The Ada Decades

by Paula Martinac

  She took it from him and stabbed the button for Contacts. There was just one—Mimi—but no address accompanied the phone number. The street might have been on there somewhere, but Ada wasn’t sure how to find it. She should have pressed the number and called Mimi Finn herself, but instead she handed the phone back to him like it was a dead mouse.

  “No address I can see.”

  “Oh,” he said. “Well, thanks anyway.” Then he turned, looked both ways on the street again, and stepped off the porch without a goodbye.

  § § §

  “I never saw him before, that’s the truth,” she told the two young officers, one man and one woman, who showed up in the middle of her supper explaining that one of the neighbors had seen the old man go into her house. Now the police said he was missing.

  They showed her a phone, which looked pretty much like the one he had asked her to check for his address. “Could be his,” she admitted. “I only saw it for a second or two. He wasn’t here but a short time.” The male cop pressed her on what a “short time” was—was it as much as a half-hour? An hour?

  “I don’t know,” she said, which was the truth. “It was . . . short.”

  The exchange made her ears warm to the touch. The police took notes and thanked her politely for the information, calling her “Mrs. Shook,” and she didn’t correct them. When they left, Ada threw out the rest of her chicken potpie, which had gone cold, and turned on the TV.

  In the close discomfort of the living room, she adjusted the big box fan, aiming it so it blew the hem of her shift and sent a chill up her bare legs. The People’s Court helped take her mind off the cops until she dozed off in her chair.

  But her nap was fitful and far from refreshing. She dreamed that she found the old man collapsed on her couch, his glass of sweet tea spilling and soaking into the cushions. His skin was chill to the touch as she bent over him, saying, “Are you dead?” over and over. She was just inches from his face when his eyes popped open, and then she screamed and woke up.

  § § §

  By morning, Ada had almost backed the old man into a far

  corner of her mind. She didn’t think about him while she was getting dressed and putting on a pot of coffee, or even when she set out her Cheerios with sliced banana. But when she went out on the porch to get her newspaper, she was jolted back to the memory of him standing on the sidewalk, staring at her with those arresting eyes.

  She pulled the paper from its plastic sleeve, but the front-page headlines held no clues about an old man’s disappearance from the neighborhood. He’d surely been found by now, she thought. How far could he go? It was true, there was an old lady who had wandered off the year before and tumbled into Little Sugar Creek, hitting her head on a rock and drowning before anyone could locate her. But she was a fragile thing, hunched and birdlike. Ada had seen the photo in the paper. Harry Finn looked like he would survive a fall.

  From the porch, Ada noticed that someone had posted a sign on her utility pole, and she stepped out to investigate. Her stomach did a belly dive as the old man’s photo stared back at her from the pole. He was seated in front of a birthday cake, poised to blow out the candles. HAVE YOU SEEN MY FATHER? was printed in bold letters across the top. ANSWERS TO HARRY. CAN’T TAKE CARE OF HIMSELF. PLEASE CALL 704-343-9002. Ada touched her finger to the flier, which she saw was on poles and trees all down the block. If she had eaten her breakfast already, she most certainly would have tossed it back up.

  Ada was dripping wet by the time she got back inside her living room. She closed and locked the front door and leaned her weight against it, her forehead leaving a slick mark on the wood. “Cam,” she said aloud, “oh, Cam honey, I’ve done something wicked.”

  It wasn’t like Cam answered her, or that Ada expected her to. But sometimes the quiet in the house felt like a pillow coming down over her face, and she needed to talk to someone.

  Ada couldn’t think of touching her cereal, so she covered it and put it aside. As she was struggling with the sheet of Saran Wrap, she noticed through the back window that the door to her daddy’s chicken coop was wide open again. He’d kept laying hens when Ada and her brothers were young, until a hawk attack decimated the flock. “I should turn it into a craft coop,” Cam used to say. In their retirement, they both liked to tinker with artsy projects—Cam had taken up woodworking, and Ada tried pottery. But Cam never got around to the restoration, and after she passed, Ada let the coop stand in the yard, sagging, along with the empty tool shed.

  These days, the orange tabby that slinked freely through the neighborhood had a habit of swatting the coop door open. She’d watched the cat do it, like something out of America’s Funniest Home Videos. She sometimes found him inside, purring and cleaning himself, like he owned the place. He had no collar that she could see, so Ada wasn’t sure who he belonged to, but he was well fed and purred when she was near him.

  “Matt could put a lock on that coop for you,” Junie offered, “or better yet, tear it down, along with that old shed. You could get a nice new vinyl shed from Lowe’s. They last forever.” But Ada didn’t need something to last forever, and she actually didn’t mind the cat. She called it Auggie, although she had no idea if it was male or female. Ada kept a few cans of cat food around, just in case the cat showed up, and now she opened one and

  carried it out to the coop.

  At the door of the shed, though, she cried out, and almost dropped the can. Harry Finn was curled up on the shed floor in the same clothes he’d been in yesterday, trying in vain to sleep off a bad case of dementia.

  Ada remembered her dream, shaking him over and over asking if he was dead. Thankfully the question didn’t need asking: His snoring sounded like a chainsaw or some other piece of equipment.

  “Mr. Finn!” she said, nudging him with her index finger until his eyes opened. “This just isn’t safe. You can’t stay in my chicken coop!”

  Harry sat up, wiping away the thin line of drool that had escaped his lips. “Sorry,” he muttered. “The door was wide open and I couldn’t find . . .” But his memory failed him again.

  “Come on,” she said, tugging at his arm to urge him up. “Your folks are looking for you.”

  Harry drew his arm back, flinching at the word folks. He seemed to be rooted, and she couldn’t drag him up onto his feet.

  “What if I don’t want to go back?” he said, clear as a school bell. “Could you . . . If I gave you some money, would you help me get a bus ticket to Pittsburgh?”

  “Is someone mistreating you?”

  “No, no, no!” he said, frowning. “I just . . . I don’t know what I’m supposed to be doing. I want to go home!”

  She heard similar complaints every time she went to the senior center—the pining for homes that had been sold years before, the confusion over what to do with the remainder of lives that had gone on a bit too long. “This is the worst cruise I’ve ever been on,” one woman had said to Ada last Christmas, as they watched a marathon showing of It’s a Wonderful Life while sipping cranberry juice cocktail and snacking on sugar cookies.

  In a way, the end of life was a terrible cruise. Days that had once been full of students and learning, of quiet suppers with Cam and weekend parties with friends, were now just extended naps with meals in between. Twig had passed suddenly the year before, probably a heart attack. Shirley Ann had moved to Atlanta to be with family, and even Ada’s brother Foster had retired to Florida. At least Ada had her home and she knew where it was—that was a comfort. Lord willing, someday she’d die there, in her bed, Cam coming to her in a dazzling white light to lead the way.

  “I understand, Mr. Finn,” she said to Harry, holding out her hand to him. “I surely do. I wish I could help you. But right now, all I can do is reunite you with your daughter. She is sick with worry, just sick. Nobody deserves that, now do they?”

  Inside, he slurped down the bowl of Cheerios with banana that she hadn’t been able to eat, while Ada dialed the number on the flier. “My name
is Ada Shook,” she said to the agitated voice that answered the phone. “I live on Card Street in North . . . in NoDa. Mr. Harry Finn is in my kitchen right now eating some cereal. He’s fine, looks like.”

  § § §

  Mimi Finn was probably in her late forties or early fifties, with freshly trimmed salt and pepper hair and crisp, preppy-style clothes like Cam used to wear—pressed khakis and a yellow polo shirt. She had inherited her father’s sapphire eyes. Ada found herself trying to stand taller and straighter, and patting her hair into place like a young woman, like she was someone Mimi Finn would actually notice. “Vanity, thy name is Ada,” Cam used to tease when she was too long in front of the mirror.

  Mimi grabbed her father and hugged him to her like he was a life vest. “I will never let you out of my sight again! Oh my God, Dad, I was absolutely terrified!” When she released him, he ran a hand through his hair in what seemed like a nervous habit. “I don’t know how to begin to thank you, Mrs. Shook.”

  “Miss Shook,” she corrected. “Or just Ada.”

  Before she even realized she was hatching an idea, Ada added, “I was thinking, if you’d consider letting him out of your sight, maybe he could accompany me to the senior center. They show movies most afternoons on a nice big television, but I don’t fancy going alone. It’s free, and it’s a way to pass the time. You like movies, Mr. Finn?”

  “Some, I guess,” he said.

  “He doesn’t know his way around here. He’s only been with us a few months. And he doesn’t have a driver’s license anymore.”

  “I still drive everywhere,” Ada said. “How ’bout I see what’s showing tomorrow?”

  Harry smiled, like she’d just handed him his bus ticket. But by tomorrow he probably wouldn’t remember the invitation—he might not even recall her face or name when she came to fetch him. She wasn’t sure it really mattered very much.

  When father and daughter left, Ada heard her stomach grumbling, and she made herself a fried egg and a slice of toast. As she was mopping up the last smear of yolk, a blur of orange caught her eye through the kitchen screen door. The tabby was back and had settled on a sunny patch of grass, where he was cleaning his paws one by one with luxurious slowness.

  Ada stared at him through the screen door, until he became aware of her, too, and stopped his business in mid-lick. Then she retrieved the can of food she’d opened for him earlier, and emptied it into a bowl. The hinges moaned when she threw the door open. “Here, Auggie,” she beckoned. “There’s a good boy.”

  Her Story

  2015

  In her eighty-first year, Ada preferred not to encounter anything out of the ordinary on a daily basis. Every Wednesday and Friday afternoon at 1:30 p.m., she drove her Buick the five blocks to Mimi Finn’s house, pulled up behind the metallic blue Subaru in the driveway, and tapped her horn three times in a crisp staccato.

  On the final honk, Mimi opened the door to the house and Harry was always standing in the frame, dressed just as he was when Ada first spotted him in front of her bungalow, looking like he had mislaid something. His standard uniform included a Steelers T-shirt (he surely had a bureau full of them), cuffed trousers, white sneakers, and when it was really hot, as it was most summer days in Charlotte, a baseball cap with a big P emblazoned on it. It was comforting that Harry looked pretty much the same every time Ada saw him.

  “You two fasten your seat belts,” Mimi instructed, fussing like a mother on her child’s first day of school. Ada and Harry nodded, although they never clicked their belts into place for the ten-minute drive to the senior center. “They wrinkle you to high heaven,” Ada said to Harry. Besides, she’d had only one serious car accident in fifty-some years of driving, if you didn’t count close scrapes and fender-benders, and it was so long ago the exact circumstances had clouded over. Ada did remember that it involved a red pickup and that the collision was soon after Cam passed, when vehicles just seemed to come at her out of nowhere. She and the truck driver escaped without a scratch, although shards of glass fell out of the pockets of her pedal pushers that night, and her Buick was in the repair shop for two weeks.

  Harry wasn’t much in the way of company, but he was familiar to her now, like the theme song of a TV show she found herself humming later in the day. She could say just about anything to him and trust he wouldn’t repeat it, because he was unlikely to recollect what she said from one hour to the next.

  As the weeks went on and their trips to the center became

  second nature to them both, Harry stopped looking at her funny every time she pulled up to fetch him. Sometimes on their drive, he even initiated a conversation, mostly about the weather or the movies they saw. “That was some crazy movie,” was a common observation of his, especially about the newer comedies starring actors neither of them had heard of. Ada’s personal favorites were the classic romances and musicals, but the senior center had an eclectic collection, based on whatever DVDs folks had donated.

  “What didn’t you like about it?” she asked, although she knew it was a hard question for Harry, whose dementia was slipping from mild to moderate, according to Mimi. Generally, the question just sat there between them like an extra passenger, and Ada filled in the silence with her own ruminations. “I didn’t think they needed all the cussing,” Ada might say to Harry. Other movies had endings that were “a little too depressing for my taste.”

  Then one Friday, when she deposited Harry back home after a viewing of The Sting (“You know, you look a little like Paul Newman around the eyes,” she told him) Mimi asked her in for supper, or “dinner,” as she called it, and Ada’s routine cracked open.

  “I’ve been meaning to ask you for quite a while, but we’re always so busy. I’m just so grateful to you, Miss Shook. You saved my father from who knows what fate.” Mimi shuddered. “I don’t even like to think about what could have happened to him, wandering the neighborhood, not knowing where he lives. And now, well, you’re saving me—getting him out of the house twice a week so I can finish my work!” Mimi was a reporter for a local magazine, but she worked from home a lot, and her schedule seemed to have quite a bit of room in it.

  Ada cast her eyes to her navy blue Keds. She wouldn’t know what to say to a reporter and her partner, who was a university dean of something or other. Twenty or even fifteen years ago she would have found conversation easier—Cam would have been there with her comfortable manner that made strangers describe her as easy-going. Cam would never turn down an invitation, but Ada’s inclination was to do just that, to retreat to her recliner as she did every night of the week. But then she pictured the frozen turkey dinner waiting for her at home. The prospect of something home-cooked made her mouth water, and she found herself accepting in spite of her misgivings.

  She had to go home first, she explained, to feed her cat. It was true that the tabby expected his meals at a set time, but her real intention was to gussy herself up a little, change out of the simple blue gingham whose pockets she had reinforced at the corners. She couldn’t even remember the last time she’d been invited out.

  At home, she put on a favorite dress, a simple cream piqué with a twisting vine of strawberries printed at the hemline, which Cam had picked out at Belk’s years back. Ada only wore it a few Sundays a year, so it was still in good shape if out of style, longer and fuller than dresses were now. She dabbed a touch of pink on her lips, and took a brush through her hair fifty times, the way she did when she was young. Her chestnut locks had once been a crown of glory, but after her hair went white, she had it cut into a manageable chin-length bob. “Nothing’s worse than an old woman still trying to look young,” she told the hairdresser.

  Cam hadn’t approved of the cut. “Can’t run my hands through it now,” she had said, though at the time they hadn’t made proper love in years.

  Ada reappeared at Mimi’s at the appointed time, not a minute too early or late, and rang the old-fashioned doorbell, the kind that twisted like a crank and that Ada hadn’t seen since s
he was a girl.

  “Welcome, Miss Shook!” A sturdy woman with a halo of blonde hair opened the door, a blast of cool air escaping onto the porch. She was wearing short shorts that emphasized her chunky legs, and a T-shirt with a map of North Carolina made out of rainbow stripes. Her handshake was as firm as a man’s. “I’m Lisbeth Sorenson, Mimi’s wife.” Her casual use of the word wife set butterflies to flight in Ada’s stomach. She knew women could marry each other now, but she hadn’t met anyone who’d actually done so.

  “Please just call me Ada,” she said. “Miss Shook was the librarian at Central Junior High about a million years ago.”

  That brought a beam of pleasure to Lisbeth’s face, which went much deeper than her lips. She was older than she looked, from the elaborate web of lines at the corners of her eyes and mouth.

  Harry was watching TV at a high decibel in the living room: “I’ll take World History for 400, Alex.” Jeopardy! had been Cam’s favorite show, and Ada had been unable to watch it since she passed. Alex Trebek had aged a lot in the years that had gone by, but she saw he was still a handsome man.

  “Harry, Miss Shook . . . Ada is here,” Lisbeth said, and Harry looked up, confused at seeing his companion in a different place and a different context.

  “Is it time for a movie?”

  “She’s joining us for dinner, Harry. Ada, let me set your purse over here and we’ll go out to the deck. It’s nice and shady, and I have some vinho verde on ice.” Ada had no idea what that was, but she hoped it was fruity so she could actually bear to drink it. She said she’d like to keep her pocketbook with her. It would give her something to hold onto, she thought.