“You’re a little hairball,” I say, laughing at its smashed-in face, its wet black nose. I scoop it up and it snorts a tiny spray at me. The tag on its collar says Maybelle. “Hello, little Maybelle,” I say. And she buries her funny little face in my neck. I leave my suitcase on the lawn and carry the dog in instead.
I see them through the screen door. They are both on the floor, in that wide open space where the kitchen table used to be. My father is lying down, bleeding from somewhere on his face. Garvey is sitting up but bent over, rocking.
“Is he dead?” I hear myself scream. “Is he dead?” I don’t know what I do with Maybelle. I’m on the floor between them, wiping the blood with my sleeve. It’s coming from just below my father’s eyebrow, not quickly. His skin is a green gray. “I think he’s dead!”
“He’s not dead,” Garvey says quietly.
It’s true. I can feel breath coming out his nostrils.
“I’m sorry I called you.” He stands up slowly. It hurts him to straighten up. “He’s not worth it. Just get in your car and go.”
I don’t move.
“I mean it, Daley. Leave. Go to California. I’m serious.”
“He’s unconscious and he’s bleeding.”
“He’s fine. He’s drunk and he has a scrape. C’mon, Daley. Get up and come with me.”
“You did this. You hit him.”
“All I did was defend myself. C’mon. We’ll stop at Brigham’s and I’ll buy you a lime rickey.” For the first time my brother looks old to me. Old and sad. He is growing jowly.
“You just had me drive sixteen hours in the wrong direction and now you want me to leave him passed out on the floor and drive away?”
“I said I was sorry. I was wrong, all right? Come with me. Now. Trust me on this one, Daley.”
“I can’t.”
“Fuck it then. Suit yourself.” He slides his old leather jacket off a doorknob. The screen door smacks behind him. “Call me when he’s dead,” he says, and starts down the steps.
“Garvey!” I want to run after him but I’m scared to leave my father. “You asshole!” I get up and scream through the screen at his back, moving away. “You fucking asshole! What am I supposed to do with him?”
“Walk away,” he calls without turning.
I go back to my father on the floor. The van starts up, the dogs bark, and Garvey yells at them as they chase him and his goddamn flying refrigerators down the driveway.
Maybelle has taken to her leopard-print bed in the corner but jumps up when I get a rag out of the drawer. She follows me to the sink and back to my father.
As soon as I put the wet cloth on his forehead he comes to, or maybe he’s been awake the whole time.
“Hello, elf.”
“Dad, I’m taking you to the hospital.”
“All right,” he says. He sounds grateful, as if he’s been waiting a long time for somebody to say those words.
I know the way to the hospital in Allencaster. Mallory and I were candy stripers there one summer. We take my father’s car with automatic windows and seat levers. The steering wheel has a thick leather sheath. He falls asleep before we hit the highway. Every few minutes I poke him.
“Why do you keep doing that?” he says.
“Just checking on you.”
“Don’t check on me anymore.” Unlike my brother, he seems not to have aged at all. He looks as I always remember him, tanned, taut, and bony. The knees beneath his khakis are the same knobs I’ve seen all my life. I find myself wanting to stare.
He smells of alcohol and I’m glad. The doctors will notice. Maybe they will suggest a treatment center. Maybe this is the proverbial rock bottom.
It’s a small hospital with a small parking lot. We get a spot near the door. I help him out of the car and he walks slowly, more bent over than usual, one hand shielding his bad eye. I steady him, relieved when I see a wheelchair out in front of the door. I steer him toward it but he bats the idea away with his free hand and the word pansy and keeps walking.
After my father is admitted, I return to the desk and ask if I can see Dr. Perry Barns, who was his internist and occasional doubles partner when I was growing up. He comes quickly, short-limbed in his white tunic, one lone tuft of silver hair left on the top of his head. I barely know him; he is just a name I’ve heard on Myrtle Street all my life.
“Look at you!” he says from the doorway. People in the waiting room glance up at the unnecessary boom of his voice. He begins shaking his head. “You were this high.” He puts a flat hand level to his kneecap
I stand and he gives me a hug and a moist kiss too close to my mouth.
“I’m sorry to bother you, Dr. Barns. It would just make me feel better if you’d take a look at him.”
“At who?”
“At my father. I’m sorry. I thought they had explained—” I glance over at reception. The chair is empty.
“What’s going on?” Like that, he switches from country club parent to doctor. I feel my body relax.
I tell him what I know, and he disappears through the swinging doors. I zone in and out of The Price Is Right.
When he comes back a few minutes later, he is smiling again. He sits next to me in a plastic chair and puts his hand on my leg. “You.” He squeezes the skin of my thigh several times. “You are all grown up.”
It would be one thing if I were recently grown up. But I am twenty-nine years old. “Could you tell me about my father?”
He pulls back his hand. “He’s going to be okay. Honkey-donkey, as my daughter used to say.” I never knew what a moron this guy was. “He’ll be hitting those famous crosscourt volleys in just a few days.”
“I’m concerned about his drinking.”
“Drinking?”
“Since Catherine left, he’s been on a bit of a tear.”
“Your father has never been a binger.”
I laugh. “You’re right. More of a steady alcoholic.”
He frowns. “Oh, now, alcoholic is a strong word. He likes his martinis, I’ll grant you. But that’s never been a problem.”
I have a swirling slippery feeling in my stomach. I feel the small stool in St. Thomas beneath me. “You’re right. I’m exaggerating. Please don’t mention to him that I said that.” I don’t need my father’s fury turned on me during the forty-eight hours I’ll be in Ashing.
He smiles. “I won’t.” He puts his hand back on my leg and squeezes a few more times. “I promise.”
My father is wrapped up in a lot of bandages, and in many more places than I thought he’d been hurt: both wrists, one ankle, his entire forehead, and around his chest. The wrist wraps look hasty and uneven and I wonder if he did it himself when the nurse left the cubicle. Once he has the bandages on he becomes even more frail, moving more slowly to the car than he did into the hospital.
When we get home I take him directly upstairs to his bed, hoping I can steal a little sleep as well. But as I’m leaving the room he says in a small voice, “Any lunch down there?”
At least I know what to make him: three hot dogs, no bun, and a sliced tomato slathered with mayonnaise. I’ve seen him eat that lunch my whole life. Tomatoes and hot dogs are the only edible things in the fridge. The other vegetables have blackened; the milk has gone sour. There is an explosion of dirty dishes in and around the sink. As far as I can tell, Garvey and my father ate everything with ketchup, which has now hardened into a scarlet shellac on every plate. I can’t cook, can’t even boil hot dogs, in such a filthy kitchen.