Now you need not die again, but still I wish you were here
—Katherine Anne Porter, Pale Horse, Pale Rider
My nephew is writing a book, he says, about Martin Luther King, Jr.
“Now why would you do that?” I asked him. “Pick a topic without so much competition. Who’s going to read your book?”
Ask him, and he’ll tell you he’s a historian. He specializes in the twentieth century, he’ll say. (He has a master’s degree. He teaches at a community college.)
“Write about some minor character,” I suggested. “Who was at the front desk that day? Who was making up the rooms?”
“What?”
“At the motel.”
Blank look, as ever.
“Where King was killed? Randy?” This historian nephew of mine, did I really have to tell him where the man, his subject, took his last breath?
He nodded.
“I met the busboy who was there when Bobby Kennedy was shot. You know that photo? The kid in the kitchen? The white jacket?”
Another nod.
“I met him once. The busboy.”
I’ve been telling Randy crazy stories since he was a kid. When he was in first or second grade, he asked me what my “real” name was, as in not Aunt Judy, not Mrs. Roberts. He seemed a little old to need help piecing this together, so I said, “When I started teaching, they took it from me.”
No reaction.
“My name,” I prompted him.
No laugh, no quizzical look.
“They took it from me in the front office. They put it in a little box and issued me ‘Miss Greene,’ then let me exchange that for ‘Mrs. Roberts’ when I got married.”
Nothing nothing nothing. He just looked at me.
Apropos of his learning about the JFK assassination in school some years later, I told him I’d been there that day, in Dallas. “I was standing on the grassy knoll, in fact,” I said. “But nothing happened there. I’d have known it.”
Where I’d really been was in class. (Who cares where I was. But people tell these stories.) I was still a new teacher, still Miss Greene, when the secretary rapped on my open door and motioned me out of the room, shutting the door behind us. Down the corridor I saw the principal at another door.
I went back into the classroom with my hand still over my mouth. That’s probably part of the story some of my old students tell now, a loss-of-innocence story, seeing adults upset, their teachers and then their parents.
Randy’s angle for his MLK book—excuse me, not his angle, his thesis—is that’s the moment America truly lost its innocence, when King was assassinated.
Well. He should be embarrassed even to say this. I looked at the ceiling when he said it, so he couldn’t see my eyes rolling. “There was never any innocence,” I told him. “That is important to remember.”
“You hear people say it about John F. Kennedy sometimes,” he said.
“Yes.”
“But my thesis is that it was actually later, once there’d been some, well, piling on.”
It seemed a small piece of cleverness on which to base a whole book. But my nephew is not going to write this book. And if he did, there would be something ignoble about it. He’d get some obvious detail wrong, or straight plagiarize. What appeared likeliest to happen now was that he wouldn’t ever bring it up again, and neither would I.
Randy is my sole heir, the only child of my only sibling. “Someday this will all be yours,” I like to tell him, gesturing to the four walls of my room. He laughs dutifully.
So, what is mine to leave? Not the streams that will stop: pension, Social Security. But there is a small life-insurance policy and a couple of retirement accounts, mine and my husband, Adam’s. It would be a lot at once, I think, as a windfall. Not change-your-life money, though, and not very impressive as accumulation, the work of two lifetimes. I may well outlive it.
Sometimes I open the file cabinet by my chair and read the folder labels: life insurance, pension, Social Security—Judy; DNR—Judy; Power Atty. [Fin., Med.]—Judy; Death Cert.—Adam; Archives [All]—Adam (this is a fat one). And so on. All in my hand. Most full of papers that I, being of sound mind and body, have signed, giving over control of myself to my nephew, Randy.
My checkbook, I hate to admit, has become hieroglyphic. What fills it is only arithmetic, I know, but to review its numbers and the words describing them, written in Randy’s block letters, requires concentration I am less and less able to muster.
Randy writes and records the checks, and I sign them. There is one big one per month to this place where I live now, its name so corny and insulting I am loath to repeat it. We’ll call it Sunset Acres. And there are others, some regular, some miscellaneous. I think it would be easy to sneak bits here and there. You wouldn’t have to be smart. You’d just have to be not old.
Randy makes the hour-long drive to see me once every two weeks. Every other visit he brings his wife and children. They are all wholly nondescript. The children might as well have the same name, though one is a boy and one is a girl. Call them both Chris, say, or Marty. Call their mother the same.
They are known here, at Sunset Acres, Randy and his Martys. They may breeze in and out as they please, and what pleases them, ostensibly, is this schedule. The schedule is fine. We are not capable of spontaneity with each other, so this regimentation suits. I don’t know a better way. We must keep in contact; it is the expected thing.
Adam was never with me here. He is pre–Sunset Acres, lucky him.
I have his scar tattooed on my body, his whole long bypass scar, all the way down his chest, but miniaturized and on the inside of my wrist. It looks like a scar there, not a tattoo.
I took a photo into the tattoo place, cropped to remove most of the context. Tattoo artists can’t be too squeamish, I suppose, but there was only skin enough in the photo to show contrast with the scar. Nothing to suggest scale, no chest to suggest the heart contained, no belly or shoulders or head attached to the chest. No way to tell that although the scar was not new, at this point the body was dead.
I didn’t do any of that. I wish I had. I think about it constantly, because I should be marked in some way, scarred. He should show on me. Sometimes I take off my wedding ring and look at the pale indentation it leaves. But the ring is not him. I’d have taken the scar itself if I could have, lifted it from him and wrapped it around my arm like a bracelet, a piece of leather.
For a while I had a red marker in a drawer. It is gone now. I would draw a snaky line down my wrist, redraw it when it washed off. I doubt it was Randy who took the marker. It was someone employed here; at Sunset Acres some decisions are made for you. That’s part of what I’m paying for. The marker might have come from the crafts area in the dayroom. It might be back there now. It’s possible that’s what happened to it.
I am not stupid; I can still make such deductions, but I won’t swipe it back. Persistent writing on my skin would be reported to Randy and the head nurse. They would laugh at me, gently, behind my back. I could explain myself, but that would alarm them further and I would be signing up for heavier monitoring. So I tell myself a story about a tattoo.
* * *
I was wrong; Randy did bring up his book project again, not the topic in much detail but a bit about the process. It was an attempt to make conversation. The lulls between us don’t bother me terribly, so I let him fill them if he likes.
“I’m reading a lot, Judy. I decided that was the best place to start.”
“That’s good,” I said, unclear what he was talking about. I would follow along from here and make my little noises in response.
He touched the phone in his pocket and looked at the clock on the wall. We were only half an hour into his contracted ninety minutes. That’s what we’ve agreed upon, tacitly. It is long enough, not so short as to emphasize that what there is between us is duty. I picture him leaving here each time in relief. Done for two whole weeks! I feel it too. But what else could we do?
“So much of research is reading,” he said.
“Sure.”
“And so much of writing a book is all the gearing up to write it! Putting your ideas down is the easy part.”
“I suppose it depends on the book.”
“My book, I mean.”
“Oh. Right.” I closed my eyes. I opened them. I decided to bite my tongue.
“Not easy, I shouldn’t say that, but . . .” He touched his phone again. “Not the only hard part.”
“No. I imagine not.”
I should help him out, suggest a cup of coffee, a walk outside; tell him what I’m reading; ask about the children. Instead I let him dangle. I think I am not cruel so much as weary. Talking like this takes such effort. I don’t know how he interprets my behavior. To him, I am probably just old; not a monster, only an obligation. That is the way of things.
Most of the people at Sunset Acres have children. They assume Randy is my son, though I correct them, over and over. Should I describe him? He is balding. He is in his late forties, maybe fifty now. He wears glasses. Myself, I am quite short, my hair is gray, I have glasses too. I don’t know that we resemble each other, though we might. Mostly we resemble the parent-child affiliations here: he is a middle-aged man, I am an old lady. The picture we make fits expectations.
There was a time Adam and I thought we might have to adopt Randy, at least informally. My sister was in a coma after a car crash, and her useless husband—the drunk who caused the crash—was showing his full uselessness. But she came out of it, and he reformed, minimally. They managed to lurch along to the end of their lives, having raised Randy into adulthood. Now I am his problem. And he is mine.
Adam felt more generous than I did about taking in young Randy, but we were both relieved not to have to. Our whole marriage long, more than five decades, we were aware the prevailing presumption was that we didn’t have children because we “couldn’t”—the defects, I knew, assumed to be mine, and poor Adam a saint for sticking by me. Yes, lucky me. Lucky, lucky, blessed me, and lucky Adam too, because we were madly in love.
Our enduring besottedness felt almost as much a secret as the fact we purposely hadn’t had children. Marriage might start out passionate; that could be tolerated so long as it remained subtly expressed, but the goal was mutual obligation. Devotion should persist, a wry aggravation with each other may develop, but any intimation of romantic and sexual attachment was unseemly much past the wedding.
Our secrets were safe, held within the culturally and legally sanctioned setup of our lives. Many people have private desperations and terrors. We also had private delight.
But my grief is borne alone. That is the trade-off, and we acknowledged that the one to go first would be the luckier. I used to anticipate my own relief in learning it would be me. But what could provide such realization? Some diagnosis? No guarantee.
I’d wanted deliverance from my worst fear, and barring that, I’d wanted information: to know who would go first, and when and how. No one can have that either, and Adam would remind me that whoever was left would just have to get on with things.
Now I am not lonely, in a general way; there is no escaping all this companionship. But I am, I remain, in love with Adam. I still want Adam, Adam only, in every way.
Imagine saying any of that out loud, to anyone. I don’t, of course I don’t. It is acceptable to say I miss my husband, but I don’t even say that. I just think about him all the time; I dream about him. He is my first thought upon waking, when I look at the photo by my bed, afraid sometime I’ll forget what he looked like. But I haven’t so far. There is still that pulse of recognition, and then my brain’s reminder he is dead. It’s been three years, and the shock has not entirely worn away.
In many significant ways I am fine. I give no cause for worry: I keep myself clean, I take sufficient nourishment, I do not weep openly, I know what year it is. I can carry on a conversation—it is performative; I haven’t had an interesting conversation in years, but I can do it.
With Randy I add my flourishes, to keep myself entertained, not only to display my lucidity.
“Will you mention Malcolm X?” I asked now, wondering whether the question would seem out of the blue to him. “Part of the piling on?”
“What?” he said. He looked at the clock again. “Yes.”
“Because he helped add up to the end of innocence.”
Perhaps Randy caught my tone, my sardonic emphasis on the word innocence, but he made no indication.
“Right,” he said. “Anyway, for now I’m reading a lot.”
“That’s good,” I repeated.
He changed the subject then, to tell me about the children, about school (things I’d heard before), about some repair to their house, about their old dog. He remarked upon the weather, upon the news of the day. A nurse’s aide came in with a paper cup of pills—they could have been anything; I thought this every time—and watched while I swallowed them. She asked if we would like some coffee.
“It’s decaf,” I reminded Randy, and he nodded.
“Probably better,” he said.
All this had happened before, the exact sequence: the interruption of the girl with the pills, an offer of coffee, my warning about it. Something would change sometime; there would be real news, a disaster; we would turn on the TV to listen to people talk about it.
We received our coffee and thanked the girl, and then Randy said to me, “Listen, Judy.”
“Okay,” I said. “I’m listening.”
“I’d like to come every three weeks instead of two.”
“That’s fine.”
“With the kids getting older and all their activities, it’s hard to get away so often on a Saturday, even for a few hours.”
“That’s fine.”
He tipped his head at me. I shrugged. “It’s fine, Randy.”
I smiled at him, closemouthed, to show how fine it was, and also to give my relief an acceptable outlet. I could not clap my hands at this news of my extended reprieve. I could give him a demure old-lady smile, though.
“I think you’re set up for now,” he said. “We paid your rent early last month. We’ll pay it again in three weeks. There will be time.”
He stood and set his coffee on my desk. He picked up a pen and leaned to the calendar on the wall. It was a big one, for old people. I could see it from where I was. I could see anything in the room from anywhere else. He wrote RANDY in the square for three weeks from now, filling up the whole space.
“Okay?” he said. “Do you need anything?”
I shook my head, still smiling.
“Shall I look at the checkbook?”
“No.”
“Really?”
I shrugged again. “I don’t care. Be my guest. You know where it is.”
He opened the desk drawer and took out the familiar (inscrutable) little book. It’s had the same cracked green vinyl cover for decades.
“Why is ‘phone bill’ circled in pencil?” he asked.
“I don’t know.”
He read for a minute more, flipped pages, shrugged himself. Maybe that’s how we could communicate. No more agonizing chitchat, just endless shrugging back and forth.
He closed the book and put it back. “I think you’ll be fine for three weeks.”
“I’ll be fine.”
Our coffee got cold, our remaining minutes ticked by, and Randy began his extrication. There is a ritual to it. It starts with him saying “Well.” He said that, then performed the other steps—the standing up, the unconvincing hug, the putting on of his jacket. Then held up his hand in the doorway before showing me the back of him, all while we each said goodbye multiple times.
I could imagine the conversation with his wife when he got home.
“How did she take it?”
“Fine. You know how she is.”
“You’re making an investment, Randy darling. Someday you won’t have to go at all. Someday what’s hers will all be yours.”
Here’s how I might hide stealing, if it were me: pad each line item, decrease the balance at the top of a new page, practice bad penmanship. I am easy to fool, I fear. So easy Randy could do it.
But he wouldn’t. I know this. The very thought is unfair to him, not to mention unflattering to me. It makes me a caricature to indulge in this kind of elderly paranoia.
“Good luck on your little book,” I told him, though I knew he was already too far down the hall to hear me.
. . .
For more of this story or other great fiction in Issue 21.1, order now in our online store. Digital copies are only $5.
Hadley Moore’s collection Not Dead Yet and Other Stories (2019) won Autumn House Press’s fiction contest and received many other commendations, including being longlisted for the 2020 PEN/Robert W. Bingham Prize for Debut Short Story Collection. She is an alum of the MFA Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College.
