The first order of business, as Gary saw it, was to sell the house. Get top dollar for it, move his parents into someplace smaller, newer, safer, cheaper, and invest the difference aggressively. The house was Enid and Alfred’s only large asset, and Gary took a morning to inspect the whole property slowly, inside and out. He found cracks in the grouting, rust lines in the bathroom sinks, and a softness in the master bedroom ceiling. He noticed rain stains on the inner wall of the back porch, a beard of dried suds on the chin of the old dishwasher, an alarming thump in the forced-air blower, pustules and ridges in the driveway’s asphalt, termites in the woodpile, a Damoclean oak limb dangling above a dormer, finger-wide cracks in the foundation, retaining walls that listed, whitecaps of peeling paint on window jambs, big emboldened spiders in the basement, fields of dried sow bug and cricket husks, unfamiliar fungal and enteric smells, everywhere he looked the sag of entropy. Even in a rising market, the house was beginning to lose value, and Gary thought: We’ve got to sell this fucker now, we can’t lose another day.
On the last morning of his visit, while Jonah helped Enid bake a birthday cake, Gary took Alfred to the hardware store. As soon as they were on the road, Gary said it was time to put the house on the market.
Alfred, in the passenger seat of the gerontic Olds, stared straight ahead. “Why?”
“If you miss the spring season,” Gary said, “you’ll have to wait another year. And you can’t afford another year. You can’t count on good health, and the house is losing value.”
Alfred shook his head. “I’ve agitated for a long time. One bedroom and a kitchen is all we need. Somewhere your mother can cook and we have a place to sit. But it’s no use. She doesn’t want to leave.”
“Dad, if you don’t put yourself someplace manageable, you’re going to hurt yourself. You’re going to wind up in a nursing home.”
“I have no intention of going to a nursing home. So.”
“Just because you don’t intend to doesn’t mean it won’t happen.”
Alfred looked, in passing, at Gary’s old elementary school. “Where are we going?”
“You fall down the stairs, you slip on the ice and break your hip, you’re going to end up in a nursing home. Caroline’s grandmother—”
“I didn’t hear where we were going.”
“We’re going to the hardware store,” Gary said. “Mom wants a dimmer switch for the kitchen.”
Alfred shook his head. “She and her romantic lighting.”
“She gets pleasure from it,” Gary said. “What do you get pleasure from?”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean you’ve just about worn her out.”
Alfred’s active hands, on his lap, were gathering nothing — raking in a poker pot that did not exist. “I’ll ask you again not to meddle,” he said.
The midmorning light of a late-winter thaw, the stillness of a weekday nonhour in St. Jude, Gary wondered how his parents stood it. The oak trees were the same oily black as the crows perching in them. The sky was the same color as the salt-white pavement on which elderly St. Judean drivers obeying barbiturate speed limits were crawling to their destinations: to malls with pools of meltwater on their papered roofs, to the arterial that overlooked puddled steel yards and the state mental hospital and transmission towers feeding soaps and game shows to the ether; to the beltways and, beyond them, to a million acres of thawing hinterland where pickups were axle-deep in clay and.22s were fired in the woods and only gospel and pedal steel guitars were on the radio; to residential blocks with the same pallid glare in every window, besquirreled yellow lawns with a random plastic toy or two embedded in the dirt, a mailman whistling something Celtic and slamming mailboxes harder than he had to, because the deadness of these streets, at such a nonhour, in such a nonseason, could honestly kill you.
“Are you happy with your life?” Gary said, waiting for a left-turn arrow. “Can you say you’re ever happy?”
“Gary, I have an affliction—”
“A lot of people have afflictions. If that’s your excuse, fine, if you want to feel sorry for yourself, fine, but why drag Mom down?”
“Well. You’ll be leaving tomorrow.”
“Meaning what,” Gary said. “That you’ll sit in your chair and Mom will cook and clean for you?”
“There are things in life that simply have to be endured.”
“Why bother staying alive, if that’s your attitude? What do you have to look forward to?”
“I ask myself that question every day.”
“Well, and what’s your answer?” Gary said.
“What’s your answer? What do you think I should look forward to?”
“Travel.”
“I’ve traveled enough. I spent thirty years traveling.”
“Time with family. Time with people you love.”
“No comment.”
“What do you mean, ‘no comment’?”
“Just that: no comment.”
“You’re still sore about Christmas.”
“You may interpret it however you like.”
“If you’re sore about Christmas, you might have the consideration to say so—”
“No comment.”
“Instead of insinuating.”
“We should have come two days later and left two days earlier,” Alfred said. “That’s all I have to say on the topic of Christmas. We should have stayed forty-eight hours.”
“It’s because you’re depressed, Dad. You are clinically depressed—”
“And so are you.”
“And the responsible thing would be to get some treatment.”
“Did you hear me? I said so are you.”
“What are you talking about?”
“Figure it out.”
“Dad, really, no, what are you talking about? I’m not the one who sits in a chair all day and sleeps.”
“Underneath, you are,” Alfred pronounced.
“That’s simply false.”
“One day you will see.”
“I will not!” Gary said. “My life is on a fundamentally different basis than yours.”
“Mark my words. I look at your marriage, I see what I see. Someday you’ll see it, too.”
“That’s empty talk and you know it. You’re just pissed off with me, and you have no way to deal with it.”
“I’ve told you I don’t want to discuss this.”
“And I have no respect for that.”
“Well, there are things in your life that I have no respect for either.”
It shouldn’t have hurt to hear that Alfred, who was wrong about almost everything, did not respect things in Gary’s life; and yet it did hurt.
At the hardware store he let Alfred pay for the dimmer switch. The old man’s careful plucking of bills from his slender wallet and his faint hesitation before he offered them were signs of his respect for a dollar — of his maddening belief that each one mattered.
Back at the house, while Gary and Jonah kicked a soccer ball, Alfred gathered tools and killed the power to the kitchen and set about installing the dimmer. Even at this late date it didn’t occur to Gary not to let Alfred handle wiring. But when he came inside for lunch he found that his father had done no more than remove the old switch plate. He was holding the dimmer switch like a detonator that made him shake with fear.
“My affliction makes this difficult,” he explained.
“You’ve got to sell this house,” Gary said.