His daughters will be called. Or one of them will, and she’ll call the other. Maybe his friend and former colleague will be called by the hospital too, or one of his daughters will call him. His daughters will come to the hospital straight from the train station. They, and possibly his friend — he’s sharp on things; that’s why they’d want him there — will deal with whatever needs to be done after someone dies. Documents. Signing papers. Going through his wallet to find his Medicare and Blue/Cross Blue/Shield cards. Contacting, probably with the help of a social worker at the hospital, a funeral home to pick up the body later that day or sometime the next day to be cremated, something he told his daughters he wanted done with it. His daughters will go home. If his friend came to the hospital, he’ll stick around and drive them, or else they’ll take a cab.
This is what they’ll find at home. The door will be unlocked. The cat will be outside, sitting on the doormat. They’ll let him in and give him fresh water and food. Both of them will probably pick up and hold the cat till he starts squirming in their arms, which he does with everyone when he’s held more than thirty seconds or so, and he’ll either jump to the floor or they’ll let him down.
His daughters will turn most of the lights on in the house and probably, for a while, the outside lights too. They’ll probably check the thermostat in the dining room to see if the heat’s on or at a temperature they want. All the rooms will be clean, other than for some tracks the EMU people made on the kitchen floor. It was still a little wet outside that morning. The cleaning woman, who comes every Tuesday for four hours and then makes herself a mug of herbal tea and a sandwich from smoked turkey and a roll he bought at the local market the day before and lettuce from the refrigerator’s vegetable bin, will have been there just two days ago, and he was always cleaning and tidying up after himself in the house. He never liked to see a single thread or a leaf from one of his houseplants on the floor. There’ll be some slices of turkey left in a zipper bag in the deli tray in the refrigerator. He used to give it to the cat, in small pieces, the next two to three days. He once shared what turkey was left with the cat but hadn’t for months. Not since he stopped eating anything with salt in it after his doctor told him his blood pressure was getting dangerously high and he wanted to put him on a medication to lower it. He told both daughters in separate phone conversations that he didn’t want to go on another pill if he could avoid it. His bowels were already too affected by the pills he’s taking. That maybe a salt-free diet and a short jog in the morning and a long walk that ended with a short jog at dusk and more exercise at the Y than he’s been doing will lower his blood pressure to a level where he won’t have to take any new medication. His doctor didn’t think so, he told his daughters, but they’ll see. It can’t hurt or make things worse, he said; just make eating less interesting. He was already taking a pill three times during the day at six-hour intervals for his Parkinson’s and another pill once a day for an enlarged prostate. He would have taken the Parkinson’s pill with his breakfast this morning after his run and the prostate pill a half hour after breakfast. The pills are in pill containers on a shelf above one of the kitchen counters. These pills and the little smoked turkey left — in fact, everything in the deli tray — and some other foods in the refrigerator they think might be too old or past their expiration dates or they just don’t want to take any chance on will be the first things they’ll dump into the trash can in the kitchen. If they get hungry and don’t use his car to drive to a market or a restaurant for dinner, what will they find in the house to eat? When he knew they were coming for a weekend or more, he bought things they liked. Flax seed bread, bagels, almond milk, Honey Nut cereal, Greek yogurt, goat cheese, other foods he didn’t eat. There’s half a loaf of whole wheat bread in the refrigerator that he bought for himself a week ago, but it’s salt-free. They’ll find it tasteless, even toasted and with butter or jam or both. In the freezer are two of the six bagels he bought for them the last time they were here and which they didn’t want to take back with them, so he froze them and they can have them this time. Also different dishes in plastic food containers in the freezer. He liked to cook and would only eat a quarter of what he made and freeze the rest and rarely ate what he froze and most of the time, a month or two after he put them in the freezer, he threw them out. They’ll dump almost everything in the freezer the next few days and all the spices on the spice shelf on the kitchen wall, most of which have been there more than a year. There are cans of different kinds of salt-free beans and diced and crushed tomatoes and tomato sauce in a kitchen cabinet. There are also several pastas and a box of rice noodles in that cabinet. So it’s possible that instead of eating out in a restaurant or going to a market for food they’ll make dinner from some combination of what they find in the kitchen cabinets and a salad from the refrigerator’s vegetable bin and fruit from the fruit bin and the bowl in the center of the dining table — bananas, clementines, a grapefruit, ripe pears — and wine from one of the bottles in the two wine racks under the sideboard.
They’ll find in the refrigerator part of what was to be today’s breakfast he prepared the night before. A bowl with soy yogurt and cranberry compote he made a large batch of so he could have it every morning for one to two weeks and a sliced banana. That’ll also be dumped. They’ll also find in the refrigerator a small plastic container of cut-up fresh fruit. Sometimes he prepared three containers of fruit at once, usually the same fruits equally distributed in the containers, lidded them and took them out one at a time with the bowls the next three mornings.
A salad fork for the fruit and tablespoon for the bowl of cereal will be on the one placemat on the table, a folded-up cloth napkin under them. He put the utensils there the previous night before he went to bed, something he did every night if he knew he was going to have breakfast at home the next morning. The napkins and placemat will be a little stained with food, since he also used them for his last two lunches, and they’ll drop them into the washing machine in the kitchen. They won’t find anything in the washing machine when they open it or anything in the dryer next to it. He did a wash two mornings before and folded up everything and put it away. The spoon and fork they’ll put back into the utensil drawer under a kitchen counter.
The coffeemaker on the short counter between the stove and sink will also have been prepared the night before: water, filter paper and grounds. Alongside the coffeemaker will be the mug he planned to drink the coffee out of and a thermos he was going to pour the rest of the coffee into after he filled up the mug.
He didn’t pick up his newspaper by the mailbox this morning, so it’ll still be there. They’ll pick it up the next morning with the next day’s newspaper. They knew his morning routine almost by heart now. They’d seen it when they were there and got up early enough and he talked self-mockingly about it on the phone several times. “It’s crazy,” he said, “but since your mother died this is what I do.” If he hadn’t gotten sick he would have made sure the living room door to the porch was locked, gone outside through the kitchen door and locked it, taken a short run with maybe a brief stop or two on the roads’ shoulders when cars were coming his way, got the newspaper at the end of the run, unlocked the kitchen door, hung the keyring on one of the hooks by the door, turned the coffeemaker on, taken the container of fruit and bowl of soy yogurt, compote and banana out of the refrigerator, or done that before he left the house, got the jar of sodium-free granola off a kitchen shelf and spooned some of it into the bowl, set the bowl and container of fruit on the placemat on the dining table, poured out a mug of coffee and put it on a coaster on the table, poured what was left in the coffeemaker into the thermos, shut off the coffeemaker, let the cat in by now if he wanted to come in and given him a fresh bowl of water and a plate with wet food on it, which he would have got out of the refrigerator or opened a new can of cat food from the kitchen cabinet that had all his canned foods, or if there was very little food left in the can from the refrigerator, done both; brought the newspaper to the table if he hadn’t already left it there when he came back into the house after his run, taken his first Parkinson’s pill of the day if he hadn’t already taken it, and sat down at the table and started to eat his breakfast and drink his coffee while he read the newspaper, starting with the capsule weather forecast for the Washington edition at the top right corner of the page.