The Wide Circumference of Love Read online

  Their trays appeared before them, brought by two young women in blue uniforms and hairnets. The meal was broccoli, baked haddock, and sweet potatoes. Diane reached over, cut Gregory’s food into small pieces, and handed him a spoon. She watched him eat and felt a stab of doubt, second thoughts, but did not know why.

  Lauren ate slowly and held Gregory’s hand even when he repeatedly pushed her away.

  “Daddy, I love you,” she whispered over and over to Gregory, who sat contentedly chewing, wolfing down the food with a vigor Diane had not seen in weeks.

  After lunch, Lauren left, telling Gregory, “I’ll see you soon, Daddy. Be good.”

  Gregory waved good-bye and whispered the words, “Be good, be good,” as she left the room.

  Diane and Gregory walked the carpeted halls, passing the doors of the residents. Taped on each door was a photo of the man or woman who lived in the room and included a list of their hobbies and professions (teacher, fireman, bank vice president, social worker) in the lives they had left behind. After they strolled the halls, they napped. Diane lay spooning with her husband, grieving what they had lost, trembling at the thought of what lay ahead.

  Three hours had passed. Everything in place, she thought. Everything except her emotions. What was there to say that would not upset the fragile web of subterfuge? Diane sat beside Gregory, watching a rainstorm beat against the window. The words in her mind were weights she was too weak to lift. She wanted to leave. Guilt made her want to stay.

  Diane stood up. Gregory, roused by her movement, pulled Diane back onto the bed.

  “Don’t go. Don’t leave.” He had sat beside her quietly, nearly comatose, but now his banked bewilderment and terror inspired the plea that was a contagion seeping through his hand and fingers into her arm, which he now held tightly.

  “Gregory, I have to go now.”

  “No,” he demanded, yanking on her arm for emphasis.

  Now she was afraid. Of him hitting her. Of her striking back.

  “Gregory, I said, let me go.”

  He said nothing but tightened his grip in response. With her free hand, Diane pushed against his shoulder, but Gregory had morphed into a wall. Each push, each shove, lodged him more firmly in place. He sat beside her angry and implacable.

  Exhausted, she whimpered, “Let me go, Gregory, please. I’ll be back,” she promised, though Leah Temple had asked her not to visit for three weeks, to allow Gregory time to realize that the facility was now his home.

  “No.” The tiny word was uttered with childlike, unreasoning truculence.

  “I’ll be back.”

  “No.”

  Diane managed to stand up even as Gregory held her arm. With one final push, she shoved him onto the bed. Now she would run. Looking around for her purse and jacket, she felt his hands on her shoulders pulling her back onto the bed. That’s when she heard the knock on the door.

  “Come in, help me, please,” she shouted.

  Lynette swiftly entered the room, cooing in disappointment. “Oh, Mr. Tate, what’re you doing? What’re you doing?” She placed her body between them, helping Diane stand up as she firmly but gently pushed Gregory down on the bed.

  “Go, go, go now,” she whispered to Diane, who gathered her things and ran from the room, from her husband.

  Standing before the entrance door to the memory care unit, Diane remembered that it could only be opened with a security code Lynette had told her earlier in the day, a code that she could not now recall. A howl erupted from room 4B. The rank odor of guilt rose from her skin as she felt the warm palm of Jessica, one of the nursing assistants, on her shoulder. Jessica’s fingers speedily punched in the numbers that set her free. A last look backward revealed that Gregory’s door was now closed, but his moans rumbled down the hallway.

  Diane raced to the parking lot, bumping into a couple walking toward the entrance. She opened her car door and sank into the driver’s seat, breathless, her pulse a knotty drumbeat. Her frightened breath was the only sound she heard as she sat wondering at the bitter taste of this bewildering, terminal, new beginning.

  Chapter Four

  Looking at his watch, Sean saw that it was twelve thirty. His mother and sister had probably done the deed by now. He’d been looking at his watch all morning, hating himself for not reporting for the real duty that had called him today. The real work he knew he had been put on this earth to do. All morning he had been ambushed by thoughts about his father. But he had forced himself to remember where he was. He was at work, in a basement he was renovating, at work on a job already a week past its deadline.

  This was construction as a work of art, he thought, looking at the bookcase Manuel and Steven were polishing. The shine of the finish on the case and shelves seemed sunlit. The bold, broad molding was flush with the ceiling of this three-story Victorian that dated back to 1912, and gave the impression that the stately, deep-hued, wall-length bookcase had grown like a sturdy limb from the innards of the drywall. Three more bookcases to go in this monster-sized basement. Sean looked from Manuel and Steven to the pile of wooden planks stacked in a corner near the steps. Planks that had to be cut, sanded, finished, and handled at every step of the process as though they were building bookcases in their own homes.

  Manuel, a five-foot-four pit bull of energy and focus, stepped down from the ladder and dropped his rag on the floor. He turned to Sean and smiled. His English was rudimentary, but he understood everything Sean told him and was so skilled that Sean called him “the house whisperer.”

  Steven, rangy and bearded, with a soiled painter’s cap on backward, stepped back and said, “Man, I wish this was my house.”

  Sean’s cell phone vibrated and he reached for it in his jacket pocket.

  Archie’s voice came in a sorrowful blast: “Hey, man, look, I’m sorry.”

  “Don’t gimme that bullshit, Archie. We’ve been here since eight o’clock. I been calling you since eight thirty. Where you at, man?”

  “Ima be there. Ima be there. Hold tight. I’m on the way.”

  Sean heard the familiar Monday-morning-just-came-off-a-bender slur in Archie’s voice, a croaking whine that made everything Archie said sound like a hustle or a lie.

  “You got one hour. I’m not s’posed to be doing your job.”

  “Okay, okay, I’m on my way.”

  Sean hung up and stuffed the phone back into his pocket.

  “Sean, he can’t keep doin’ this. Why you let him get away with this? You gon’ let me pull that bullshit?” Steven asked, hunching his skinny shoulders, throwing his cloth down, and storming past Sean out the sliding doors into the backyard.

  “No good. No good,” Manuel said, shaking his head. He walked to a table near the fireplace and grabbed his keys. “I go for lunch now.”

  No, it wasn’t good. And he didn’t need Manuel or Steven to tell him that. A week ago, thieves had broken in and stolen all their tools. Now they were finally back on track.

  This was his crew, and he was their boss. He got them work. He found the clients. And he was supposed to handle their shit, no matter what it was. Hell, he knew this wasn’t good. But it was better than where he’d been a couple of years ago. Better than knowing what he wanted and being afraid to go after it.

  Everything he knew or thought he knew about contracting he had learned from these guys. Steven, the young brother he’d taken on as part of a city-wide effort to connect ex-cons with jobs, had done five years for trying to be the marijuana kingpin of Simple City. Archie, the old head of the group, had nearly thirty years in construction working on some of the city’s biggest projects. But when he got paid at the end of the week he dove into a fifth of scotch.

  Usually it was just Mondays. What was it about Mondays that made them blue, bleak, and impossible for Archie to face? That made him resist the call to come back to the world?

  Still, Archie was the boss when Sean wasn’t there, and it was Archie who had taught all of them to honor a house, not to just repair or buil
d it, but to work on it as though they were working on a cathedral. Guys who had fired Archie for drinking still gave him a good recommendation.

  Manuel and Steven didn’t know it, but it was Archie who had introduced Sean into the tight-knit, competitive world of the city’s black contractors. He’d taken Sean around to work sites where Sean had observed how the men who’d been at it for years worked with their crews, managed a job.

  Sean had been a contractor for three years now but remained in start-up mode, doing the same “see-me-hire-me” jockeying he’d used when trying to get his first jobs: driving by a work site, looking for whoever was in charge, asking for subcontracting work, anything—plumbing, floors, demolition, clean-up, painting. He had a crew or could get a crew to do any of it. All of it. Trusting he’d get good word of mouth when a client was satisfied. Giving out business cards at the Home Depot; calling real estate agents; tracking down city government contracts; bidding on jobs, calibrating what was too high, what was too low.

  He’d never before been more aware of the power—and powerlessness—of money. Getting nearly ten thousand dollars for a week and half of work, and out of that having to pay salaries and deduct supplies. He dreamed about money at night. Nothing was for sure. Everything was a possibility he had to nail down into a certainty. But this was the price he paid to turn houses into homes, and in rare moments, turn craft into beauty as the backdrop for living a life.

  Once in the early, lean days, sitting in Archie’s truck in an alley behind a house his crew was demolishing, Archie had told Sean, “Youngblood, you can do this thing. Ain’t nothing to it but to do it.” Archie had leaned back against the driver’s seat, adjusted the rearview mirror as though he was expecting a bill collector or an ex-wife to round the corner, and said, “You just got to keep doin’ what you doin’ that’s all. Keep being hungry. Being broke is inspiration. Hell, that’s the story of my life.”

  “Yeah, but look at your life. Archie; you could be somebody’s boss. What the fuck happened?”

  Archie had turned his rheumy eyes on Sean and said, “Sometimes the knockouts, everything you didn’t see coming just happens to you and all you can do is try to get back up every time it knocks you down.”

  Archie was a conundrum, a shadow. Sean knew all about Manuel’s family in El Salvador, the wife and children he had left behind and who he hoped would join him in America one day. Steven had told him about his two baby mamas and the boys he’d grown up with in Simple City, half of them now dead. But it was Archie whose story he didn’t know, who had given him a way to imagine his own.

  Still, he’d have to let him go, he knew that. Monday was as valuable a day of the week as any other. He’d let him go and soon. But not today.

  Pissed, Sean slumped onto the basement floor, removed his jacket, and dipped a paint brush into the half-full can of finish. He stacked several sanded shelves and painted each one with the brilliant yet toxic gleam. Painting, he forgot Archie and his breathing slowed. Painting, he was encased in a zone impenetrable to even his own reliable, vexing worries. Painting, he had never told anybody, was how he prayed. But the brushstrokes merely kept pace with the onslaught of questions, embers glowing at the edges of his thoughts. How had his father reacted when his mother and sister said good-bye? What had his mother told him to get him to stay?

  The good thing about living with Alzheimer’s, Sean sometimes allowed himself to think—because he lived outside its grip—was that you had no idea when someone had failed you. The bad thing about having Alzheimer’s, he knew—because it had stolen his father from him—was that you had no idea when someone had failed you. This was all bullshit rationalizing gleaned from the books and articles his mother collected and pressured him to read. To understand the ultimately inexplicable. To dive into the freezing waters of all this loss and somehow reach the surface, step onto the shore, and stand shivering but strong.

  His father was moored in a world where he thought he was thirty-one or thirty-two years old, a bachelor, with all that he would achieve still a heartfelt desire. Was the fact that Sean found it harder and harder to look at his father a verdict on his love? Sean had allowed himself to conclude, unlike his sister and mother, that there was nothing left of the man he wanted to love, honor, and respect. But that void, and his insistence on it, offered Sean little he could use in acknowledging the man who remained and always would be his father. A ghost, a shell of himself, but still his father.

  It had cost his mother all the love she had to decide to put his father in Somersby. He knew that, but all he could do on this day was pay his own price, his devil’s due by bailing out.

  As a recovering prodigal son, letting them down had become a reflex.

  Caught in Georgia Avenue eight o’clock traffic, Sean checked his phone and saw a text from Valerie, a curt, four-word inquiry: How did it go?

  Sean dreaded telling Valerie the answer to her question, even as he meditated on the reality that he was a grown-assed man in a grown-up relationship. It didn’t get more grown than living with a twenty-seven-year-old widow whose husband had died in Afghanistan. He loved her, and that unfortunate soldier’s son, too.

  Sean had just passed the contractor’s exam and given notice to the big-box hardware store where he’d been working when he met Valerie. She’d strode into his aisle, unsure what she was looking for, but she’d needed his help.

  Valerie was a big-boned woman who wore her weight as an embellishment, her size a sensual promise. She smelled of jasmine and both her reddish brown hair and freckled cheeks were girlish. Somebody he already knew he would want to take home. Her giggle was music, an invitation, when she became confused about her purchase.

  When she came back two days later to return the bolts, washers, and faucet she had bought for her plumber, she was coy, lingering long after they found what she actually needed. Sean had asked for her number, but she’d shaken her head no and instead asked for his. He actually dreamed that night that she would call. In reality, she made him wait three days.

  Initially, Valerie put her son Cameron between them. Their dates usually included the boy, as if she was testing Sean to see if he could love her and her son.

  “I don’t come unencumbered,” she’d said. “We’re a package.”

  She’d told Sean this as though she had practiced using the declaration as a scare tactic. But now, almost three years later, he’d moved in and they had begun to talk about marriage. No one in their families knew yet, but they considered themselves engaged. Even his dad, now forgetting everything, would be happy for him.

  When Sean entered the apartment, he dropped his keys in a ceramic bowl on a table near the door.

  “I’m home,” he called. Greeted by silence, he was enveloped in the aroma of garlic and tomatoes. The living room had the look he loved: Valerie’s shawls and the caftans she was knitting were piled on the sofa. Cameron’s soccer ball, several Spider-Man comics, and video games lay on the floor near the television. He saw Valerie’s and Cameron’s plates on the table, littered with remnants of garlic bread. The kitchen stove and sink were a puzzle of pots, pans, and dishes. This wasn’t disorder, Sean thought. This was a place where you could tell people lived.

  Walking down the hallway, Sean passed the closed bathroom door. Behind it, he heard Cameron splashing and engaged in a muted but fervent conversation with himself. Or was he giving orders to action figures? Valerie was in the computer room manipulating a spreadsheet on her desktop. Sean placed his hands on her shoulders to claim her and to steady himself.

  “How did it go with your dad?” she asked, turning around to face Sean, and in that swift movement severing his touch. Her eyes rested on Sean’s face with an electric expectancy that would accept nothing short of the truth.

  Sean turned from those eyes and walked a few feet away, sitting on a leather hassock. He sat examining his clasped, tense fingers, not looking at Valerie.

  “You didn’t go with them?”

  “I couldn’t. It seemed too m
uch like saying good-bye.”

  There was her silence. Then his silence. What more did she want him to say?

  “Sean, we talked about this last night.” The words came in a whisper he had not expected.

  That’s what he loved about her and what he hated about her: the way she charged in, refusing to let a thing rest until it had been solved.

  Gathering his will and his wits, he aimed the words at her. “You mean you talked about it and tried badgering me into saying I’d do something I knew I couldn’t.” He stood up in self-defense, to explain why he lost his nerve.

  “What are you afraid of?” Valerie looked up at Sean from her swivel chair. The disappointment in her eyes stunned him like a blow.

  “When I finally get my life together, he’s gone. He can’t see it, can’t comprehend it. What I am supposed to do with that? You saw the last time we went to the house—that rigid, vacant stare. The stories he tells that make no sense and go on forever. Asking me over and over if I’m his son? That’s what I’m afraid of. And it makes me feel like shit that you and Lauren and my mother don’t seem to be as afraid as me.”

  He had said it, and now his heart bulged with regret and relief. His eyes glistened. He blinked back the onslaught. He didn’t deserve the anointing they promised.

  “I can’t speak for Lauren or your mother. Sean, I know what it means to lose someone. To really lose them. Your father isn’t gone. Love what’s left.”

  After that, he had no appetite. Valerie shepherded Cameron through the rituals of preparing for bed before escorting the boy into the kitchen where Sean sat at the table studying the food on his plate rather than eating. The six-year-old climbed onto Sean’s lap and hugged him good night. Watching Valerie and Cameron walk to the boy’s bedroom, Sean plunged into all the thoughts that the searing moment of truth with Valerie had unleashed.

  He had never told anyone how the impact of Alzheimer’s on his father reminded him of his own continuing struggles with dyslexia. His father had lost the ability to read. Reading. Even now Sean saw numbers and words backward. Sometimes reading felt as exhausting as lifting weights. He knew in some sense what his father must be going through, how frightened he must have been the first time he looked at a page and saw nothing he could comprehend.