The Bill from My Father

by Bernard Cooper

  I must have been wide-eyed because my father added, “Don’t look like that! She didn’t tell them I was crazy out of the kindness of her heart. She gets something out of it too.”

  Betty glanced at him sharply. “I was protecting us both.”

  My father nodded, but I don’t think he heard her.

  “Did you know that Gomez called me?” I asked.

  My father sighed. “I figured he might. I got a pretty penny for the place, but I owe a lot too. There are liens and things. A second mortgage. I’m looking at a mobile home in Oxnard. Not the best place in the world, but it looks just like a regular house, and it’s what I can afford.”

  “We,” said Betty. “What we can afford.”

  “Betty’s from Oxnard. She knows some people up there, so its not exactly like starting from scratch. You’ll come up and visit.” He cleared his throat. “You sure have grown since the last time I saw you.”

  “Dad, I’ve been this tall since high school.”

  “Taller than me?”

  “For years,” I said.

  My father shrugged. “Then I guess I’m shrinking.”

  * * *

  After loading mementos into my car, I came back inside the house to say good-bye. Betty nudged my father and this reanimated his grave face. He slapped his palm against his forehead. “Almost forgot your present,” he said. I followed them into the kitchen. Dad stationed himself in front of the counter, then beamed at me and stepped aside.

  A pink bakery box yawned open to reveal a cake, its circumference studded with strawberries of an uncanny size and ripeness. The fruit was glazed, and beneath the kitchen’s fluorescent lights, it looked succulent, moist, aggressively tempting. Slivered almonds, toasted gold, had been evenly pressed into a mortar of thick white frosting, every spare surface dotted with florets.

  What I noticed next made me catch my breath. Written in the center, in goopy blue script, was Papa Loves Bernard. For a second I thought there’d been some mistake. I’d never called my father Papa. Dad, yes. Pop, perhaps. The nickname belonged to another parent, didn’t mesh with the life I knew.

  I looked at Betty. For the moment her attention was elsewhere. Probably in Oxnard.

  My father began yanking open drawers and kitchen cabinets, offering me anything that might not fit into his new trailer, which was just about most of what he owned. A punch bowl set, napkin rings, two-pronged forks for spearing hors d’oeuvres—artifacts from his life with my mother, a life of friends and fancy repasts. His barrage of offers was frenzied, desperate. All the while I politely declined. “This is more than enough,” I said, gazing at the cake. As hungry as the sight of it made me, I knew a slice would be sickening, dense with sugar, rich with shortening, every bite a spongy glut. Yet it looked so delectable sitting in his kitchen, Betty Crocker’s Sunday bonnet. If years of my father’s silence had an inverse, that clamorous cake was it. Within it lay every grain of sweetness I’d ever declined or been denied. While my father jettisoned old possessions, I swiped my finger across the frosting and debated whether to taste it.

  D-L-R-O-W

  Along with the cake and a box full of childhood memorabilia, I left my father’s house with a scrap of paper on which he’d written his new address and telephone number. As I drove down Ambrose Avenue, I watched the Spanish house my family had lived in grow smaller and smaller in my rearview mirror, like a stucco galleon drifting out to sea. The neighborhood hadn’t changed much since the days I barreled down that same street on a pair of roller skates, vibrations from the pavement shooting up my skinny legs and rattling my teeth. Driving past the grab bag of architectural styles was like visiting Montana ranch land, the British Isles, and the French countryside in a few seconds flat. It wouldn’t have seemed odd if the residents watered their lawns in costume: Bonjour! Howdy! Jolly good day! Hollywood had been an ideal setting for someone as tight-lipped about his past as my father, a place where a person could choose a favorite historical style and settle in with his fellow men to a cinematic vision of the good life.

  I let the engine idle at the corner, hesitant to make the turn. It was going to take me a while to adapt to the fact that the place had been sold. I’d come to see the house as Brian’s inheritance as well as mine, repayment for his constancy and late-night advice, a nest egg my father, when all was said and done, might have decided to pass on to us. That the buyers were a gay couple didn’t help; I thought of them as understudies who’d lucked into our roles on opening night. My reverie ended when the cloying fragrance of frosted cake woke me to the here and now. I pressed the pedal and sped away.

  After waiting a week or so for my father and Betty to settle in, I called to see how they liked their new home and reached a disconnected number. I checked with directory assistance to make sure 805 was the right area code for Oxnard, which it was, then scrutinized the remaining digits to make sure I hadn’t mistaken the seven for a one. I punched the number again in case I’d misdialed, and again was greeted by the recording of a woman who said, in a voice devoid of feeling and inflection, “We’re sorry. The number you have reached has been disconnected.” We’re sorry? Was she Pacific Bell’s spokes-robot? The collective pronoun only emphasized the fact that no one but me was sorry in the least. Thinking my father may have accidentally transposed two of the seven numbers, I tried a few permutations, but to follow this process through to its logical conclusion, I’d have to dial seven-to-the-seventh-power variations, whatever gargantuan number that was. At this rate, reaching my father could take me the rest of my life, which, metaphorically, was what I’d been doing with my life up till then.

  Below the phone number he’d scrawled, “Siesta Court,” but there were no numerals to indicate an address, and I wasn’t sure whether this was the name of the street or of the trailer park itself. The more I said it to myself, the more Siesta Court sounded fictitious, a location too bucolic to be true, like Cheever’s Shady Hill or Levin’s Stepford. It was as if my father had packed his bags and vanished into an imaginary landscape.

  Cake or no cake, I couldn’t help but think he’d done this on purpose.

  “A phony number!” I grumbled to Brian. “I haven’t thought about people giving other people phony numbers since I cruised the bars.” Even back then, this breech of simple decency irked me, and it had happened to me and all my bar-hopping friends at least once. I mean, how hard was it to say you weren’t interested in someone while the two of you were face-to-face? Why knowingly fan the flames of false hope? Anyway, it’s one thing to get the brush-off from some guy in a bar, but from your own father? I felt as if I’d been abandoned on a stranger’s doorstep. Except there was neither a stranger nor a doorstep, and I was pretty old as foundlings go, and the word foundling was completely wrong, since lostling was closer to what it was like.

  What would I do if another week went by without word from him? Who could I contact? He hadn’t spoken to his daughters-in-law in years. His former neighbors wanted nothing to do with him. Betty was the only person who might know where he was, and they shared a nonexistent number.

  “Can you believe this?” I asked Brian.

  “It still tastes pretty good,” he said, scarfing down the last dry slice. He swallowed hard. “Even the frosting.”

  “Hello, Bernard?” The prodigal father. “Bernard?”

  That’s my name, we used to say on the playground. Don’t wear it out. “Where have you been, Dad? I’ve been worried sick.”

  “I moved, remember?”

  “The number you gave me is wrong. I asked information for Edward Cooper on Siesta Boulevard, Avenue, Place, Way. I tried everything Siesta!”

  “The number’s under Betty’s name.”

  Of course; if you’re going to antagonize a corporate monopoly, you might as well kiss their services good-bye. “I wish you had called.”

  “I’m calling you now. Would your phone ring if I wasn’t?”

  “It’s just … I had no idea how to find you.”

  “How
’d you like to have dinner with your old man?”

  In my head I said, No! Aloud I mumbled, “When?”

  “How about now?”

  “It’s two o’clock in the afternoon.”

  “How about an hour?”

  “Tell me what’s going on, Dad.”

  “For crying out loud! Where’d you learn to be so suspicious? Can’t a father visit his son? I thought that’s what you wanted.”

  An ambulance wailed down a nearby street, and a second later I heard its siren over the phone.

  “You’re in the neighborhood, aren’t you?”

  “Look. Do you want to get together or not? I didn’t take the bus all the way out here so I could suffocate in some phone booth.”

  “You took the bus?”

  “I sold the Caddy. They can use it for scrap metal as far as I’m concerned. Damn thing depreciates just sitting in the driveway. And the mileage, forget it! Guzzles money. Besides, the gal at DMV wouldn’t renew my license due to my glasses. All I need’s a new prescription. I’ve been driving a car since before she had eyes!”

  “Is Betty with you?”

  “No. And if she calls you and asks where I am, tell her you don’t know. Tell her you haven’t heard from me in weeks.”

  “I haven’t heard from you in weeks.”

  “Good,” he said. “Then you won’t have to lie.”

  Whatever he was up to, it wasn’t good. Oxnard is sixty miles north of Los Angeles, a daunting journey for a man my father’s age, especially one who hadn’t used public transportation since the 1940s, when Pacific Electric’s Red Cars plodded along the downtown streets, sparks cascading from overhead wires. That he’d arrived here safely was a tribute to his grit when meeting a challenge, or his desperation when fleeing from one.

  I was about to leave the house to pick him up when Betty phoned. “Your father and me had a fight,” she blurted. Her voice was ragged. “He stormed out hours ago and I don’t know where he is. He was confused worse than I’ve ever seen him. He’d been gone for almost an hour when I got in my car and went looking for him. He barely knows the area. There are lots of places around here a person could get lost, railroad yards and citrus orchards. You could walk a long way and not see a McDonald’s or 7-Eleven. Every few miles I’d pull over to the side of the road, get out of the car, and stand there shouting my lungs out. I couldn’t remember whether he was wearing his Miracle-Ear when he left. And who’s to say he’d answer if he heard me? I drove and drove and hardly saw a soul. It might as well have been me who was lost. I could have sworn the end-time had arrived!”

  As difficult as it might have been for me to imagine Betty’s vision of the Rapture—believers abruptly sucked into the sky, their bodies rising heavenward in a great migration—it was even more difficult for Betty to imagine herself being left behind with the unrepentant, her cries unanswered in the desolate landscape. “If Ed found his way back here while I was out looking for him, I’m not sure he’d recognize our trailer without my station wagon parked beside it. The trailers in our court look pretty much the same. ‘Cracker boxes’ is what he calls them.”

  I told Betty not to worry, then failed my father by letting her know he’d called me from the corner. “Praise the Lord,” she said forlornly. “Did he tell you the DMV revoked his license? He sold his Caddy the very next day. You know how proud he was of that car. He’s usually shrewd about business, but he left it in front of the trailer park with a For Sale sign and struck a deal with the first people who came along. A young couple. Newlyweds maybe. And listen to this: he let them pay with a personal check! ‘Good riddance,’ he kept telling me. ‘It’s someone else’s headache now.’ What he’d done didn’t really hit him until he figured out that he had no way to go to the bank and make the deposit. He asked if he could borrow my car, and when I told him he couldn’t drive without a license, he said, ‘What the hell difference does a piece of paper make? You think I’ll drive any better with a piece of paper?’ and I said, ‘It’s against the law,’ and he said, ‘Don’t tell me about the law. I have more law in my little finger than most men have in their whole hand.’

  “He called me selfish and yelled at me to get out of his house. His house. I couldn’t believe it! I waved the deed to the trailer in front of his face so he could see both of our signatures for himself. He snatched it away and stared at it for a long time, checking to make sure his signature was his. His hand was shaking something awful. I said he better sit down and get a grip on himself, and he threw the deed on the floor, grabbed a couple of his things and left, but not before reminding me I wasn’t his wife.”

  “I’m sorry,” I said.

  “He had every right to say it. I’m not his wife in the eyes of God. We pooled our money to make a life. No man has wanted that from me—a life together—in a long, long time. But we shouldn’t have lied to that social worker, Mr. Gomez, about your father’s mental health. Now we’re being punished by the lie coming true!

  “This trailer park is tiny and I’m sure the neighbors heard us yelling. I’m looking for steady work and I can’t get work if people think I fight in my private life or if they hear that I tried to cheat an old man out of his mobile home. It only takes one rumor to ruin a reputation. The arguing, the accusations would be one thing if people thought we were husband and wife, but after all this time, he still tells them I’m his nurse!” Betty usually had comforting proverbs and Bible quotations to fit any dilemma, but none came to her now. “Maybe it’s the medications and he can’t help acting this way. I thought things would be different after … I thought once we moved … If he had a relationship with the Lord …”

  “Betty …”

  “If he knew the Lord through me, I mean, like the friend of a friend. What I’m trying to say is that I’ve worked at plenty of places where old folks can’t feed themselves or tie their own shoes. They dirty their diapers and cry for their mothers. Old people, not a tooth in their head, crying for a mother who’s never going to come. It has to be the most pitiful sound on earth. Half of them don’t recognize their own children on visiting day; all they see’s a stranger who claims to be kin. You can’t hardly blame them for saying mean things like, ‘I don’t know you. Go away.’ That’s how bad I thought it had to get before an old person was a danger to themselves or someone else. You know me,” she said sardonically, “always a step ahead of the doctors.

  “I thought there was normal and then there was not normal. But not normal sneaks up on you. Not normal takes its sweet time. It was terrible the way your father looked at me before he walked out. He recognized his signature on the deed but didn’t remember signing his name. Either way it frightened him to death. And you know what happens when your dad gets scared. He blames the nearest person. Oh, he didn’t have to say it outright. I saw it on his face as plain as day: if I had forged his signature, the deed would make sense; if I was dishonest, then he was sane. Trusting other people was never his strong suit. My mistake was thinking I was going to be the exception, the person he’d never turn against.” She blew her nose and took a breath. “The man’s in trouble. There. I said it.”

  The reason for my father’s unannounced visit, or so he claimed, was to hand over a family heirloom he’d been wanting to give me ever since he’d packed up the Spring Street office. A belated gift, to say the least. This act of generosity justified his anger toward Betty—how could she have refused a favor to a generous old man?—with the added vengeful benefit that his disappearance would cause her distress. By denying him the use of her car, she’d condemned him to spend the rest of his days wandering through Oxnard on foot, a lost tribe unto himself.

  My father’s mercurial love bounced from one ungrateful recipient to the next, and I knew enough to mistrust it, knew I’d stay in his favor for only so long and always at a cost to someone else. Still, he could have made up any number of excuses to explain his visit to the city, and he made one up that included me.

  Even before I spotted him squinting into a
row of news vending machines on the corner, I began clearing off the passenger seat, plucking tape cassettes off the floor, and tossing empty water bottles into the back. He’d often said my car was “a pigsty,” but I wasn’t cleaning up the car to prove him wrong so much as I was trying to impersonate the responsible adult pictured on my driver’s license.

  I found a parking space on my first trip around the block—a small miracle in a city as crowded as this—and edged my car toward the curb. My father looked up from the headline he was reading and stared at me through the passenger window. He tightly clutched a brown paper bag to his chest, as if someone might try to steal it away. I waved hello and smiled as if everything was fine. I could tell he was looking right at me because his thick prescription glasses magnified his eyes, the trajectory of his gaze direct and unmistakable. The sky was an ingot of afternoon light, everything distinct beneath it. I motioned for him to open the car door and climb inside. Not a blink. Not so much as a twitch of volition. Betty’s phrase came back to me, “Strangers who claim to be kin.” We continued to stare at each other, my father and I. With the windows rolled up, the world surged by with barely a sound. He seemed to be sealed inside the sunlight just as surely as I was sealed inside my car. I was afraid to roll down the window, afraid he wouldn’t respond to my voice, wouldn’t react if I called him Father. Stranded in the gap between silence and speech, I could almost feel my own name loosen and peel away, leaving me raw and anonymous.

  His eyebrows bunched in puzzlement when I lowered the window. The hum of the city flooded in.

  “It’s you!” he cried happily. “I couldn’t see through the glare on the glass.”

  “Didn’t you recognize my car?”

  He looked the vehicle up and down. “It’s clean,” he said. “So, no.”