A Good Distance

by Sarah Willis

  There’s a fluttering in her chest. Was she just a child, moments ago, and now she’s old?

  How old?

  Rose looks at her hands, and her breath catches in her throat. No. She looks around the room. Is she in a hospital? No. It feels like a home. Whose home?

  She closes her eyes, thinking she’ll go back to that time in the apartment, but instead she’s listening to her parent’s talking loudly from behind the bedroom door. Her ear hurts, but Rose stays where she is. What are they saying? Why is her father mad?

  Rose is a child again. All over again. And again.

  I’m washing dishes when the phone rings. At the same time, Todd walks into the kitchen through the back door, done finally with raking the leaves, a project that has taken him much longer than it should considering the backyard’s not all that big. He’s wearing a black T-shirt with the sleeves cut off, even though it’s chilly outside. He’s warm-blooded, my husband, but more so, he’s proud of his muscles and the tatoo that circles his left upper arm. He also has one pierced ear with a small diamond. I like the tough look, but right now pieces of torn leaves are stuck in his hair and there’s a smear of dirt across his cheek, as if he’s in camouflage from my mother. Hell, it might work.

  The phone has rung three times. I get it. It’s the nursing home. Kethley House, the good one.

  “We have a room for your mother. Are you still interested?”

  “Yes,” I say. “We are.” What else can I say, with Todd standing here? I’ve made him a promise, too, that if the very best home becomes available, we’ll put her there. Put her there. It sounds like I’m moving a couch.

  “Well, we would want her to move in on Tuesday. Will that be possible?”

  Three days away. It’s too sudden. Todd raises his eyebrows, turns his calloused palms up, asking who it is. I mouth nursing home to him. His eyes widen and he nods. I have to be careful what I say.

  “Yes, I think so.”

  “Well, we would need a commitment from you. There’s a long waiting list.”

  “I understand. Can I get back to you?”

  “I suppose. But I would need to know by Monday morning. No later.”

  “Fine,” I say. “Thank you. Thank you very much. I’ll call you then.”

  When I hang up, Todd looks at me. “Well?”

  “Kethley House has a room available. Tuesday.” My chest hurts with these words. Words do hurt. That nursery rhyme is a big fat lie.

  “And you didn’t say yes? What’s up with that?” His shoulders hunch up, stay there, waiting.

  “I’m not ready,” I say.

  “No one ever is.”

  When I don’t say anything else, he closes his eyes and sighs, slowly shakes his head. He’s still standing by the back door. He won’t come in further until he takes off his mud-spattered boots, and he hasn’t yet. “She needs to go into a home,” he says, gently, trying hard not to start a fight. “I’m not telling you anything you don’t know, Babe. If you need me to be the bad guy, then, okay, I’m the bad guy.”

  “No, I am,” I say. “I’m just trying to make up for it.”

  “For how long?” he asks.

  “I don’t know. Another month?”

  He shuts his eyes again, closing me out. I notice the age spots above his temples that mark him as older than he looks. Todd has one of those soft, boyish faces which belies the biker image he’s going for—like a rottweiler wagging his stubby tail, you can tell he’s friendly. I think my mother’s the only one in the world who doesn’t like him, and only because she forgot she did.

  “You said that last month, Jen. Hell, can’t you see she’s consuming you? We don’t have friends over. You never laugh. You act like you’re guilty for everything, for being married to me, for being happy. She’s making life miserable for all of us.”

  “It sounds like I am.” I go over to the window by the kitchen table. The backyard looks beautiful, the green grass uncovered and fresh looking, the flowers rimming the yard like a frame for all that perfect green. I imagine Todd removing the last leaf by hand, standing back and looking at a job well done. He likes manual labor. He planted the garden before I moved in. I don’t know anything about flowers. He said those white flowers are called mums. I remember him telling me that because that’s when I told him how I was never allowed to call my mother Mom. It was Mommy until we were old enough to call her Mother, at about the age of six. She hated the word Mom. Thought it a lazy, common word. Mom is what Jazz calls me.

  “I’m sorry,” I say. “Look, I chased away every man she could have ever married. She’s alone because of me. I have to do this.”

  “Hey, I’ve heard the story. I don’t buy it.” He stomps his feet to get off some of the dirt, but it looks as if he’s marching in place. Leaning over, he starts to unlace his boots. After he changes into his moccasins, he’ll step outside and shake off the backdoor mat, and then sometime tonight he’ll clean off his work boots in the basement with a stiff brush. He says he can’t afford not to take care of his things. He’s said that more than a few times in the last two months, since I haven’t been working.

  “Okay, let’s get practical about this,” he says. “Don’t you have to go back to work sometime? We could use the money.”

  I pause, not saying what I’m thinking—that for the past three years I’ve been making twice as much as he does, which means, technically, I could take off three years and we’d be even. “They’ll understand,” I say. “They’ll give me more time. We’ll be okay.”

  “Will we? It’s not just money. You know what? I don’t mind the overtime. It gets me out of the house. Is that what you want? You want to be on your own again, feeling tough and independent? Am I in your way here?” He’s bent over, untying the second boot, looking up at me through a mop of soft brown hair. He looks like a big kid who needs some hot tomato soup. Mad, though. He’s definitely getting pissed.

  “No. You’re not in the way. That isn’t what I said.”

  Todd hardly gets angry like this, but it is happening more often now. He really lost it a few weeks ago when my mother pulled the curtains down in her room, tearing the hardware right out of the wall. She wadded one up and stuffed it in the toilet. He actually swore at her. He’s a sweet man, so when he turns mean, he frightens me. I am afraid I have mistaken him.

  In the silence between us, Todd stands up, sticking his hands in his pockets, making fists under the fabric, as if he has carried large rocks into the house. The muscles in his upper arm pulse.

  “One more month? Please?” I say. “It took her longer than I thought to adjust to moving here. She trusts me now. She may not know who I am, but she trusts me. One more month?” I pause, look at him. “I’d do the same for you. Is that so bad?”

  He grins, those oh-so-even teeth a reminder of how I love him at the oddest moments. “You’re good. Very good,” he says. “But will they wait a month?”

  “I’ll call them back. I’ll ask. I’ll beg.”

  “I just want what’s best for us, as a family. Is that so bad?”

  “No, that’s not bad at all. It’s just that she is my family.”

  He doesn’t say anything, but I can tell he’s giving in. He really doesn’t like to argue. He’s so good. How can I be so lucky?

  I walk over and hug him. It’s all the words I have.

  While Todd’s in the shower, I call my sister Betsy to tell her that the nursing home has a room available. I’ve talked to her more in the last year than in the last thirty-five years, if talking is what you call it. We trade necessary information. She and her husband will pay two-fifths of the nursing home. My brother and his wife will pay another two-fifths. The rest will come from my mother’s Social Security, and a bit from Todd and me. Todd’s embarrassed by this, so I only talk to my sister about these things when he’s in the shower, or not home. Which gives me plenty of time to talk with her, but I don’t.

  I time this call perfectly. They’re not home and I get the answering machin
e. I leave a message about the nursing home, and then I tell her I’ve decided to keep Mother here a bit longer anyway. In a very sweet voice I say, “Call me back, if you want to talk about it.” Her turn.

  We don’t sit down for dinner until eight, and it’s takeout Chinese. A mistake. Both the timing and the choice of food. My mother gets edgier as the day wears on. I think there’s a constant struggle to make sense of what she sees—the details of the present must hammer away at her fragile belief that the time is somewhere around 1960, a time period she finds the most comfort in. I should have fed her earlier. Hindsight now. And Chinese food is not easy to eat; the rice splutters to the floor with each forkful. Bean sprouts trickle out of her mouth. Soup just spills, like soup.

  It’s not so much that her hands shake, which they do, but that her right arm is weak; the spoon and fork are never held quite level. The mess doesn’t actually bother me so terribly—I have cleaned up worse—but it bothers her.

  “To hell with this!” she hisses.

  Her sweet, kind-lady disposition was fraying by five, when she insisted on a shower even though she already had one. Thus the late dinner.

  “If they’re going to feed us . . . crap, then I’ll just starve. Who cares? Not me.” She tosses the spoon with the wonton and more broth than I thought possible across the table. She has wicked aim. It lands directly on Todd’s plate.

  Todd holds perfectly still, but I see the tension in his jaw. Very slowly he slides his plate to the side.

  “I would like to go home now,” my mother says.

  “Hey, lady, that’s fine with me,” Todd says. “I’ll drive. Let’s go.” He pushes his chair back, picks up his plate, carries it into the kitchen.

  I wonder where all the rules have gone. Such as, when you sat down for dinner, it was a time to be polite and grateful. And the rules I thought I understood about Alzheimer’s? Last week I asked her a simple question about her brother, Uncle Brent. I wanted to know if he got hurt in the war. She couldn’t get two words right in a row. She talked about someone called Jimmy. Who was Jimmy? And did Jimmy get hot-pierced with the thingamabob in the left pat-her-thigh, or Brent? Why is it that whenever she wants to tell me how bad I am, she has every word she needs? Who made these goddamn rules?

  Todd comes back from the kitchen. “I’m going on-line. Thanks for dinner.” He always says thanks for dinner, even when it’s takeout and he’s gone to get it. He’s a wonderful guy. My mother, who believes Todd is going to drive her home, is walking toward the front door.

  I feel like I’m going to cry, so I shake my head hard like you do when you’re driving and nodding off. I don’t know why it works, but it does. The tears I felt coming hold off, waiting for the next time.

  “Mother,” I say as she rattles the brass front door handle. It’s locked.

  “Will you stop calling me that!” She turns at me. Her eyes are squinted tight with hatred. “How dare you!” she says.

  With those words, I lose thirty years of growing up, and suddenly I am fifteen, dressed in torn bell-bottoms and a flowered peasant blouse, wearing white lipstick; I can feel it on my lips like a pale thought. On the floor, tattered and stomped on, are the remains of a carton of Viceroys, each and every cigarette broken in two. “How dare you!” she shouts at me. I have destroyed every cigarette in the house and poured two bottles of scotch down the sink. The house reeks of booze and nicotine and the heady smell of my own power. But really, I am powerless. Every nerve in my body twitches. I can hardly swallow. My heart is right in my throat; I can feel it choking me, I can feel it wanting to be thanked. I believe the things I say, and do, can change her. Holding my breath, I wait for her to say, “Oh, God, you’re right. I’ll never smoke again. I’ll never drink another drop.” But I was not, nor ever have been, a reason for her to live.

  “Mrs. Morgan,” I say now in my calmest tone. My father was a director, and even though he died when I was young, I learned a few things from him, and inherited a few more—my straight hair, my long fingers, rosacea. “Would you like me to take you upstairs? Would you like to play gin rummy? Take a shower?” I say the last just to amuse myself. I need a little amusing. I need to make fun of her, even though she doesn’t know it.

  “Gin rummy,” she says, holding her chin up. “Gin rummy,” she repeats. I unlock the gate at the bottom of the stairs. I have asked Todd not to step over it when my mother’s watching so she doesn’t get any ideas, but I have asked so much he must feel it’s only right to ignore something. As I walk my mother up the stairs, I realize I would rather give her the third shower of the day than play a single game of gin rummy.

  Passing the computer room, I see Todd furiously typing away to someone I don’t know, telling them something he needs to say, to someone else besides me.

  He was on-line last night, too, and the night before.

  Chapter Three

  When I wake up, Todd’s already gone. He bought the motorcycle after his divorce, and since then goes off riding on Sunday mornings, sometimes with a friend, but more often than not, alone. When we started dating, he’d take me along, but I’d keep telling him to slow down, or complain about the wind. He started saying I didn’t have to go if I didn’t want to, and finally I took the hint.

  His first wife left him, stunning him with the news she was having an affair. He told me he would never allow himself to be blindsided like that again. There was an edge to his voice that said he understood quite well that I had left people behind; that he would leave before he was left again. I remember that every Sunday morning when I wake alone. Might he, right now, be riding with someone who doesn’t complain about the wind, who doesn’t have a crazy mother? Someone he was talking to on-line last night? I’m too tired to think about it, and it’s still just morning.

  He burned the mattress after his wife left him. He dragged it out to the backyard and set it on fire. The fire department came running, sirens blaring. He got a good stiff fine and had to see a psychologist. As sweet as he is to me, he admits he used to have a bad temper. He won’t explain exactly what that means. “I never hit a woman,” he says, but that’s all. He says he works hard to stay calm, that he’s a changed man, and I believe him. I think he told me that story so that I would never take him for granted. But the Todd I know is so good, that I do.

  I left him a note on the counter to pick up some chicken breasts at the grocery on his way back, and I know he will. Bugsplattered from the ride, he’ll go into the store and get the chicken. Even if he’s having an affair. I shake my head. Go away stupid thoughts, I think, and it works for a while.

  I take my mother to St. Ann’s for Mass, even though I wasn’t raised Catholic and my mother has sworn off religion for the rest of her life, not knowing that the end of her life would be a foggy, veiled version of the beginning of her life, and she now gets to relive her mistakes, like believing in the grace of God.

  My mother’s dressed in a white blouse and a green plaid wool skirt, stockings, and black thick-soled shoes with good traction. I hold on to her arm. I don’t know who I am today. We haven’t discussed it yet.

  We sit in a back pew in case something happens. She might start talking out loud. She might remember that she hates God. This would not be a good place for her to suddenly remember that.

  If my mother is Catholic again because she has forgotten she isn’t, what about confession? What does she confess? Old sins? What becomes of the new sins she can’t remember? Does confessing that she took the Lord’s name in vain when she found out she was pregnant, being forgiven for it a second time, null and void the fact she spat at my husband last week, calling him a “dirty bum”? Where does ignorance fit into His game plan?

  My mother makes a soft guttural sound and begins to stand up. I press a hand on her thigh, and she sits back down in the pew. The priest begins to speak and I look at my mother to see if she is going to do anything else, but she just closes her eyes.

  Something about the church bothers Rose. It’s her church, St.
Ann’s; she knows that—as she walked up the steps past the towering pillars and under the high stone arch she felt so proud to belong here, still . . . She looks around again. The stained-glass windows are the same as the last time she was here, but the tabernacle is new, rather plain looking if you ask her, and where are all the candles? And the people; none of them are familiar. Where are the Spencers, who always sit in the same row with her family? And where are her parents?

  Oh, she’s in the wrong pew! Way in the back instead of in the fifth from the front, where they always sit. She begins to stand, but a woman presses her hand on Rose’s thigh and she figures there’s some special reason to sit here today, but she’s forgotten what it is. Still, what an odd thing for a perfect stranger to do! Looking down at her lap, Rose is startled by her clothes. They’re so dowdy. Jeepers, she’s wearing a wool skirt, like her mother’s! What exactly is she doing here today? It’s not Jimmy Miller’s funeral, is it? No, that was last month. She remembers that.

  The priest begins to speak, and Rose closes her eyes against the strangeness. Dear Lord in Heaven, she begins to pray, and then doesn’t know what to ask him for. Help me, she tries. Will that work?

  The sound of the priest’s voice soothes her, and she keeps her eyes closed. Nothing could really be wrong, could it? She’s in church, after all. If anything is wrong—if she has done something wrong—she simply has to ask Him for forgiveness.

  Even with the protection of God, Rose’s life is a cascade of ration stamps, air-raid drills, headlines in bold letters, and death. The Bibles her father sells are piled along the walls like extra bricks to keep their family safe. On her way to and from school each day, she passes the Millers’ house, remembering Jimmy Miller’s face: narrow with bad skin and small eyes. His funeral last month was her very first funeral. She couldn’t keep her eyes off the flag-covered coffin. She felt her skin crawl at the thought of being inside that small, cramped space. There were latches on the sides? Why?