The Last Cadillac

by Nancy Nau Sullivan

  “We have to look at all this. We aren’t a family anymore. It goes beyond where Dad happens to be living,” she said.

  “I suppose so. But what’s important now is taking care of him, and I’ll keep doing that for now, the best I can.”

  I tried to focus.

  “All right,” Lucy said. “I just want you to know. I’m here. You can call me. Just to talk, that’s all.”

  “Just to talk. Thanks. That’s good. That’s very, very good.”

  I walked out across the backyard, picking my way through the weeds over the stepping stones, and with each step, I saw more clearly.

  For now, it wasn’t just about me. It was about all of us as a family, but in that particular moment, the spotlight was on Dad. I hadn’t really thought about my siblings in the decision to take Dad to Florida. Dad hadn’t either. I’d taken it for granted that they’d go along with the plan to take care of Dad, once it was on the table and they saw how much he wanted to go. But it hadn’t turned out like that. We didn’t feel like a family together.

  That was only part of it. Deep down, I had to admit that I wasn’t Daddy’s little girl anymore, and that was the part I kept holding on to. I just didn’t want to give that up at all. I didn’t want to give up my dad.

  As such, I would continue to cherish the relationship I had with my father, and I would be his caretaker. And I must take care of my kids, those kids that grew and grew. They were learning a lot from Dad, and from me, and The Adventure. The kids were growing, but I kept returning to that strange reversal of roles with Dad. Dad wasn’t taking care of me anymore. I was taking care of him, and I didn’t weigh this as much as I just went ahead and did what I had to do. He needed the care. He needed me now.

  I had to think about the future. I wasn’t going to be able to stay in this house on the canal, with the increasing taxes and flood insurance, if I didn’t start thinking seriously about a job. The freelancing began to run out after we landed in Florida, although I continued to write some articles for the newspaper and others in the early months. We were well into our second year together in Florida, Dad paying rent, the Ex sending support, and I still had some savings from the house and furnishings. I hated to think of it, the temporary life of caring for Dad. But it always got back to that in my mind. After Dad, what? The world would shift again. So, I needed to put a serious spin on it. Dad was fast approaching eighty, and he was still dodging one health scare after another. I could not deny the fact, even as much as I tried to tell myself how resilient he was, how he leapt from one crisis to another. Time was running out.

  What I wanted to do was to be a teacher—not a news writer with weekend and holiday shifts, because I needed to be with the kids. I needed to start doing something about getting my certification, beyond shuffling papers and making phone calls. I had to get off my ass, instead of filling the late afternoons with wallowing and resentment toward my siblings. Some day, after this hiatus as caretaker was finished, I’d have to start over. Really start over. Again.

  I walked into the kitchen and looked at the clock. It was four, and Dad was down for a late nap before his martini and the news with Tom and me. The kids were hanging out at the community center. My daughter had taken to cheerleading, a perfect occupation for her, and Tick was playing soccer. And me? What was I up to? It was time for a chardonnay. I poured it into the glass and I put the frosty globe of wine, like a piece of cool fruit, up against my forehead.

  Ah, relief!

  The wine felt good going down, and the tile under my feet felt soothing. I stared out the kitchen window at the mango tree with a canopy that spread over nearly half the backyard. Before I called the school board, I would get out there and rake up the pesky brown gravel and the ripened fruit that fell off the tree, which the squirrels attacked and left teeming with ants. The cleanup was a major yard chore, but it was worth it. The Kent mangos were stringless and juicy, and tasted sweeter than peaches. I thought about picking some to go with chicken. The mango would give it an exotic flavor, but I would probably be the only one who liked it. My daughter wanted chicken nuggets every night, and Dad had a craving for grilled peanut-butter-and-ham sandwiches. It was his favorite treat, because that was the treat he shared with Mom at the malt shop when he was courting her, when he suavely ordered a soda with two straws and one straw went up his nose. It was their first date. “I guess I really impressed her,” he said. His shoulders shook when he told the story, remembering it, and I patted him, and then I went into the kitchen and made him another peanut-butter-and-ham sandwich. We all ate sandwiches for dinner a lot. Tick would eat anything, if I could get him to sit still long enough. He didn’t really care what I fixed; eating was boring, he said.

  But Tick liked mangos. When they were almost gone in the late fall, he’d climb to the top of the tree giving me fits. Higher than the squirrels he went to get the last of the sweetest mangos that had baked in the sunshine. He had gone up on his second harrowing trip to the top of the tree—we had long passed our October anniversary in the house—and the last of the mangos sat on the windowsill.

  It was still a strange, beastly time of the year, when summer would not give up and the hurricanes threatened in the last days of November, when the breeze in midday hardly moved at all, except for the wild bursts of tropical weather. I stood at the sink and I didn’t feel like doing much of anything. I should have been out there raking, but instead, I watched the great, long, leafy branches sway and scrape the window.

  The rain was coming. The weather moved with the sudden whip of the branches, and it told me that we were going to get more than our daily tropical shower. The wind clacked through the palm trees, and the cloud’s shadows scurried across the backyard. Sometimes, it was frightening to see the weather change so fast, from blue to grey, roaring in from out of nowhere across a calm sky.

  The still day began to billow up in our faces. Hurricane Earl was headed north through the Gulf on its way to the panhandle. I’d heard it on the news and then forgotten about it, and now, here he was, as advertised. I didn’t believe all I heard from the forecasters, but they were getting better about predicting the location and strength of hurricanes, once they’d formed. Predicting landfall was another matter. We would probably have a good ten hours to get out if one were due to land. But not to worry with Earl, the forecasters said. Earl promised to buzz right by us, but not without brushing us with his ragged edge of wind and rain. I could see him getting stronger in the limbs of the mango tree, whipping branches back and forth against the house. The gusts sent the last of the ripe fruit plonking to the ground by the dozen. One crashed on to the window sill and startled me out of a daydream.

  I took a sip of wine. It was already 4:30 and I hadn’t done anything all day. I would wait this one out and hope for the best. I was getting used to hurricanes.

  32

  IT WAS AN AWFUL RAIN

  Earl came and went, as pesky as a visit from a long-winded, sloppy relative. He made himself at home, littering the yard with branches and lids of garbage cans from far down the street. In his wake, puddles became breeding grounds for mosquitoes, and sewer lines overflowed, making the Gulf inhospitable to swimmers and fish alike. I viewed the paper bags, newspapers, and half a bicycle in the front yard. I wondered if Earl had emptied the recycling bin and all my wine bottles had rolled down the street. I feared that I was turning into a drunk, paralyzed, staring at trees, waiting for the rain, waiting for something. There was no sense waiting; no one was going to tap me on the head with a magic wand.

  I needed a nap, just a short one to block out reality. Just for an hour.

  I flopped on my bed, readjusted the pillows under my head. I looked out the sliding glass doors. A squirrel whipped down the plumeria in a great flurry of leaves and scattered the last of the pink blossoms. The hurricane had caused little damage to the yard, except for the huge branch of the majo tree that cracked loudly and crashed down in the middle of the night, at which time I rolled over. I hadn’t bothered
to look because I didn’t want to deal with the yard.

  Billy, my neighbor, knocked on my door to tell me that my tree had taken out the fence between us. That wasn’t a good thing, considering Billy. I silently hoped he would forgive the damage of my crashing branches, as I forgave his barking German shepherd. Billy offered to work on the fence separating our two yards and help out any way he could.

  “Free of charge, darlin’,” he said. A leer curled up on his fat lips holding the toothpick that stuck out of his upper dentures, and I chose not to comment on his lascivious attitude, or on his hideous dog. It wouldn’t have been neighborly.

  “Thanks, Billy. Talk to you later,” I said, a bit rudely, but I was tired. I didn’t want to deal with Billy. I fled to my retreat and curled up in the comforter.

  I was all of ten minutes into the nap when the front door slammed. Tick was back, probably with a vengeance from the sound of it. More and more these days, doors and windows and cabinets did not whoosh or click shut quietly under his hand. They crashed behind him. Having a teenage son and knowing what to do with him were getting tricky. Sometimes I felt like I was walking on eggshells around him. I turned over and buried my face in the pillow.

  At some point in the past few months—how fast it happened—he had changed, or I had, or we all had. Nothing stayed the same. But Tick was growing up. Many times, I thought that I’d given him too much freedom. He was not surly or rude, but he was often distant. That was expected of a teen-ager, but it was the abyss that I feared, that distant space where things just happen, without control or forethought. I’d had plenty of experience not fore-thinking, and I was afraid of the consequences of that pattern where Tick was concerned. I tried to give him privacy, but at the same time, I was worried I was giving him too much. I needed to know what he was doing with himself all those long hours he wasn’t in the house eating Cheez-its, playing the guitar, and sneaking a cigarette with his grandfather—although, to Tick’s credit, he stopped the latter.

  I didn’t look forward to a confrontation as I burrowed into my comforter, but then I knew there wouldn’t be one, since I’d been nagging him to get home at a decent hour for dinner, and here he was. I suspected that he was smoking pot, although he refused to admit it. He shut down tight when I brought it up. I finally brought it up once again—that and the smoking of all cigarettes—in a short, economical burst of questioning, and then he was gone. His eyes were often bloodshot slits, with a silly fixed grin on his face that was the mirror of attitude adjustment through chemistry. I looked in the mirror at my own reflection, and I saw the same expression of disaster staring back at me. Yet, I expected him to listen to me, his mother, in my demanding tone with a chardonnay in one hand and a fermented look on my face.

  He stood outlined in the doorway of the bedroom. God, he’d gotten tall, and I hadn’t noticed that about him. I’d mostly noticed the marijuana-induced grins and the back of him when I started to question him about where he was going and with whom. I couldn’t see his face until he leaned forward, and then I saw the hollow expression, a cross between fear and anguish, and at once I knew something was wrong. I was suddenly afraid; it washed over me like dirty water. His hair was plastered to his forehead, and he was breathing hard, like he’d been running. He just stood there in the doorway, looking at me while I sat on the edge of the bed.

  “What’s wrong?”

  “Erin’s dead.”

  Neither one of us moved for a horrible second, both of us spinning through the awful realization of those final words. It couldn’t be true that his beautiful little neighbor and school chum, someone so young and good, was gone, irrevocably gone and not ever coming back—the long white hair that flew when she turned her head quickly, the girl who spoke in that high, clear voice, “Is Tick home?”

  “How do you know?” I said, demanding that he prove himself wrong. Somehow, bad news made me angry. It was a dangerous flood inside that threatened to drown me and everyone around me. I just didn’t want to cope. Maybe it was a rumor, I thought; maybe he didn’t know for sure. Not confirming the dreadful news would avoid the possibility it was true and keep it from becoming reality.

  But he was staring past me, into realms of disbelief.

  “I just saw her at the pier this morning. And now she’s gone, just like that.” He collapsed in the doorframe, his expression fixed in shock, or resignation. I couldn’t tell.

  “How? Who told you? How do you know that?”

  Something snapped. His eyes, mouth tightened. He had to deal with me, and he was frustrated that he’d even come to tell me. The impatience of the young was cutting, and a reminder that I was getting older by the minute and less useful in his life. Now I was of no use at all.

  “I went over there after practice. Her father came to the door and he told me. He just stood there and said it.” Tick put his head in his hands.

  Finally, I said, “How.”

  He looked up at me then, and waited until it settled over him. “She went into town with Jared. They were in his truck, and someone hit them. On her side.”

  He delivered the news in a remarkable staccato, punching the air with the awful pieces of information. I got the picture immediately: an outing, stolen from the day, gone bad. Still, I sat on the edge of the bed, and the only thing that went through my mind, the selfish thought that flit from one brain cell to the next, was that Tick had not been with them.

  “What about Jared?”

  “He’s fine. He walked away.”

  Tick’s face changed from the shock to one of awful loss. His cheeks burned red, and he dropped his head to his knees. I went over to him and touched his hair. He was crying, and there was nothing I could do, except sit there with him and share his grief, as if I could take some away, or cut it in half.

  It had been an awful wreck. The kids had taken a left turn in front of a fully loaded truck weighted down with lumber. It smashed into Erin’s side of the car, killing her instantly. The fact that Jared walked away from the accident was both terrible and lucky. He had driven his friend to her death, and he had to live with that. All of his friends were grief stricken, blaming him and themselves for all the stupid things they had gotten away with.

  Tick had never been able to thank Erin for helping him. I told him he could repay her by doing the same for others, an idea he liked, but it wasn’t going to bring her back.

  The funeral was supposed to heal a wound, but it opened many. In the church, a huge poster-size school picture of Erin was propped next to her urn so that she appeared larger than life. It made a cruel impression during a service when even the pastor broke down.

  Her parents, long divorced and grieving horribly, later fought over who would get their daughter’s ashes. The fight ended when they divided her, spreading some of Erin over the Gulf of Mexico and scattering the rest of her ashes off Chicago’s Oak Street beach on Lake Michigan.

  It drove Tick crazy—this Solomon’s curse of sorts—not knowing where the last of his friend was, and no amount of Christian preaching at the service, or from me and Dad and his dad, that she would be one with everyone in heaven, in the world, one in his heart and mind forever, made it better. He could not be consoled.

  Tick was mostly angry with Erin’s parents, who had split her in two. “How could they do this?” he demanded. “How could her parents do this?”

  “Parents do crazy things,” I said, knowing perfectly well that I was talking about myself.

  33

  “I WANT A MARTINI.”

  The fallen trees left by Hurricane Earl caused more than superficial damage to Billy’s fence, and a branch from my majo tree involved more than a few sticks. It was more like a tree trunk that extended its long torso through Billy’s yard and left its leafy tip hanging over the seawall into the canal. Finally, I had to face him over the repairs. I stood in the backyard, looking into a deep hole where the enormous tree trunk had fallen. It made quite an impression, on Billy and me.

  “Didn’t you hear it, dar
lin’? Oooo, you must be some sleeper,” Billy said.

  Ooooo, I wished he wouldn’t call me ‘darlin.’ He made me feel greasy when he said it. And I didn’t want to discuss my sleeping habits with him, either. He stood a safe eight feet away, but soon he was inching closer, until I got a whiff of tobacco, beer, and testosterone that nearly knocked me over. It didn’t help that his aura was cooking in the hot afternoon that hovered at 100 degrees, even in the shade of the mangled majo tree. The canal glinted with late afternoon sun, and birds cawed and dipped for mullet. I didn’t want to deal with the hole in my yard, and I especially did not want to deal with Billy.

  “Yes, ma’am. That was some strike.”

  “What strike? What are you talking about?”

  “Why the lightnin’ strike that took out this here little old tree and made this hoo-mon-gus hole in our yards.” Now he was drawing us together as one, in the wake of Earl. I was about to turn and run into the house.

  “Billy, I don’t remember any lightening strike the night Earl came through.”

  “Well, ’course not. Yee-all must sleep like a little old she bear in winter.” Then he cackled so I could see the large black hole where teeth should have been.

  I didn’t know where he got his theories, or what part of the god- forsaken earth he’d crawled from. He looked and smelled like the dregs of a wilderness camp, and he didn’t make any sense. I didn’t remember any lightning strike exactly. But searching my brain, I did come up with a flash of memory, of one nightmarish crack in the hellacious storm: a very loud shrieking sound like the earth was breaking apart and it was protesting, and here it was, the result, in my backyard, and Billy’s.