The Forever Year

by Lou Aronica

  “It isn’t the others, Dad,” Jesse said tentatively. “In fact, they don’t even know I’m talking to you about this, and would probably think I’m crazy if they did.”

  Even though he seemed to be in mid-thought, Jesse stopped talking. Mickey frowned at him. It was sometimes hard to imagine that this kid had any success as a journalist, considering how much trouble he had getting to his point.

  The boy finally continued. “I’m thinking that maybe you should think about moving in with me.”

  Mickey’s eyes widened. He certainly hadn’t seen that one coming.

  “No, don’t be silly,” he said immediately. “First of all, I don’t need to move out of my house. And second of all,” he hesitated, “well, we don’t need to talk about second of all.”

  “No, I mean it, Dad. You really can’t stay in the house any longer. If you don’t want to believe that you aren’t as young as you used to be, fine. But even if that’s the case, there are certain things that Mom took care of that you just don’t know how to do for yourself.”

  Jesse took a couple of steps closer to him. His face had already begun to color.

  “Are you planning to just buy new clothes and seal off the laundry room when it starts to overflow with your dirty stuff? And let’s not even get into the cooking thing. If you start experimenting with kohlrabi, the entire neighborhood could be at risk.”

  Jesse was smiling as he said these things, but Mickey was surprised by the intensity in his voice. He’d clearly been thinking about this. Not that any of it was convincing, but at least it was premeditated.

  “Jess, I’m okay. You and your sisters and your brother underestimate me.”

  “Dad, none of us are saying that you’re feebleminded or that you’re going to spend the rest of your life huddled under blankets and listening to a transistor radio. But it’s a big house, and you’re all alone in it. Maybe this isn’t a good time in your life to be learning new tricks.”

  Mickey took a step back and put his hand up to stop his son. “I don’t want to talk about this anymore.” He left the cart with Jesse and headed toward the checkout.

  “They were talking about a nursing home,” Jesse said as Mickey walked away. “The rest of them decided that an assisted living apartment would be best for you.”

  Mickey stopped and turned around. He couldn’t believe what Jesse had just said. His children were conspiring against him without his knowledge?

  “I’m not some doddering fool,” he said bitingly. “They can’t force me to do that.”

  Jesse put his arm on Mickey’s shoulder and spoke in a conciliatory tone.

  “Dad, after the fire, they could probably do whatever they wanted if they felt it was necessary.”

  Mickey felt a chill. Would his children really try to prove his incompetence in court? Would he ever let it get that far?

  “I don’t need an old age home.”

  “Which is why I suggested your coming to live with me.” Jesse smiled. “Your youngest child.”

  Mickey gave a stiff chuckle.

  “Yeah, my wild, unmarried son.”

  Jesse laughed loudly. “Wild and on the prowl. With his old man – and I mean that purely in the colloquial sense – riding shotgun.”

  Mickey smiled. Jesse was so different from the others.

  “Nah, you don’t want me living with you. I’ll get in the way.”

  “Actually, I’d love it, Dad.”

  Mickey looked into his son’s eyes. He realized he’d never figured out how to read this child. If this were Darlene or Matt or Denise, he’d be able to tell in a second if they really meant what they were saying.

  What Jesse was saying didn’t make sense. But the kid had put ideas in his head. Ideas about his children dragging him out of his house, of their bringing in lawyers to decide his fate. No one should have to deal with that.

  “Let’s go check out,” he said, beginning to walk down the aisle again. “When we get home, we’ll make coffee and talk some more.”

  Chapter Four

  Sometimes the clichés just ring true. I wished for this. I got it. And by the time it started, I was already beginning to regret it. I should have known myself well enough by now. I should have known how I got when I romanticized things, and more importantly how I tended to react when things didn’t turn out as I expected. I should have been experienced enough and had enough perspective to be prepared for the rocky terrain. But this was my father and I might as well have been a toddler. Once again, the simple act of dealing with my family had turned me into something less than I wanted to be.

  I was fully aware that moving my father from his four thousand square-foot Colonial into my twenty-five hundred square-foot Cape was going to be a challenge, which is why I spent so much time with him trying to determine which items he needed, which others he wanted, which he was going to pass along to children and grandchildren, and which we were simply going to get rid of. Hours and hours, over days and days. I missed a deadline for the first time in my career, yet on moving day I realized that I might just as well have gone to Bermuda.

  I should have expected it after what happened at the tag sale we’d held the week before. I consulted with him on every item we put on the tables. We even agreed on prices. The first time he talked a browser out of buying a basket because “my wife really loved this, I can’t possibly part with it,” I was touched. That was because the pattern hadn’t emerged yet. Six more times that afternoon, people tried to purchase items that Mickey Sienna decided they weren’t allowed to buy. Why it didn’t register on me that these items would therefore be coming to my house – and that many additional items would be joining them – I’m not sure. Perhaps I simply wanted to be blissfully ignorant a short while longer.

  The last couple of days before the move, I found myself uncharacteristically frenetic. I couldn’t maintain a lengthy conversation, I couldn’t write, I even had trouble lying in bed with Marina. I wanted everything to go smoothly. I wanted my father to be thrilled at the prospect of coming to live with me. I wanted him to move his favorite personal belongings into my house and immediately dub it his house as well. Having had so little hands-on experience, I mythologized the entire father-son experience. And yet if I had been paying any attention to the messages my body had been sending me, I would have understood how I was setting myself up for failure.

  All of this was making me horribly edgy. The night before, I didn’t sleep well, and in the morning I drank too much coffee. I got to my father’s an hour before the movers were scheduled to arrive, then started ranting when they were fifteen minutes late. I was in no condition for even the slightest thing to go off track and I certainly wasn’t ready for my father to reevaluate every item in the house.

  “Pack it up carefully now. Do you have any of that bubble wrap?” he said to one of the movers. The man had taken a box into the living room and was placing ceramic swan figurines into it.

  I walked up to them. “What are you doing with these, Dad?”

  “We didn’t pack the swans,” he said with a note of disbelief in his voice.

  “We weren’t planning to pack the swans. You’re giving them to Christina.” Christina is Matty’s youngest daughter.

  Dad looked at me as though I’d suggested he part with one of his limbs.

  “I can’t give these to Christina. Your mother loved them. Remember how she used to pick up each little swan and dust it individually? Christina will break them.”

  “She’s twenty-three.”

  “She won’t appreciate them. You want to give them to her after I’m dead, I can’t do anything about that. But I’m not giving the swans away.”

  I had no idea what he was planning to do with these trinkets. Certainly they weren’t going on my mantle, no matter how dewy-eyed he got. He’d sort of gotten to me with that image of my mother dusting the swans, though. I must have seen her do that dozens of times over the years. I decided to let it go and to move on to supervising the packing of the truc
k.

  A short while later, a lamp came out that I know we agreed to leave behind. I vividly recalled the conversation where I explained that table lamps required tables and how all of mine were being used already. There definitely wasn’t room for another table in the living room. Regardless, I didn’t say anything. But it bugged me.

  Not long after, three movers made their way out of the house gingerly carrying the china cabinet.

  “What are you doing with this?” I said.

  One of the movers glanced over at me. “Gotta get it on the truck before we start bringing out the boxes.”

  “Who said you needed to get it on the truck at all?”

  The mover gestured back toward the house.

  “The guy inside said this was coming.”

  After too little sleep, too much caffeine, and too much of a sense that my father had been toying with me during the weeks of preparation, this put me over the top.

  “The guy inside is severely impaired mentally. I don’t want you listening to him. He probably told you that he used to live in this house with his wife, right? It’s very sad. Don’t move anything that wasn’t marked to be moved without talking to me first.”

  I went back inside.

  “Why did you tell the movers to load the china cabinet on the truck?” I said when I saw my father.

  “How else were we going to get it to your house? Do you have any idea how much something like that weighs?”

  “There’s no room for the china cabinet in my house, remember? We talked about this. You’re giving it to the Salvation Army along with the breakfront, the dining room table, the guest bed, and all the other furniture that also won’t fit in my house.”

  “We never talked about the china cabinet,” he said flatly.

  “I think we started with the china cabinet.”

  “I wouldn’t have said we weren’t taking the china cabinet. Do you know when I bought this china cabinet for your mother?”

  This was getting old for me very quickly.

  “I don’t know, Dad, the day you moved into the house? The day Denise was born? The day Mom told you that she wanted a china cabinet more than anything else in the entire world and that if by some chance she should die before you that you must promise to never go anywhere without taking it with you?”

  My father scowled at me.

  “There’s no reason to talk to me like that.”

  I shook my head. This wasn’t the image I had in my mind of the day my father moved into my house. I was thinking of something with some brandy, maybe a deck of cards, a bit of wisdom being passed down from one generation to the next. Not this.

  “Take the freaking china cabinet,” I said. “Floor space is overrated anyway.”

  I walked out of the house and down the block a bit, hoping to cool off. I tried to look at this from his perspective, then just decided I was too agitated to be sympathetic. I pulled out my cell phone with the intention of calling Matty to bitch a little. Certainly he would have no trouble understanding how stubborn and frustrating my father could be. But then I thought better of it. I didn’t want to admit to Matty that I was stressing over this move or that I was having anything approaching second thoughts. He would expect that. He was almost certainly waiting for it. He’d probably even told his assistant to hold all calls except for one from me – and then only if I sounded flustered.

  Instead, I called Marina’s cell. She was a third-grade teacher and there was no way for me to get her at work, but just the idea of being able to dump a little of this on her was therapeutic.

  “Hi, it’s me. I think I’m going to have to get rid of my bed in order to accommodate all of my father’s stuff. Do you want it?” I looked skyward for a moment, and then continued. “We’re not exactly having a Hallmark moment over here. Actually my father is having a series of them and it’s driving me out of my mind. If he starts getting sentimental over the washing machine, I’m not going to be responsible for my actions.

  “I hope your day went okay. I’m really looking forward to seeing you tomorrow night. I’ll try to stay out of jail at least that long. Bye.”

  I decided to walk around the entire block before going back to the house. Just in time to see him supervising the move of the breakfront into the truck. I took a deep breath, tried to think happy thoughts, and decided we’d sort it out some other time.

  About an hour and a half later, everything was loaded, and the truck took off for my house. We sat in the car for a moment before pulling away. The new owners wouldn’t be taking occupancy for another couple of weeks, so this wasn’t the final goodbye. Still, it wouldn’t have been right for either of us to rush on at that very moment.

  For the first time on this crazy day, I allowed myself to think about how the house I grew up in wouldn’t be in the family for much longer. I thought about all the times I lay on the couch with my head in my mother’s lap as we watched television. I thought about the posters I used to have up on my bedroom wall. I thought about the basement whose dark corners didn’t stop intimidating me until I was fourteen. I wondered if all of the memories that I wanted to take from my time here were locked in my mind, or if I had been too cavalier with them, assuming that I could always go back to the house to retrieve them.

  I can only imagine what was swimming through my father’s head at that moment. If simply preparing to back out of the driveway was having this effect on me, it must have been exponentially more powerful for him. I hadn’t given this enough consideration earlier. I had approached this as a task that needed to be completed. But it was a rite of passage.

  We sat for a while longer in silence. At one point, I even closed my eyes to see my mother walking out to the driveway to greet me, as she always did when I was younger. At last, I decided that I needed to head off. I was getting ready to turn the key in the ignition when my father bolted up and said, “My god, I can’t believe I was forgetting it.” He opened the car door and headed back into the house. I called to him to ask where he was going, but he ignored me. I imagined that he was going to come out lugging some chair or vase that he’d decided he could never part with. I’d already convinced myself not to challenge him.

  A couple of minutes later, he returned with a tattered and yellowed box.

  “Don’t give me a hard time about this,” he said as he returned to the car, holding the box on his lap.

  “What is it?”

  “Don’t try to tell me you don’t have room.”

  I’d obviously shaken him up in some way with my earlier ranting and I was feeling pretty guilty about it.

  “It’s fine,” I said, starting the car.

  “This is important to me.”

  “I know. It all is. You’re right.”

  He looked off at the house and then down again at the box.

  “Come on,” I said, “let’s go home.”

  Chapter Five

  My preference is to write feature pieces. I find human-interest stories fascinating. A few years ago, I did a ten thousand-word article on a single grandmother raising her triplet grandchildren by herself after their parents died in a car crash. Not only did I bond with the material, but I bonded with the subject as well. Marilyn and I still send each other Christmas and birthday cards, and I recently started an e-mail correspondence with nine-year-old Kerry, who has decided that she wants to be a writer.

  Most of my work in this area has been stories of ordinary people doing extraordinary things. I’m always so deeply impressed with the way others can reach untapped reserves when required to do so. It never fails to make me just a tiny bit less cynical for a few weeks afterward. But I’ve also done a number of pieces with celebrities. I try to find the human story there as well and not to be too terribly disappointed if I can’t find one.

  The reality of being a freelance writer, though, is that feature pieces are the occasional dessert I can allow myself if I stick to a relatively healthy diet otherwise – meaning uninspiring but steady how-to pieces on subjects such as me
n’s health, finance, and home repair. I’ve even ghosted a couple of pieces for experts on parenting. At the moment, I was working on an article about giving oneself regular testicular exams. There’s just about no way to feel particularly motivated about work like that, even if the doctor who provided the background for the story is very dedicated, speaks with conviction, and even has you convinced that you haven’t been spending enough time examining your testicles.

  This should have been an extremely easy gig, and I expected to have the entire thing written in a day or so. Yet, I spent most of the morning procrastinating, laboring over opening sentences (as though anyone would be reading the article for style) and checking my e-mail on the quarter hour. It could certainly have been that the subject matter was preventing me from getting my work done. I’d dawdled in precisely this fashion when doing articles on head lice, 401K’s, and installing dormer windows.

  I chose instead to blame my father.

  Once we had gotten him moved in and had found a place for his things in my now ludicrously overly-accessorized house, I began to get excited again at the thought of having him live with me. I’d been missing my mother a lot since she died, and having my father around alleviated that a little. When I was feeling nostalgic, I could bring her a little closer by talking to him about her. I was also excited that I would finally get to know Mickey Sienna, and that he would get to know me. There had never been time for that when I was a kid and there had never really been an opportunity since. I envisioned us evolving naturally over the next several months until we were old buddies, guys who shared both a family bond and a genuine personal connection. I imagined the next time our family all gathered together that my Dad and I would have the inside jokes and little asides that he’d always had with the others. And, if only for a moment or two, my siblings would feel a little jealous of me the way I had been of them for as long as I could remember.

  Once again, though, I was romanticizing. Perhaps because I’d never had a functioning connection with my father, I oversimplified the mechanics of a father-son relationship. I assumed that there would be a natural meeting point, a place where we could sit comfortably emotionally. It had always been that way with my mother. But when this didn’t happen almost immediately, I found myself getting disillusioned – even as I chided myself for becoming impatient quickly. I had so completely built this thing up in my mind that I was entirely devoid of perspective. I was angry that my father wasn’t participating in my little parent-child fantasy, and I didn’t care if he knew it.