “Vulgarity isn’t necessary, is it?”
“It’s only vulgar if you say it is.” I raise my eyebrow again.
Ike grins. “Yes, I’m family. But Allison is your aunt, and better equipped to be a parent than I am, since she already has grown-up kids, and I might be a wandering vagabond once I’m done caring for your dad. I don’t know.” Ike’s finished with his sandwich and is eating the other half of Dad’s Philly steak and cheese.
Once I’m done caring for your dad. Shove. Onto the bottom of the lake, right next to not being able to chew or swallow well.
“What’s your plan, Rambling Man?” My dad’s arm shakes as he holds his Coke up to his lips to find the straw. Ike steadies him.
“I need to get my ass into college before I go gray, but I haven’t decided when or where.”
“Speaking of college, Tobin, is there anything we need to do for your entrance portfolio?” For just a second, he sounds like my dad, strong and capable.
“Gotta take more photos. Caption them so they make a story. Fill out a form.”
“As long as you’re working on it.”
I nod.
“How’s my birthday party coming? Only a couple of months.” He smiles. “Got my duck yet?”
“Allison’s helping with invites, and I think she has the cake lined up. I talked to her friend who’s a caterer, so we have the food ordered. I’ve got a set of photos that are being blown up for decorations. I have to buy streamers and plates and do a couple other things. No luck with the rubber duck.”
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