She tilts her head back into the water and comes up sputtering, wiping her eyes. Meanwhile I’ve got the shampoo off the shelf. I pour some into the palm of my hand and smooth it into both hands, kneel beside the tub and work it into her smooth fine hair. She smiles at me.
“Don’t get it in my eyes, Patrick.”
“I won’t.”
And I’m careful not to. But I can’t help thinking of our last real night together, starting with our shower, starting with me shampooing her hair just as I’m doing now.
Then telling her turn around, I’ll do your back.
She does. I wash her back, her ass, her breasts, her stomach. She raises her arms and I wash her armpits, her arms, then her back and ass again, into the crack of her ass, into her cunt. She soaps her own hand and reaches down to me.
This is not a good place to go.
She’s looking up at me with those very innocent eyes.
I turn on the water behind her. Fiddle with the hot and cold until it’s luke.
“Okay, rinse. Close your eyes.” I’m trying to keep the thickness out of my voice.
I cup my hands, collect the fresh tap water and pour. Collect and pour. Over and over again until her hair is clean and shiny. She stands up, raises her arms and smoothes her hair back off her forehead. The gesture is so Sam it floors me for a moment but only for a moment because with her arms raised I can see the dark stubble in her armpits. Three days growth now. Sam shaves every day.
I wonder if Lily’s noticed.
While she’s toweling off I go into her room and retrieve yesterday’s tee shirt, socks and panties.
The panties are stained again, worse than before.
I’ll have to talk to her.
“Dad?”
“Pat? Hey, how are you?
My father is Daniel Patrick Burke and he and my mother are the only people in the world allowed to call me Pat.
I don’t phone him nearly enough. But he’s good about it. I think he understands.
“I’m okay. How about you?”
“Not bad. Got a little golf in this morning. I’ll never be any good at the damn game but it gets me off my butt now and then. My partner was Bill Crosby. He asked about you, sends his best.”
Bill always does. Like my father he’s a retired schoolteacher. Only my father taught math in Tulsa while Bill taught history in the Bronx. Bill’s a little rougher around the edges.
“Tell him I said hi.”
“I will.”
There’s a pause on the other end and I hear the flick of a lighter. My father’s Zippo. My dad’s got emphysema. He shouldn’t be smoking at all but he figures half a pack a day will buy him a little more time than two packs would. He’s content to leave it at that for now.
“How’s the weather been?”
“You know, sunny Sarasota. Weather’s fine. I just wish the snowbirds would hurry up and go home. You can’t get a parking space anywhere in this damn town. I went to visit your mother yesterday and then decided to grab a bite to eat. I had to walk five blocks to the Bonefish Grille and then waited half an hour for a table. Sometimes I think everybody down here’s from Minnesota.”
So here comes the inevitable. The dreaded question. The reason I don’t call too often. But I have to ask.
“How’s Mom?”
I hear him pull hard on his Winston.
“She asked me who I was, Pat.”
He lets it lie there a moment. On this end, I’m frozen.
“Sometimes she knows me and sometimes she doesn’t. I wanted to take her out for some ice cream. You know she loves ice cream. They tell me that’s typical. That with Alzheimer’s the sweet tooth goes last. But she gets so confused, you know? She wanted to get a sweater even though I told her she didn’t need one. She couldn’t find her own clothes closet. She went looking in the bathroom.”
My father knew he needed to put his wife of forty-two years in a managed care facility when she decided to make a frozen pizza for a snack one night and put the pizza in the oven, box and all.
“Anyhow I got her out of there and we went for a drive and I got her a chocolate sundae. She seemed to enjoy herself, to have a good time. She even reached over and smiled and had some of my banana split, just like a little kid. She was sweet. But, you know, she never once asked about you or your brother. And I’m not sure she knew who I was, even when I kissed her goodbye. Even then she looked puzzled.”
He sighs, coughs. After two years this is still always rough for him. He changes the subject.
“You hear anything from your brother?”
“No.”
And now the pause is on my end. My brother Ed is two years older than me — he became a D.C. cop after the Marine Corps. He thinks what I do for a living is ridiculous. I think what he does is probably just short of criminal.
Besides, I’m thinking about Sam.
“Something wrong, son?”
“No, Dad. Everything’s fine. I’m just a bit tired, that’s all.”
“How’s Sam?”
“Sam’s fine. She’s glued to the television.”
Which is true. I just don’t tell him what show it is.
“Give her my love, will you”
“Sure, Dad. Of course I will.”
Another pause from me. I’m picturing my mother and her chocolate sundae, her reaching across the table.
“You sure you’re okay, Pat?
And I almost tell him then. I almost blurt out the entire thing, because I love my father and maybe he can comfort me, maybe he can tell me it’s going to be all right and make me believe him the way I always believed him when I was young and he was the dad, the schoolteacher you could always go to, who always knew that you treated kids the same as you treated adults, with respect and an open heart.
I want to tell him that I miss her — that I miss us. Because we’ve always been one hellova pair, Sam and I, not just lovers but the best friends either of us has ever had, who tell one another when we’re hurting or need help and love to crack one another up with some silly goddamn joke. We love the same cat. Respect the same books. Smile to the same Tom Waits CDs in the car. Share a grave distrust of politics, lawyers and Wall Street.
I want to tell him that I feel abandoned. Like part of me’s living alone.
But my mother’s burden enough for him.
“I’m fine, Dad. Honest.”
I can’t tell if he buys that or not. Finally he breaks another silence.
“Okay. The two of you come visit your old dad one day soon, all right? It’s been too long.”
“Sure, Dad. We will. I promise. Love you.”
“Love you too, son. Love to Sam. ’Bye.”
Over the next two weeks I slash away at Samantha. I’ll tame that lovely bitch, keep her juicy ass big if it takes everything I’ve got. My deadline’s not until the end of next month but when I’m not with Lily I’m obsessive about this. The pages don’t exactly fly — I keep having to correct them — but I’ll have it done way before then.
We’ve fallen into a kind of pattern, Lily and I. She fixes her own cereal in the morning and I make lunch and dinner. I work while she plays. I make sure she has a bath every day and — over her protests, at first — that she washes her own damn hair. Once was quite enough for me. I order out for groceries. I do the laundry, skid marks and all. Can’t seem to bring myself to talk to her about that.
But Lily’s meanwhile become more demanding. Can’t blame her. She’s bored. Television and beads can only go so far. Same for Barbie’s two-story Glam Vacation House, Glam Convertible and Glam Pool and Slide. For a few days she’s into her Easy Bake Oven. She masters Barbie’s Pretty Pink Cake and goes on to Snow Mounds, Raisin Chocolate Chip Cookies, S’Mores, and Easy Bake Brownies.