Milt looked happier than she had ever seen him look. “Marvelous!” he said.
No one ever said marvelous anymore.
“Oh, you’re nice,” she said.
“I have an idea! Can you drive me downtown? I have an appointment in a half hour and I’d like you to come with me. Besides, I’m not allowed to drive.”
“All right,” she said. Of course she had guessed that soon she might be taking him to doctors’ appointments.
Instead, she drove him in his old, scarcely used Audi, which she found stored in the garage with a dust cloth over it, to his lawyer’s. “Meet my lovely new friend, Casey,” he said, introducing her as they were ushered into the lawyer’s gleaming office and the lawyer stared at her skeptically but shook her hand.
“Rick, I would like to change my will,” Milt said.
“Yes, I know. You wanted to—”
“No, now I want to change it even more than I said before. I know we were going to leave the house to the Children’s Hospital, which was Rachel’s wish, but they’re doing fine without us, their machinery’s over there tearing things up every day on that new wing. So instead I’d like to leave everything, absolutely everything, to Casey here. And to make her executor as well.”
Silence fell over the room as Milt’s beaming face went back and forth between pale-feeling KC and pale-looking Rick.
“Milt, I don’t think that’s a good idea,” KC said, clutching his arm. It was the first time she had actually touched him and it seemed to energize him further.
“Nonsense!” he said. “I want to free you from any burdens — it will keep you the angel you are.”
“It hardly seems that I’m the angel.”
“You are, you are. And I want you and your music to fly untethered.”
Rick gave her a wary look as he made his way slowly behind a mahogany desk the size of a truck flatbed. He sat down in a leather chair that had ball bearings and a reclining mechanism that he illustrated by immediately beginning to bounce against it and spin slightly, his arms now folded behind his neck. Then he threw himself forward onto a leather-edged blotter and grabbed the folder he had in front of him. “Well, I can get Maryanne to change everything right now.” Then Rick studied KC again, and in a voice borrowed from either his youth or his son, said to her, “Nice tats.”
She did not speak of it to Dench. She did not know how. She thought of being wry — hey, Villa is back! and this time it’s an actual villa — but there was no good way. She had been passive before Milt’s gift — gifts required some passivity — and she would remain passive before Dench. Besides, the whole situation could change on a dime, and she half hoped it would. Like almost everything, it existed in the hypothetical — God only knew how many times Milt had changed his will — so she would try not to think of it at all. Except in this way: Milt had no one. And now he had no one but her. Which was like having no one.
Dench appeared in the bathroom doorway as she was cutting bangs into her hair with nail scissors. “I thought you were growing your hair,” he said. “I thought you were going to sell it.”
“It’s just bangs,” she said, threw down the scissors, and brushed past him.
She began to take Milt to his doctors’ appointments, though she sat in the waiting room. “I’ve got reservations both at the hospice wing where your grandmother was and also right there,” he said as they passed the Heavenly Sunset Cemetery.
“Do you have a good tree?”
“What?”
“Do you have a good space beneath a strong tree?” she said loudly.
“I do!” he exclaimed. “I’m next to my wife.” He paused, brooding. “Of course she has on her gravestone ALONE AT LAST. So, I’m putting on mine NOT SO FAST.”
KC laughed, which she knew was what he wanted. “It’s good to have a place.”
At the doctor’s sometimes the nurse, and sometimes the physician’s assistant, would walk him back out to her and give her hurried and worried instructions. “Here is his new medicine,” they would say, “but if he has a bad response we’ll put him back on the other one.” Milt would shrug as if he were surrounded by a gaggle of crazy relatives.
Once, a nurse leaned in and whispered, “There’s a fear it may have spread to the brain. If you have any trouble on the weekend, phone the hospital or even the hospice. Watch his balance particularly.”
KC took another of Ian’s books to Milt’s book nook, and one day, not seeing the old man outside, she worriedly tied Cat to the book nook post, went up to the main door, and knocked. She opened it and stepped in. “Hello? Good morning? Milt?”
Out stepped a middle-aged woman with an authoritative stride. Her heels hit the floorboards and stopped. She wore black slacks and a white shirt tucked into the waistband. Her hair was cut short — thick and gray. It was the sort of hair that years ago, when it was dark, wigmakers would have paid good money for. The woman stood there staring for a long time and then said, “I know what you’re up to.”
“What are you talking about?”
“One of his Concertos in Be Minor. How old are you?”
“I’m thirty-eight.”
“I wonder if he knows that. You look younger.”
“Well, I’m not.”
“Hence your needs.”
“I don’t know what you mean.”
“No? You don’t?”
“No.” Denial, when one was accused, was a life force, and would trump any desire to confess. Perhaps this was the animal strength of the psychopathic brain. Or the psychopathy of the animal brain. An admission of guilt would knock the strength right out of you — making it easier for them to twist your arms behind you and put the handcuffs on. It was from Dench, perhaps, that she had learned this.
“Shall we sit?” The pewter-haired woman motioned toward one of the sofas.
“I don’t think that’s necessary.”
“You don’t.”
“No, besides, I was just walking my dog, and he’s still tied up outside. I was just checking on Milt.”
“Well, my sister has taken him to his doctor’s appointment, so he won’t be needing you today.”
In bed KC lay next to Dench, staring at the ceiling, and smoking a cigarette, though they were not supposed to smoke inside. Cat lay on the quilt at the foot of the bed, doing his open-eyed fake-sleep. They were all carnies at the close of Labor Day. She stared at her Hammond keyboard, which right now had laundry piled and draped over it in angles. “What illness do you suppose Milt actually has?” Dench asked.
“Something quiet but wretched.”
“Early onset quelque chose?”
“Not that early. I don’t think I can go on visiting him anymore. I just can’t do it.”
Dench squeezed her thigh then caressed it. “Sure you can,” he said.
She stabbed out her cigarette in a coffee cup, then, turning, rubbed her hand down along Dench’s sinewy biceps and across his tightly muscled stomach, feeling hounded back into his arms, which she had never really left, and now his arms’ familiarity was her only joy. You could lose someone a little but they would still roam the earth. The end of love was one big zombie movie.
“Do you realize that if you smoke enough you will end up lowering your risk of uterine cancer?” she said.
“That’s a bad one,” said Dench. “The silent killer. Especially in men.”
“What did you do today?”
“I worked on some songs about my slavery-oppressed ancestors. I’m blaming the white man for my troubles.”