Mr. Wonderful

by Daniel Smith

  11 | danny

  We all go to a farmer’s market in Tower Grove, an upscale part of south St. Louis—I guess to get out of the house. Dawn describes for me and Mom what she calls her “amazing gazpacho recipe” she wants to try on us, so we walk around this humongous city park with pavilions scattered everywhere with maybe thirty or forty booths run by foodie types trying to sell their produce. We spend what feels like an eternity fondling tomatoes and checking out just the right cilantro. “I’m very big on keeping it local,” Dawn says.

  “That’s great, Dawn,” Mom replies. “Because the farmers here need the business.”

  “Plus it tastes better,” Dawn says.

  “So ‘local’ just tastes good, huh?” I ask.

  “When it gets to your table quicker, it’s fresher and better. Try to keep up, Danny.” Mom chuckles, like she’s in on Dawn’s little jokey jabs at me.

  Back at the house, while Dawn prepares her masterpiece gazpacho, Mom goes into her study. Working on the weekend—that figures: she works like a Trojan, making the rest of us look like slackers. Sometimes, I swear, Mom acts like she thinks I AM a slacker. Maybe she’s right, but when I’m not working I’m often thinking real hard but I’m not sure she knows it. So I wander into her study to do some out-loud thinking. She’s got out her law books, and working on the depositions from Jack’s sleazy card-playing friends. After I offer a few more choice nuggets of insight about why these guys are possible accomplices to Jack’s grand plan to off his wife for the insurance money—they are all deep in debt, the detectives discovered, and both of them had wives run away from their sorry asses, proof positive, in my book, that they were looking for an easy score and some serious payback from ungrateful women—Mom puts down her papers, takes off her reading glasses, and gives me a good, long look, like she hadn’t really seen me up close before.

  “I’m really impressed with your ideas, Danny. They may turn out to be just good hunches that can’t be proven in court, but still, it’s great you know how to connect the dots. It’s speaks to motivation which is key in a murder trial like this.”

  “Just trying to help,” I say.

  “Well, it shows me you may have some hidden talents.”

  “Can’t be that hidden. I mean, wouldn’t I have gotten these talents from you and Dad?”

  “I guess.”

  “Where else would they come from? Certainly not from my, you know, real parents.” Mom gives me a long, hard look, like she can’t decide if she should nod her head sadly or jump up and strangle me.

  “Did you ever try making contact again—?” she asks.

  “No.” If the woman who gave birth to me, my own flesh and blood, doesn’t want to know me, doesn’t even want to talk to me, then I’m moving on. I remember crying that night after I called her, realizing she wasn’t going to call back. I was just a kid, but even then I knew I was just gonna have to make sense of everything by myself. At least Brian and Corinne love me, want to care for me, make sacrifices for me—more than they bargained for, I imagine—but that’s better than what a lot of my friends’ parents do for them, or TO them. Poor Dawn probably wishes she HAD been adopted, considering the shit show that her parents were. So she didn’t feel sorry for me when I told her about my situation. “You were lucky, Danny,” was all she said. Still, I almost never tell people I get to know that I’m adopted. I just don’t want to see that look anymore of “oh, that must feel sad, deep down, to know your own parents rejected you.” Who needs that? But I still have dreams where I meet up with my real parents and we have this great time together and I see how wonderful they are and how I look like my dad but have the heart of my mom, and so on. But then I wake up and I’m back wandering around in the same mystery fog.

  “Gazpacho time!” Dawn yells from the kitchen. We all sit down in the kitchen to taste Dawn’s new creation. And it’s great. Mom can’t stop oohing and ahhing over how “flavorful” and “original” Dawn’s gazpacho is. It’s like really tasty tomato juice, I’m thinking, but from Mom’s reaction you’d think Dawn was now a five-star chef. She does have skills, I have to say, and I’m hoping Dawn can somehow get out of the waitressing biz as it’s low-paying and pretty demeaning. Now that I think about it, it’s like none of us—except for Mom—is really making good on what we should (or could) be doing in life. Dad’s about to get fired at school by an asshole dean breathing down his neck; Dawn’s lost her job at the restaurant thanks to a sexual predator chasing her (and me); and I’m, well, I’m still struggling to find the right career opportunity. “I wonder what Grandpa would think about us?” I ask.

  No one says anything for a minute, then Mom pipes up: “Robert wouldn’t be impressed, I can tell you that. He believed everybody should do what they love, but if they don’t know what that is, then they should try to love what they do.”

  “Easier said than done,” I say.

  “I guess we’re not supposed to settle for ‘easy’,” my gazpacho Queen observes.

  12 | brian

  When I wake up and look out my bedroom window which faces east, I can see it’s starting out a beautiful day—clear skies and sunshine. Checking the skies, that’s the first thing I did every morning growing up in this house. Seeing the distant horizon under mostly blue skies, I took such comfort and joy in what felt like a world of wide-open hope and promise.

  As I make my way into the kitchen, adjacent to the master bedroom, my exuberant mood comes crashing down amid the difficult daily realities facing Dad and Claire. I can hear Dad shouting at Claire, “Scratch my back! Scratch it, dammit!” as she tries to get him dressed for the day. After he’s dressed, I lean in to say hello, hoping for a pretense of normality and recognition from him.

  “You sleep okay, Dad?” I say.

  He looks at me quizzically, which at first I take to be his hearing loss at work. “I said, did you sleep okay—?”

  But instead he looks over at Claire who’s making the bed: “Who’s that man?” he asks.

  “It’s your son.”

  “OK. Brian,” he says.

  I am floored that he knows my name. I come over and shake his hand (we’ve always been hand-shakers, not huggers, in our family). “Good morning, Dad.”

  “I need some sausage for breakfast. Jimmy Dean sausage.”

  “That’s his favorite but we’re fresh out,” Claire says with a smile. “Any chance you could run to the store and get some for us, Brian?”

  “Be glad to. Anything else you need?”

  It doesn’t take long to get to the store: Fred’s Quik Trip, a three-minute drive from the family home, is a mediocre convenience store masquerading as a place to buy groceries. As I pick up the Jimmy Dean sausage along with some milk, cereal, and coffee—Claire probably had no time to lay up any additional staples before I got there—I sense someone, a middle-aged man, in the store watching me closely. At the cash register, he finally comes up to me. “Aren’t you Brian, Doc Fenton’s boy?” he asks.

  “Sure am.” I study the man but for the life of me I can’t call up a single name.

  “I’m Joe Don Lanagan,” he says with a mischievous grin.

  The grin I DO recognize. This is the school bully who enjoyed terrorizing me in junior high. Now he’s an overweight, deracinated sixty-year old man, still stuck in Juniper. I manage a smile and a handshake with my enemy from more than four decades ago.

  “You look about the same, Brian,” Joe Don says cheerfully.

  “Thanks. You too, Joe Don,” I lie through my teeth.

  “You don’t live around here, do ya?”

  “No. St. Louis. I’m a professor up there.”

  “Yeah, I think I heard that. Must be here visiting your dad, huh?”

  “As a matter of fact.”

  “He’s a tough old bird,” Joe Don observes as he mercifully starts toward the door. “I’m sure he’s not going down without a fight. You always knew where you stood with Doc Fenton. Well, gotta run. You be good.” With that, he gives me a tip of hi
s John Deere tractor cap, nods, and leaves the store. The cashier, an elderly lady, sensing the awkwardness of the moment, tries to be helpful: “Joe Don runs the feed store east of town. Both his marriages ended real bad. I think he lives alone now,” she whispers.

  Not wanting to add to his misery with a moment of jubilation, I say nothing but leave the store with a smile. Forty years ago Joe Don was a near-daily nemesis of mine, but now he’s an object of pity. Preston Jones, the old Texas playwright, said it well: “Time is a sonofabitch.”

  Over breakfast, Claire gives us the drill for the day: we take Dad to the doctor over in Bonham, about 20 miles away, and he has a visit from his physical therapist after lunch. Jeff will join us for dinner. “Sounds like a full day,” I say, as Dad munches silently on his toast and jam, never once looking my way.

  Taking Dad for a ride in the car to see the doctor turns out to be the trip from hell. He’s too stiff to move his arms and legs very well but he resists angrily any effort to help him get from his walker into the car. He tries to hit me several times—thinking, I guess, that I somehow mean him harm—so Claire takes over, trying to maneuver him into the front seat. He repeatedly yells at her, threatening to “knock your head off” with several attempted punches aimed at her face. Having been down this road before, she adroitly avoids his punches and, amazingly, despite the ongoing verbal and physical aggression, finally gets him into the seat. “You’re being a real pill this morning, Robert,” she tells him in what has to be the understatement of the year.

  I know the way to the doctor’s in Bonham—despite the many years since my boyhood, the roads and sense of direction in this rural part of north Texas remain firmly implanted in my memory—but I’m not quite ready for the harsh commentary from Dad along the way. If I go anywhere close to the speed limit, it’s “Slow down! I said SLOW DOWN!” If he senses I’m taking a slightly different route, he yells, “You can’t go this way! Get the hell back on the right road!” I try to explain we’re on the right road, an idea he is not about to entertain: “Oh, hell, you don’t know a damn thing!”

  At the clinic, Claire wheels him into the doctor’s office while I check my messages in the waiting room. Jeff sent several texts so I figure I better report to him.

  “Hey, Bro’, I was wondering when I was ever going to hear from you,” he says.

  “Well, if you’d come with me, you’d already know, now, wouldn’t you?”

  “No need for sarcasm, Bri. You know I want the same thing for Dad as you do. How’s he doing?”

  “I don’t know, Jeff. So much anger, not just at me, who he mostly doesn’t know anymore, but at Claire who will do anything for him.”

  “He try to hit you?”

  “Yeah. And Claire. Yesterday, he was totally naked and screaming at her to take his clothes off.”

  “Yeah, the doctor told me it’s all just dementia. The neurons or whatever in his brain are all misfiring, so he doesn’t know what’s happening around him, who people are. It’s a really sad way to go out, Bro’.”

  “Well, he’s not ‘out’ yet.”

  “Right, but you gotta admit: he’s the shell of the man who was our father.”

  “’Was’?”

  “You know what I mean.”

  “Claire says you’re coming over for dinner.”

  “That’s the plan.”

  “Make it happen, okay?”

  “Don’t worry. Like I said, we need to have that powwow with Claire.”

  “OK. Later.” I hang up.

  The doctor gives Dad a mostly clean bill of health—his heart and lungs are fine—though his liver is shot (not from drinking but taking daily painkillers for too many years). As Claire wheels Dad back to the car, the good doctor comes over to me. “The main thing is that dementia just follows its own course. You got to sort of roll with it, you know?” he says unhelpfully.

  Claire rewards Dad for not having a meltdown in the doctor’s office by driving him over to the local ice cream store where she gets him a double scoop of chocolate chip. She kisses him fondly on the forehead as he plows into his ice cream cone. “We’re going to head back now, darling,” she tells him. He makes no response as we drive off. As we drive into Juniper, Robert, who slept most of the way, awakens just outside the city limit sign and suddenly wants to bypass the main road that eventually takes us to their house. “Keep driving,” he insists, pointing east along the farm to market road we’re on.

  “Where’s he want to go?” I ask Claire.

  “Where do you want to go, Robert?” she asks, stroking his hair.

  “Just keep going.”

  I drive for another couple of miles, taking us away from Juniper headed toward no place I’m aware of. But then I see a sign for Mt. Carmel Cemetery.

  “Turn right!” Dad orders.

  “You want to go to the cemetery?” I ask, as I follow the road into Mt. Carmel.

  We pull up at the cemetery. It’s actually a rather beautiful place—as cemeteries go—with lots of pecan, mesquite, and oak trees surrounding maybe a couple of hundred well-tended gravesites. “He sometimes likes to come out here,” Claire says from the backseat. “I think he likes to look at our own plot, which is right over there,” pointing to a small piece of land under a shady mesquite tree. There’s a little wooden bench next to the plot. “That’s our bench. We used to come and sit there. We decided that whoever goes first will come and sit here and talk to the one who’s passed. Now he sometimes just wants to be driven out here to look at it. At least I think that’s what he wants.”

  I look at Dad, watching his eyes, trying to fathom what he’s thinking, what he’s worried about or hoping for. He’s nearly impossible to read. After a long moment of staring out at the cemetery through the glinting sun, he looks away and mutters, “I want to go home.”

  We have an uneventful dinner, with Jeff showing up in time for dessert. Dad looks really tired—outings like we had today really wear him out, I think. Although he says a few things to Claire while he eats (requesting more tea and a new napkin), he has nothing to say to me or Jeff. There’s sort of a faraway look in his eyes, but at least we are spared another angry outburst.

  After dinner, Dad says he’s tired and wants to lie down. Claire is reluctant to allow this as he’s likely to go to sleep for the evening and will awaken her at two in the morning ready to get up. But he insists, and to avoid another meltdown she walks with him back to the bedroom. Claire returns to the table shaking her head. “I guess we did too much today,” she says.

  Jeff and I clear the table to give Claire a little break. She watches the weather channel on TV. (Why is it the elderly are so obsessed with the weather?) Finally, we bring her some coffee and a small piece of cake (everything she eats is in small portions—no wonder she remains so slender and fit when everyone around her, myself included, is growing fatter). We watch the tail end of the weather forecast with her—hot and humid, temps in the 90s—then she clicks it off and turns to us with a sad “I know why you’re here” look. “I guess you want to talk about your dad.”

  “Yes, but it’s about you too, Claire,” Jeff says.

  Jeff makes all the appropriate points about how Claire can no longer control Dad or protect herself (or others) from his many angry, violent outbursts. “This isn’t his fault, Claire,” Jeff observes, “these are misfiring neurons that prevent him from recognizing people and situations for what they are. If we thought bringing in home health care workers would solve the problem, he could stay here with you. But as you’ve already pointed out, he simply wouldn’t allow them in the house.”

  Claire nods and then looks over at me—as if to say, “are you ready to break the tie, Brian?” Jeff throws me a look that says “it’s time to man up, Bro’, and make the difficult choice of putting Dad in a safer place, even if it feels like giving up.” I look at my hands and think about Dad and Claire—too long for Jeff. “Well, what do you think, Bri?” he insists.

  “What I’ve seen these last couple
of days is not encouraging. I never imagined how physically combative he could get and how deeply confused he could become.” I can practically hear Jeff nodding vigorously and I can almost feel the weight of Claire’s solemn-faced silence. “The last thing I want—or Jeff, I’m sure—is for Dad to do you any kind of harm, emotionally or physically.”

  “Exactly,” Jeff agrees.

  “That’s not being fair to you, Claire. And, really, not to him either.” More vigorous nodding from Jeff. “But as long as you’re fit and mentally sharp—as we both know you are, thank God—I just don’t think it’s our place to insist that Dad be put away in a nursing home, even a good one, and therefore take away a comfort and source of love that matter so much to both of you—even if he doesn’t fully understand all that anymore.”

  “Brian, I’m not sure you’re grasping”—an alarmed Jeff responds.

  “What I’m grasping is that Claire and Dad love each other, and even if only Claire can truly act on that love, she has pride of place over the two of us—as it should be. Robert is her husband, Jeff, and that counts more than the fact that he is our father.”

  “I cannot believe what you’re saying, Brian,” Jeff insists, his voice rising now out of shock and frustration. “We need to think about the well-being of both of them.” Getting nothing from me, Jeff turns to Claire out of desperation. “Claire, what do you think?”

  “I know you boys are trying to do the right thing. Robert would appreciate that. He would. But”—

  “But what?” Jeff asks.

  Claire seems to be somewhere else for a moment and doesn’t respond.

  “Claire?” Jeff asks again.

  “I’m sorry,” Claire responds finally. “I think I hear Robert stirring or something in the bedroom. I probably need to go check on him.”

  “No, that’s okay. I will,” I say, glad to get out of this tense powwow.

  “Will you?” Claire says. “You are so sweet.”