“My doctor friends say you’re trying to gouge them on the office building.” Mike made this statement with a crazy grin.
“Cheapskates.”
“You got that right. But again, they’re my friends.”
“Why don’t they leave?”
“I don’t know.”
Mike rarely asked Frank to come to McDonald’s. Meeting there for lunch almost always meant something, since even by Mike’s standards the dining was not the issue. When their mother had been in the nursing home, after the fiasco in Fort Myers, she had gone rapidly downhill. Frank tried having her at home and so did Mike, but she no longer knew where she was and would prowl about at all hours. Once she set fire to Mike’s house trying to cook on the gas stove at three A.M. One of Mike’s children found her, nightgown on fire, and Mike had to spray her with a fire extinguisher. “Go ahead, kill me!” she had cried.
Adding to their problems was the fact that she had never liked them as children. She had been a famous local beauty and children had never fit her plans. She had associated Mike and Frank with her decline throughout her life, so that by the time she was old and infirm she openly disliked them. But she got pneumonia from the fire extinguisher and nearly died. So they put her back in the home, which was pleasant but inhabited almost entirely by what looked to Frank like zombies, who sat and stared or held playing cards but didn’t play them or who waited for the meal bells or simply watched television with perfect vacancy or took on small tasks that didn’t need doing, like curtain arrangement or extra dusting.
Frank had loved his mother but got nothing much in return, and even Mike, who hadn’t cared, understood that his mother’s situation was not one to be desired. She reached the point that she no longer got out of bed, then no longer ate and was on life support equipment. This went on for a good while; they visited regularly even though most of the time she didn’t know they were there, and when she did, she was unpleasantly reminded of how little she liked them. Finally, she failed to return to consciousness altogether. After a couple of months, Mike called Frank with his decision. He had spoken to the doctor. An absence could be arranged if Mike and Frank wished to remove her life support system.
“I couldn’t do it,” said Frank.
“You don’t have to do it,” said Mike. “All you have to do is agree it needs to be done and I’ll do it.”
“I just don’t know, Mike.”
“Maybe she’s living in a bad dream, Frank. I’d want mine pulled.”
They agreed that they would do it. Frank wondered, after she died, what the actual moment of death had been: when this decision was reached, or when her pulse stopped and her temperature started down? It was actually Mike who removed the … stuff, the equipment, the tubing. The last thing she said — and they had to go back a number of weeks for this — was something that had just bubbled up from a Johnny Carson show she had seen, and they would never have known that except that Mike had seen the same show. In a crooning, faraway voice, she repeated the words of a famous model who was a guest on the show telling about her photo safari to Tanzania. Their mother seemed to become the model, down to peculiar expressions of enthusiasm like “off the graph”: “The lions were really off the graph!”
They waited a long time after the apparatus was removed and she lingered on. They decided to stay with her in shifts. Mike went home to eat with his family; Frank stayed and watched. She never moved. Frank thought about her for a while, then thought about himself. He considered the compartments they had gotten into over the years, starting with his father the farmer-entrepreneur, his mother the town beauty of the famous Geranium Festival, Frank the investment manager and Mike the orthodontist. Gracie was about to join the former-wife class, and his mother had eased into the class of the soon dead. Frank’s daughter was in the college class, to enter either the professional or the homemaker class and join them all in the grand march off the flat earth. He decided to stop thinking about himself and about all that this meant under his flat-earth view, and to listen. He heard nothing. He got up and stood next to his mother. Her small hand lay open on the bed. Her wrist was terribly thin. He rested his hand next to it and lay his finger across her wrist. Nothing. He remembered how superfluous she thought he was. She said he was the boy who held the lantern while his mother chopped the wood.
“There’s one of my patients,” said Mike. “See that pretty teenager there? Carrying the milk shake? Well, you oughta had a look at her when she arrived on my doorstep. Looked like a church key.”
“She looks fine now.”
“Nothing whatsoever to prevent her from falling into your basic local social pattern. When I got her, she was headed for a life either alone or with a wheat farmer.”
Frank asked himself how two brothers could have turned out so differently. Everywhere Mike looked he saw certainty, definition and meaning. And yet, when they were growing up, Frank was always optimistic and Mike suspicious. Mike’s suspicion had paid off. He knew absolutely where he was going and it didn’t bother him that it was one mouth after another. The inevitable things about life didn’t bother him either. Even death struck him as one more piece of local color, a nostalgic event.
“Frank, what in the hell are you thinking about?”
“I was just thinking how different we are.”
“You just figured that out?”
“No, it still is hard for me to understand.”
“Not me. You’re a year older. You had to break trail. Plus, Dad made more sense to me than he did to you. That’s why everything has seemed so much clearer to me. You always seemed to think Dad was crazy.”
“I suppose.”
“I may be missing a whole layer of life, you know,” Mike said. “Its seriousness. But I don’t strain my mechanism like you do. Sometimes I think you’re like an airplane that keeps taxiing and never quite gets airborne. I’m dumb, I just fly.”
“I was airborne for a while.”
“Maybe you were. But I don’t crave struggle. I enjoy my life. It goes by smooth as silk and I’d just as soon have it that way. I’m a big fat happy guy with a big fat happy wife and several extremely average children. I like it. I’m flying.”
“I don’t blame you,” said Frank. He looked up and saw Dick Hoiness coming in, the old guitarist hidden in a summer suit, and signaled him to come over.
“Hi, Dick,” Frank said coolly as Hoiness reached the table. “I wanted to thank you for slipping out of the bar the other day.”
“It had to be done.”
“Had to be done,” Frank said. “I ought to cancel my insurance.”
“Life will go on.”
“You cancel yours and I’ll cancel mine,” said Mike, always loyal. This might have gotten serious.
“What a day,” said Hoiness, starting for the counter. “Let me know what you want to do, fellas.”
“We forgive you,” said Frank. “We just wish you were more of a stand-up guy.”
“Musicians aren’t like that,” called Hoiness from the counter. “We’re gentle escapists — you know, four-F.”
“What about your claims adjusters?” Mike asked.
“Different breed,” said Hoiness. “Hard-boiled but compassionate, realistic but generous, universally loved. Montana natives one and all. Low rates and prompt attention. Our claims adjusters stand for family values and a decreased dependence on foreign oil.” He turned to the smiling girl behind the counter and ordered. He pointed to each item he ordered on the wall menu behind her, as though she had never heard of these things before.