But they're gone, gone forever.
And I say, unavoidably, hoping not desperately, "I've got some time."
"Sure you do. But you never know, do you, Jerry?"
Theresa, bless her soul, can always bring it on.
I say, "You never do. I could have a bad stroke right now, not be able to brush my teeth, and you'd have to put me in Ivy Acres."
"You could be roommates with Pop," she says, almost brightly. "I wonder how often that happens."
"I'm sure it's rare."
This is a prospect I haven't yet considered, but one I probably need to; not that it will actually happen or that I would let it, but I should realize that this is how people my daughter's age might naturally see me, and not even because they wish to.
"But you wouldn't really want that, would you?"
"To live with Pop in the home?"
"No," she says. "Just the home part."
"Is there an alternative?"
"Sure there is."
"Like what?"
"You know."
"I do?"
"Sure you do."
Or I think I do, but I'm afraid to say it first, the idea instantly replenishing the abandoned gravel pit of my heart. I think she's talking about what all of us not-for-a-while-middle-aged folks would love to hear whenever we get together with our grown kids, which I'll unofficially call The Invitation. Since they moved into their big house I've been secretly waiting for Jack and Eunice to float the idea that I eventually sell my house and move in with them, maybe agreeing to give them half the equity for my future maintenance by an attractive home nurse, the other half going to the kids' education or an inground pool or whatever else they deem to be worth the misery and trouble.
I've hoped this even despite the fact that Jack and I aren't close in any demonstrable way, or that I'm undeniably only so-so with the kids, being willing to take them to a carnival or the zoo but otherwise unable to sit with them for more than a few minutes in their great room amid the ten thousand plastic toys and gad-gets. I admit even to murmuring admiration over recent years for Jack's half-Asian blood, periodically extolling the virtues of filial piety (which Daisy once accused me of knowing nothing about, after forbidding her to call long-distance anymore to Korea, as she was running up bills of $200 a month), hoping that he'd someday put aside our thoroughly unspectacular relations and decide to honor some vague natal charge I'd slyly beckoned, some old-time Confucian burden that wouldn't depend (lucky for me) on anything private and personal. On this score I think us old white people (and black people, and any others too long in our strident self-making civilization) are way down in the game, and it wouldn't surprise me at all if the legions of my brethren about to overwhelm the ranks of assisted buttressed life prove to be among history's most disappointed generations.
As for Theresa, I never imagined she would ask me to join her crew, even if she were in a position to do so. But perhaps the current circumstance has initiated in her what is proving a sentimental bloom of hope and generosity, and in the sweet light of this I can't say much now, except to burble, genuinely and gratefully, "You've got plenty to think about with yourself and Paul."
"I know, I know. But so it's even more important to talk about it."
"Absolutely right," I say.
The Dairy Queen boys switch, the second one a bit more tentative than the first, as he seems to have little experience driving a stick, a video game probably the extent of it. The first customer presently turns in to the parking lot, and the kid at the wheel nearly hits him as he pulls out onto the road. We watch him as he bolts down to the next light, stalls, U-turns at the signal, stalls, and then hustles back.
Theresa finishes the milkshake, drilling about with the straw to draw up every last drop. Over the past couple weeks she's gained weight from Paul's four-star training table, as have I, with her cheeks and neck and shoulders looking fleshy and sturdy in her crème-colored cotton tank top. As she sits coolly at the wheel of my Impala wearing the Jackie 0 sunglasses, I can't help but wonder how close the two of them might be, she and Daisy, how they'd be plotting the family milestones, how, if I were a very lucky man, they'd be endlessly teasing me and causing me troubles and generally giving me a constant run of heartbreak.
"I'm glad to hear that from you, Jerry," Theresa says. "I was discussing it with Paul last night. About me."
"You?"
"Of course me. We decided that if things got horrific and the baby was already out and there was nothing left but blind faith, that he would help me take the necessary measures."
"Necessary measures? What the hell are you talking about?"
"What we're talking about."
"I thought we were talking about our future."
"Exactly," she says. "I don't want Paul and you and maybe Jack, if he even cares, to carry me beyond what's reasonable. I'm not going to go for anything heroic here. I'm not interested in lingering. Besides, I think it's appalling, the level of resources our society puts toward sustaining life, no matter the costs or quality."
"I don't care," I say, doing my best to switch gears unnoticed.
"I think it's noble."
"Noble? It's craven and egotistical. This when thousands of children are born each day into miserable conditions, when our public schools are crumbling, when the environment is threatened at every turn. Really, it's ridiculous, how antideath our society is."
"Look, honey, I don't know what you want me to say, but I'm definitely antideath. Especially yours."
"You may think that now. But if I were down to eighty pounds and I couldn't hear or see, and the pain were so great I couldn't stop moaning, all of it costing you and everyone else two thousand dollars a day, would you want me to endure every last breath?"
"I don't like talking about this."
"You're a big boy, Jerry."
"Okay. All right, then. I think you deserve your turn."
"My turn? You think Pop is enjoying his turn?"
"You're missing my point," I tell her. "Pop is where he is because there's no better choice. I put him there for his own good but he's not locked up. He doesn't like Ivy Acres, but in fact he doesn't want to live with me or Jack or anybody else. He can walk out anytime. What he really wants is his old life back, which he can't have. So he's doing what everybody does, which is just to ride it out for the sake of his family, so Jack and his kids can go over there and sit with him for an hour and fiddle with the bed controls and watch The Simpsons."
"It doesn't matter that nobody's really enjoying themselves?"
"Nope. It's just part of what we have to do, and Pop's job now is to be Pop-as-is. I'm not talking — about heroics here, because there's no way that I would want you to suffer. But if things don't go so well I hope you don't do something sudden. There's a certain natural run to these things and I think we'll all know if it's really time. But I don't think it truly ever is."
"Don't you think Mom did something sudden?" Theresa says, the scantest edge in her tone.
"Of course not. She didn't commit suicide."
"But it wasn't purely an accident either, right? If she hadn't been so miserably unhappy, maybe she'd have been more careful."
"Could be," I say, focusing on the miserably unhappy, not so much the truth of it but the fact of Theresa, as a young girl, knowing her mother in such unequivocal terms. This not even getting into all her possible views on my contributions to that unhappiness, the broad intense feelings probably swamping her back then and the thousands of chilly extrapolations she's made since, all of which, coming from her, are liable to scare me straight unto death.