“We’re good, Mom,” Dylan said.
“Because it may get cold.”
Kate had always worried about others being cold—she couldn’t believe the boys’ youthful furnaces could rev so efficiently.
David stood closer to her. “Everything is fine. There’s nothing to worry about.”
“Excellent,” she said, sounding completely reassured, and the tour guide nodded approvingly.
CHAPTER TWO
Mrs. Nowicki touched Kate’s arm lightly and said, “It’s your husband, David. He’s here to see you.” David thought he saw a slight moment of recognition, but it was so brief he could have imagined it, and now Kate wore her empty, polite expression as she said, “It’s good to meet you.” He wanted to bolt. Instead, he sat near her and they listened to music while he showed her photos from their front garden, which he had kept up for the sake of the neighbors, leaving the back on its own except for the mowing.
Each year it became a little less like the house that she’d lived in. Nothing was actually torn or broken, just worn past the point where she normally would have brought home samples of carpet, paint, or fabric and then steered him to her choice. There were no fresh flowers in the house now.
“Kate, do you want to go outside for a while?” he asked, and she blinked a few times, then stood and followed him through the back porch to the large lawn, where they found an empty bench and watched two of the house cats play. After a while, she stood and walked towards the wooden fence at the back of the lawn, stopping at the first row of viburnum to finger the leaves. She looked with unusual concentration at the man-made pond just beyond the fence.
“We can’t go to the water now, but I’ll take you this Saturday through the park entrance,” David offered as he walked towards her. She appraised him, which moved him—it was so much like when he would ask her to watch hockey with him and she’d say, “I believe I’ll clean grout instead.” Odd, how opposition carried a certain charm for him now.
He guided her back to the bench and they sat for what seemed like a very long time, though he wouldn’t let himself look at his watch. Finally, he walked her back to her room. As he turned to shut the door behind them, she did too and they bumped hard against each other. She drew him to her and kissed him. Her tongue parted his teeth briefly, but then she stepped back. “I don’t want my husband to see us.”
“Katie, Katie,” he whispered, and then in a louder voice, “I understand. I’ll leave.”
Though he didn’t. He took a chair and opened an old Sports Illustrated, though he wouldn’t remember any of it when he later tried to talk sports. Kate took a seat too and seemed to forget he was there—or at least didn’t seem to mind—and after a few minutes, an aide arrived. He considered this aide to be Kate’s favorite, though he had nothing to base it on except that he liked how she spoke to Kate. All of the aides seemed kind and professional, but Tyiesha had a way of working with Kate while seeming oblivious to her decay.
“I’ll help her get ready for bed unless you want to, Mr. Sanders.” Young people seemed incapable of calling him by his first name. Couldn’t she see he was young too?
He pointed to his briefcase and said, “I need to tackle the insurance. I’ll be in one of the visitor rooms.”
She steered Kate towards the bathroom. “Sounds like I’ve definitely got the better job tonight. Good luck.”
“Thanks,” he said. He stood and surveyed the small alien room. Leaving without her was always a mixture of loneliness and relief. He walked down the hall towards one of the small rooms, part-parlor, part-office, where visitors could take a break, meet with staff, or do paperwork at the half-size desk. He passed Mrs. Nowicki, who stopped for a moment as he waved his briefcase at her.
“Oh, good, David. I didn’t want to ask how it was going, but I see you’re on it.”
“Yes, a double Scotch, please.” Her mouth twitched a little as they parted, and he gave himself extra points for getting the sweet but serious woman to laugh.
He laid out his paperwork that now had a new pile labeled “dispute.” After paying efficiently for almost two years, the insurance company for the good policy had decided that his skimpy, almost-nothing policy, like something advertised on TV by a badly faded movie star, might be primary after all. Who would think that the words “primary,” “secondary,” and “recalculate” could cause such dread and fear and problems? Before this, his worries had been about car accidents, illness, and money, even though it had been years since he and Kate were poor.
There was a list of other items to fret about in descending order, but he kept them pretty well at bay. Still, here he was: illness and money—and, always, car accidents. And now, recalculations. He sorted his piles and looked for the log. He had followed Martha’s warning to keep a record of every phone call, email, and contact with an insurance company or any other players. “You’ll think you won’t need it because the first couple of people you talk to will make you believe it’s easily fixed. They’ll be lying. Keep that in mind—almost everyone you talk with is either lying or mistaken.” She had managed the medical bills for her parents’ final years as well as for her husband’s heart surgery, an operation that was a success, though the billing mistakes almost killed her.
He couldn’t find his log or the to-do list he’d attached to it. He sorted through files and loose papers a second time; without them, there was no way he could reconstruct all of his work. He knew he had become intolerant of the sensation of losing things, and he felt like a young child overwhelmed by unfairness. The log wasn’t there, nor the bills he’d been working on, and he remembered nothing of the contents. Fuck this, he thought. He swept his arm across the papers just as a voice behind him said, “Hello, I’m Jane, one of the social workers.”
He turned to see a woman in her late forties—or maybe a young fifty—assessing the papers on the desk. “I’m David Sanders,” he said. “I haven’t seen you here before.”
“I’ve consulted with the L for two or three months, but very part-time and not usually at night.”
She used the same abbreviation he and the boys had come up with for the Loon Lake Ladies Retirement Home. “Mom would have loved the name,” Dylan had decided. “She’d say, ‘My brain has retired. I must join it.’ ” They all liked doing Kate impersonations.
Jane wrinkled her forehead. “Your name is so familiar to me. I’ve heard of you from outside of here.”
“I teach in the history department at the university.”
She shook her head slightly, as if that wasn’t it.
“And what do you do, Jane, besides walking the halls listening for the sounds of a relative’s meltdown?”
“For starters, I give out a lot of Kleenex. And I help people in despair over their paperwork. Yours looks worse than usual. Did you throw it in the air or just shuffle it?”
“Kind of both. Just so you know, I’m usually more cheerful than this.”
“No one expects you to be cheerful.”
“Are you sure? I feel like Kate and I are on perpetual probation.”
“If Kate deteriorates and can’t be managed here—and there are no signs of that—it has nothing to do with how you act. You’re not graded. And she’s not exactly graded—either we can take care of her safely, or we can’t.”
He thought of figure-skating pairs and how a healthy marriage is like that, minus the grace and the horrible costumes. Such mutual dependence—your scores might be high or low, but you were getting the same score. Not for him and Kate. Apparently they weren’t in the pairs’ event anymore.
“I can help you sort through the insurance stuff,” Jane said. “The business office can only go so far trying to untangle things.”
He sighed. “You’re willing to look at this mess?”
“I like the challenge. I don’t get mad or panicked like relatives do. Well, sometimes I do. Being human and all.”
“I can see why you’d want to establish that before agreeing to take this on.”
She smiled. “That’s for another day. You’ll have to sort out these piles first. Show me everything in order and then I’ll start.” She gave him her card. “I’ll leave you to it,” and left the room in her quiet, sensible shoes.
David let himself watch her walk the first hall length until she turned a corner, then he worked a while longer, putting things in their proper folders. He found the log, which was not hiding or missing after all, and he felt cheerful—or maybe something more than cheerful. It was an unfamiliar feeling.
CHAPTER THREE
David had two remaining good friends. Several others had drifted—whether it was when he became chair of the department or when Kate got ill, he wasn’t sure. The timing had been so close. One who remained, Tucker, was an associate history professor who had liked being in the orbit of David’s family life. “Soon I’ll be too old to have kids without looking ridiculous, so I may have to appropriate yours,” he had said more than once. They still got along well at work, but Tucker, recently and traumatically divorced, didn’t want to be around the sad person that David was outside of the university borders. They’d begun to confine their time to work, just after work, and the occasional movie where little was expected of them.
David loved his job. He knew he was lucky to have it and, early into Kate’s illness, understood he had to keep himself together at school. He was careful not to be distracted or visibly miserable, but he couldn’t keep that up outside of work hours. His other friend, Ian, didn’t mind morose.
“It’s not catching, what you have,” he said when David commented on Ian’s imperviousness to his moods. “And it must be exhausting for you—all those hours on the job making sure no one pities you. Well, I pity you plenty, so don’t bother being fake with me. Besides, you’re still funny. You’re a dark, pathetic, funny bastard, and my brothers are four thousand miles away, so you’ll have to do.”
Ian ran the university’s international programs and had emigrated from northern England for the job. Stocky, with the ruddy skin and imperfect un-American teeth that could give away his nationality even before the working class remnants of his accent did, Ian was so happy to have a tenure-track job, and now tenure, that he never complained—or at least not about anything personal or job related—as if he feared it could all be taken from him on grounds of ingratitude. And he never complained about the weather. “The lot of you are spoiled,” he’d say. His accent strengthened with each beer.
So Ian was now the only person David confided in. Others changed the subject with practiced speed, but with Ian, he could give his brief but terrible update and Ian would listen and then say “That is so fucked,” and no matter how long before they next met, he would remember everything David had said.
They never parted with anything more emotional than “later, man.” Neither initiated awkward hugs or bumps. Once last year, David had cried in the privacy of a rear restaurant booth, Ian his only witness. Ian waited and then said, “I don’t see how it is you don’t do that all day long. Tough as titanium you are—nice guy but tough as titanium.”
Once, noticing a waitress flirt with David, Ian said, “You must get horny. I mean, Christ, you had a wife who basically never turned you down.” David was pretty sure he had never said such a thing—it was an exaggeration—but maybe Ian had just picked up on what he hadn’t said.
“Listen, the next time Daphne goes to England, let’s you and me go to Vegas.” Ian’s wife returned home three or four times a year, about three trips to every one that Ian could make. Ian missed her, but they had made a deal when he took the job. He never strayed, at least as far as David knew. “I like the reunions when she comes home,” Ian said once, mildly.
“Vegas? You call it Vegas?”
“We can see the Crazy Horse show. It’s classy, they say. They’re real ballet dancers, naked, in toe shoes and everything. And then afterwards, you can call one of those numbers you see everywhere and have a date. No one will get arrested. I won’t be calling anyone, of course. I’ll be in my room wanking off.”
“You know I’m not doing any of that.”
“But you could.”
“You’ve done it? Dated?”
“I’ve done everything.” Ian had grown up poor and tough. He added, quietly, “I’m just saying, there’s everything to play for.”
As he drove to the L, David’s attention was flagged by the words “baby boomers” and he turned the radio up. He was always interested in what his cohort was up to, even if the baby part sounded sillier and sillier as they either aged or died. He listened to a scientist say that people born between 1959 and 1969 can expect to live until the age of—pause—70. Seventy! Shit, you mean he only has a dozen or so more years to live? David knew that like most of the babies, he planned to die at 92, still fit. Lonely though he was, he didn’t want life to end. Anyone who knew even a little history knew that despite his bad luck with Kate, he was still an extraordinarily lucky guy.
The topic of the radio show turned out to be the paltry retirement savings his age group had managed to put aside. Not him. He sometimes thought he’d done nothing but save for retirement. He turned off the radio and parked. Give me a show about married widowers, he lectured the silent radio, and then I’ll listen.
He signed in and found an empty office. It was a Friday, not his normal day, but he decided to see Kate afterwards anyway. Kate wouldn’t know it was an extra visit, but he couldn’t picture being here and not spending time with her. Or he could picture it, but he couldn’t do it. He had developed a sort of tic of imagining himself being watched when he was at the facility, or when he was anywhere except work and home, as if he were on a reality show being judged for his skill and style as the husband of a sick wife.
He was fishing files from his briefcase when Jane came in saying, “Don’t throw them out! I beg of you!”
They both laughed and he didn’t feel embarrassed.
“You’ll like my records,” he said. “I got out Kate’s arsenal of Post-its and highlighters.”
“She was the organized one?”
He nodded. “I didn’t even know what an Explanation of Benefits was until this happened. She handled the insurance and the tax returns. She was good at math—everything except time zones. She always knew how many hours difference but did the arithmetic wrong.”
“Did she work? Outside the home, I mean.”
“When we met, she was an accountant. I was in grad school. Then we moved here for my job and she joined a big-deal accounting firm. But after she had the first baby, she lost interest in accounting.”
“She didn’t work after that?”
“She went back to school. She is—was—a nurse-midwife. Turned out that was her real calling.”
Jane glanced down before meeting his eyes again. “It must have been horrible for her when she had to stop working.”
“Yes,” was all he said, and when the pause felt too long, he added, “Horrible is the right word.”
“She sounds gifted—and except for setting watches—very efficient and capable.”
“That wasn’t who she was, though. It was a means to an end—she’d say that all the organizing was just so we could get to the fun part of living. I can hear her now: ‘We can’t enjoy life if our kids don’t learn to spell, or we miss the T-Ball sign-up, or someone has a toothache because they don’t floss. Come on, boys, let’s get those dishes done so we can get to the fun part!’ Sometimes, she’d—” David stopped abruptly and looked at the ceiling.
“David.”
“I need a glass of water.”
Jane brought him water, judging skillfully, he noticed, how much time he needed to collect himself.
Then she asked, “How is it that you have not one but two long-term care policies? Do you have any idea how unusually prepared that is?”
“When Kate turned forty-nine, not even fifty, mind you, her mom and dad gave us each long-term care policies. They said they’d pay for five years and after that, split it with
us.”
“Wow, that’s generous.”
“I know. At the time it just seemed nutty, money down the drain. I tried to argue with them. I had a little teaser policy through work, an almost worthless thing, and I had actually looked into the idea of getting better policies, but it was so expensive and I just didn’t see us as such pessimistic gamblers.”
“What did Kate think?”
“You know, I had forgotten about this part, but later that night on her birthday, I tried to get her to laugh with me about this truly bizarre gift and to talk about how we could get them to change their minds. She acted like she agreed with me, but I could tell she didn’t.” He added something he had never thought of before. “I wonder if she knew something already.”
They sat quietly for a moment. Finally, Jane said, “This is going to be solvable, but it may take a while. One of these companies is obviously wrong about who has to pay first, and the fees are high enough that they both have to pay, so I don’t know why they’re acting like eight year olds.” She shrugged. “I’m going to offer you a few books to read. If you haven’t seen them before, you’re welcome to borrow them, and hey, they’re not about insurance.”
He laughed a little and thanked her, then signed a paper allowing her to talk to the warring companies as well as his HR department. He watched her make her first call, eventually leaving a message.
“I see you are human,” he said. “You get stuck in voice mail too.”
“Flesh, bones, and a beating heart. The whole package.”
Jane turned aside to tidy up the desk and he took the chance to study her. At the sound of her vibrating cell, she took a complicated call about rescheduling a meeting involving many extremely busy people. He closed his eyes and tried to figure out why she seemed so familiar to him. She was as dark as Kate was fair, though they were about the same (average) height, and both were still slim. Kate looked like a young woman from the back and, in crowded settings, he used to catch himself feeling guilty for admiring a girl—he used the word in his mind only—who proved to be his wife when she turned around. He wondered again how old Jane was. He suspected she had the olive skin that Kate had once pointed out to him. “Mediterranean women’s faces don’t age,” she’d said wistfully.
The Half-Life of Everything Page 2