Death Benefits

by Sarah N. Harvey

  I never met my mom’s father until we moved here. Arthur was close to eighty when I was born. He told my mom that his traveling days were over, so he never came to visit us, even though he could afford it. He never offered to fly us out to Victoria either. Never remembered birthdays or Christmas. I guess we weren’t sufficiently interesting or useful to him. That all changed in late October when he had a small stroke and ended up in the hospital. Mom, who was listed as Arthur’s next-of-kin, got a call from a doctor in Victoria who said Arthur was going to be sent home soon, but he couldn’t drive anymore or cook his own meals or look after the house. For two weeks after his release from hospital, he would have twenty-four-hour care, paid for by his health insurance. After that, he was someone else’s problem. Marta was too far away and too busy with her tennis and her banker and all her children and grandchildren. Mom only had me and a few piano students. And a shitload of guilt, it turns out.

  We packed everything up, said goodbye to our friends and drove across the country in our old Audi wagon. It wasn’t much of a road trip. Not like in the movies. Before we left Nova Scotia, I took a vow of silence that lasted until Saskatoon, where I broke down and begged for a burger rather than the sandwiches Mom made in our crappy motel room every night. She may have been enjoying the quiet for all I know, but all she said was, “McDonald’s okay with you?” After that, it took more effort to stay silent than to talk, so the western provinces went by pretty quickly.

  By the time we were on the ferry to Vancouver Island, I was positively giddy (for me). I stayed outside for the whole trip, watching for whales, taking pictures for Japanese tourists on their expensive digital cameras, covering my ears when the ship’s whistle blew. Another ferry passed us, dangerously close it seemed to me, and I waved at a guy who was leaning over the railing of the other ship. He didn’t wave back. I flipped him off, but then I realized that he was puking. Oops. A woman in a red jacket stood behind him, arms crossed, watching him vomit.

  My mom had joined me on the deck, the wind whipping her ponytail into her face. She squinted at the couple on the other ferry and grinned. “Good times,” she said. “At least you’re not a puker.”

  “You know me,” I said. “Stomach of steel.”

  A hair was stuck to her lipstick and she brushed it off. “I’m sorry about this, Rolly. The move. Your grandpa. I know it’s hard for you. But I couldn’t just leave him on his own. He raised me. Just because we’re not close now doesn’t mean he didn’t do his best.”

  “Right,” I said. “His best was live-in nannies, boarding schools and summer camps. What a guy.”

  “He had no choice,” she protested. “My mother left us when I was three months old. He had to go where there was work. He couldn’t very well take a baby on tour, could he? And he was in great demand. Berlin, New York, Paris. Everyone wanted the great Arthur Jenkins. There just wasn’t enough Arthur to go around. So I did without.”

  “Bitter much?” I said.

  She glared at me and turned to go inside. “Not as bitter as he is,” she said.

  Now, after a couple of months of catering to his every whim, she’s interviewing caregivers and considering the seniors’ equivalent of boarding school. No privacy, bad food and inmates who wet the bed. Tit for tat, Grandpa. What goes around, etc., etc.

  Mom interviews about a dozen applicants before she finds one she likes even a little bit. A tiny woman who looks like she’s about eighty herself, prides herself on getting her “old gents” squeaky clean “down there.” Gross. One guy arrives on a huge chopper. He has a shaved head and a lot of prison tats—all blue, all nasty. He says he only looks after “old straight white dudes” and he always has to have Mondays off for his “meetings.” Mom looks him in the eye and tells him that Grandpa is black (which he definitely isn’t) and gay (ditto) and Jewish (I’m not sure, but with a name like Jenkins I doubt it). Biker dude stomps off, muttering about kikes, fags and niggers. “Nazi creep,” Mom says.

  By the time Mavis arrives, Mom is desperate. Mavis is a retired nurse, British, with a faint white mustache, stained teeth and muscular forearms. She says she has lots of experience with “old folks” and that she’s sure Mr. Jenkins is a “poppet.” Not bloody likely, I want to say. She also claims to like “a bit of Brahms over tea,” which endears her to Mom, and she is so much better qualified than any of the other applicants that Mom gives her the job on the spot. No reference check, which seems unwise to me.

  She starts work the next day, and Grandpa, predictably, hates her on sight. Refuses to talk to her or eat her cooking. I could have told Mom that Grandpa, even though he’s really old, would still want to be looked after by someone young and hot, but since no one of that description applied for the job, I didn’t think she would find my opinion helpful. He phones Mom on her cell about twenty times that first day, raving about cutting her out of his will. Telling her how ungrateful she is. He even compares himself to King Lear, which I guess makes Mom Cordelia, the good daughter. Which probably makes me the Fool. He calls Mavis an old cow, a dyke and a sadist (apparently she cooked him something called Spotted Dick). Two days later Mavis quits, and Mom starts the whole process again.

  This time she gets lucky right away. Lily is from the Philippines, she’s trained as a care aide and she’s super-motivated, since she’s trying to save money to bring her husband and kids to Canada. She doesn’t know anything about classical music, but she laughs a lot, she’s tattoo-free (at least as far as I can see) and she’s clearly not a dyke. She asks for Sundays off to go to church. That’s it. She’s happy to work six days a week, twelve hours a day, happy being the operative word. I’ve never met anyone who laughs so much with so little reason.

  “She’s perfect,” Mom says after Lily leaves. “Dad will absolutely love her.”

  “Yeah, right,” I say, imagining him grabbing Lily’s ass as she brings him his lunch.

  For a minute Mom looks as if she is in pain. Maybe she’s reliving some past injury or it might simply be a leg cramp. Her father never remarried after her mother took off. She’s not even sure her parents were ever married, but according to Mom, he always had a female companion when she was growing up. He’d turn up for lunch twice a year at her boarding school with Carmen or Graziella or Therese. All much younger than him, all musicians. He particularly liked singers. None of them came a second time. And now Mom has sent a sweet, youngish, relatively attractive woman into the dragon’s den.

  “I’m sure it’ll be fine,” she says. “Dad is far too old…”

  I snort.

  “And Lily’s married, Royce.”

  “What does that have to do with anything?” I ask.

  Two weeks later, Lily is history. Apparently Grandpa flashed her, and not just at bath time. The first few times, she laughed it off, but when he asked her to sit on his naked lap, she ran out of the house, called my mother and quit.

  “I guess I’m lucky she hasn’t filed charges.” Mom is on the phone to Marta the day after Lily quits. I sit across the table from her in the kitchen, trying to guess what Marta is saying. Nothing good, from the look on Mom’s face.

  “I can’t ask him to do that,” she says. “And I can’t afford to take the time off work. Not now. Not ever. And even if I could, I’d kill Dad within a week.” She forces a laugh, but she’s still frowning. Her hair looks like mine: dull, flat and stringy. The only difference is that she pulls hers back into a ponytail when she’s working outside. Ponytails on guys are lame. She stands up and starts pacing the kitchen: sink, fridge, stove, table, sink, fridge, stove, table.

  “I’ll think about it, Marta,” she says. “He won’t like it.”

  Marta must say some Australian equivalent of tough shit, because Mom starts yelling, “Why don’t you send Mandy, Marta? You said yourself she needs a change of scene—a challenge. Why do Royce and I have to deal with this? God knows, you’ve got the money. And the time. Why don’t you hang up the tennis racquet for a season? Marta? Marta?” She holds the phone a
way from her face and stares at it as if it’s a dead rat. “She hung up on me! Can you believe it? Sixty years old and she hung up on me?”

  I shrug. I don’t have any siblings, not even half ones. I have no idea why siblings fight. I’m about to head downstairs, when she says, “You know what Marta thinks?”

  I shake my head. It can’t be good. “What?”

  “She thinks you should look after him.”

  Now it’s my turn to be gobsmacked. I knew that word would come in handy one day. “Why me?” I squeak. “He hates me.”

  “Don’t be ridiculous, Rolly. He doesn’t hate you. He doesn’t know you. You’re not sick anymore, you’re not in school, you’re not doing anything, you don’t have a job and I need the help. Maybe Marta’s right. Maybe it would be good for you. I don’t know.”

  “Good for me,” I echo. “In what way?”

  “Money, self-respect, something to put on your resume? Pick one. Would you prefer that we move in with him? Or have him move in here with us? Either way we’d be at his beck and call all day, every day. And you’ll still have to get a part-time job. I hear McDonald’s is always hiring. Or you can go over to his house for a few hours five days a week. Your choice. And it wouldn’t be forever—just until school starts in the fall. By then I’ll have had a chance to work something else out.”

  “How many hours a day?”

  “Six, to start.”

  “How much money?”

  “What I was paying the others—fifteen an hour.”

  “Cash?”

  She sighs. “Yes. Cash.”

  “Who’s paying?”

  “He is.” She doesn’t elaborate. I’ve never thought about it before, but I guess he’s loaded.

  I do the math: $90 a day, 5 days a week. $450 a week, tax free. $1800 a month for 4 months. $7200. No way I’d make that flipping burgers or pumping gas. By the end of the summer, I’ll have more than enough to buy a car and drive back to Nova Scotia. I’d fly, but I’m phobic. Bad experience in a small plane when I was ten.

  “Until September then. Cash every Friday.”

  Mom nods.

  “I’ll take it under advisement,” I say.

  She nods again. “You do that,” she says. “You’ve got an hour.” She goes into the living room, sits at the piano and starts to play. Something slow and sad—Satie, I think, or Debussy. I always get those two mixed up. I know better than to interrupt her. She tells people she can’t afford therapy, which is why she plays the piano and works in the garden. She sent me for therapy right after we got here, because she thought I might be depressed. I went a few times, just to get her off my case, and then I got mono and couldn’t go anymore. She hasn’t suggested it again. It’s pretty expensive, and I’m not suicidal or anything. Just, as the therapist said, suffering from emotional dislocation. Otherwise known as homesickness. But now, as the liquid notes saturate the walls of the house, I envy her. What would it feel like to retreat into sound or scent, to feel soothed by a Chopin nocturne or calmed by a stand of hollyhocks? The closest I get is when we have waffles and bacon with maple syrup.

  Having my grandfather here would ruin everything. No question. When you’re in the same room as him, it feels as if he is breathing all the air. He likes the curtains closed and the heat cranked up. He can’t listen to music without criticizing the performers. He doesn’t eat what he calls “foreign” food, even though he’s spent so much time in exotic places. He must have been a treat to travel with. So I weigh it out in my mind. Him in my space all the time, or me in his six hours a day. Minimum wage, a dorky uniform and smiling at people I ordinarily wouldn’t talk to versus one cranky old guy, one happy mom and cash. Quite a lot of cash. Enough to get me back home.

  I wait until Mom stops playing before I go into the living room. She is sitting, shoulders hunched, looking at her hands on the keys. Her fingernails are crusted with dirt and there are small cuts on her wrists and the backs of her hands. Not the hands of a musician, Arthur said to her a while ago.

  “Mom?” She looks up when I speak. “You got yourself a deal.”

  Three

  Mom drops me off at Grandpa’s house the next morning on her way to one of her gardening jobs. I haven’t been up this early in months. Mom’s in a good mood, so she lets me drive the truck, which is great until I stall at the Stop sign halfway up the hill to Grandpa’s place. As I struggle with the gears and the clutch and the brake, we start to roll backward down the hill.

  All she says is, “Relax, Rolly. Take your time.”

  I got my learners’ license as soon as I turned sixteen, but Mom’s usually too busy to take me out, and we can’t afford driving lessons. I’ve never had to deal with a hill and a Stop sign before. It sucks.

  I grind the gears and my teeth, and eventually we start going forward again. When we get to Grandpa’s, Mom reaches over and puts her hand on my arm as I set the brake.

  “Do you want me to come in?” she asks.

  I shake my head. “Nah. It’s cool. He knows I’m coming, right?”

  She nods.

  “I’ll figure it out. See you at two.”

  As I walk down the path to the front door, she calls out, “Bye, Rolly,” before she drives off with a brief toot of the horn. I wave without turning around and walk up to the front door, clutching the key she’s given me. I’ve never been here by myself. Should I ring the doorbell before I use the key? Or should I just walk in and risk giving him a heart attack? Before I can make up my mind, the door opens and there he is. Arthur Jenkins, celebrated cellist, legendary ladies’ man, abysmal parent, shitty grandparent.

  “Oh, it’s you,” he snarls. “Where’s your mother?”

  “Work,” I reply. I try to slip by him into the house, but he’s blocking the doorway with his walker. Something smells really bad—sour and burnt. “Uh, can I come in?”

  “Why?”

  Is the dementia this bad already? “I’m here to, uh, help you,” I say.

  “I don’t need any help,” he mutters. He turns around very slowly and walks away from me, leaving the door open. I stand on the doorstep, watching his progress, wondering if I should bail now and face my mom’s wrath later. Fifteen an hour, I think, four hundred and fifty a week, eighteen hundred a month. It will be my mantra for the next four months. I step inside just as he says, “Can you make a decent cup of coffee?”

  “Coffee? Yeah, I guess so. Unless you mean, like, a no-foam low-fat nutmeg cappuccino or something.”

  “I like a café au lait in the morning. Half coffee, half hot milk. Strong coffee. Think you can do that?”

  “Yup.”

  “Not exactly loquacious, are you, boy?” he says. “Kind of taciturn. Although you probably don’t know what I’m talking about.” He snickers.

  “No, I’m not loquacious. I prefer to think of myself as laconic,” I say. “Taciturn seems a bit negative. And I think talking is overrated.” Take the hint, old man, I want to say. Just shut up. It’ll be better for both of us.

  He snorts and shuffles into the living room where he maneuvers himself into a huge black leather office chair behind a glass-topped L-shaped desk. The desk and chair sit on an enormous red patterned rug. The effect is of Arthur sitting on an island with a population of one. It’s the kind of desk that a CEO of some major corporation might have, and the whole arrangement faces a wall that features a gigantic wall-mounted plasma TV, tuned to CNN. In any other house, this might be an understandable arrangement, but if you opened the drapes, you would be looking at a hundred and eighty degrees of ocean, sky and mountains. There’s even a small island with a lighthouse, and usually there’s a sailboat or two, some fish boats, maybe a freighter going by. On clear days you can see right across to the Olympic Mountains. Mom says we’ll go over there someday, soak in some hot springs she read about. The whole front of the house is floor-to-ceiling windows, but all the curtains are closed, and he sits with his back to the windows. The first time I was here, I opened the drapes and went out o
nto the wooden deck that runs from one end of the house to the other. Arthur freaked. I thought he was going to have a coronary. He’s like a vampire—can’t stand sunlight.

  Next to the living room is the dining room, which is painted a sort of murky peach. The only furniture, if you can call it that, is a dusty grand piano with the lid down and the keys covered. Beyond that is the kitchen, which looks as if it hasn’t been touched since the house was built. The breakfast nook comes complete with a yellow arborite table and matching chairs. Very retro. Down the hall from the living room is the master bedroom, which is paneled in dark wood. I’ve only been in there once when Mom sent me to gather up Arthur’s dirty laundry. It was like being in a bear’s winter den. Smelly, warm, claustrophobic. The outside of the house is white and curvy with a couple of porthole windows at the front. It’s genuine Art Deco. Unique, very valuable and totally wasted on my grandfather, Mom says. Apparently he bought it sight unseen. His main requirement was privacy. The house is near the end of a dead-end street at the top of a hill. It sits on a huge rocky lot ringed with oak trees. You can’t even see his neighbors’ houses.

  There’s a brand-new Krups coffeemaker in the kitchen, and I discover the source of the sour smell: a saucepan of milk on the back burner has boiled over. It looks like it’s been fermenting for a couple of days. I set the pan in the sink to soak and wash out the foil burner liner; then I dig around in the cupboards for a clean pan. There’s milk in the fridge and coffee in a canister on the counter. There appears to be no dishwasher, which is very bad news. The mug that is sitting in the dishrack looks as if it has only ever been rinsed, never scrubbed. Good enough. When his coffee is ready, I take it to him in the living room. He takes a sip and sighs. Could be satisfaction, could be annoyance. It’s impossible to tell.

  “Mind if I open the drapes?” I ask. It’s worth a try. I could look at that view all day.

  “Yes.”

  “Yes, you mind, or yes, I can open them?”