“It’s Grandpa,” Elizabeth Morris called, cupping her hand over the telephone as she yelled the message across the family room to where her father was immersed in a 2,000-piece Big Ben puzzle he and Mom had been working on now for weeks with little overt signs of progress. The thing still looked like the jagged skeleton of a picture. So far they had only managed to fit the edges together, with random bits of connected pieces scattered through the center.
“Just a minute,” Jay said, beginning the complex process of extricating himself from behind the wobbly card table without disturbing any of the pieces so carefully laid out around the promised-but-not-yet-emerging representation of a crumbling European castle surrounded by unbelievable emerald forests and plastic turquoise skies.
“Hi, Grandpa,” Elizabeth said, removing her hand and speaking directly into the phone. “How are you?”
“I’m fine, sugar-plum. And how is everything there?”
“Fine. I won the spelling-bee in school today. I spelled cantankerous.” She giggled.
“That’s just great.”
For an instant, Elizabeth caught an undercurrent in Grandpa’s voice that worried her. She was about to ask again how he was feeling, when Jay finally made it across the room to the telephone. He took it from her, ruffled her hair (which he knew she hated), and spoke to his father.
“Hi, Dad.”
“Jay, how’s everything.”
“Just great. How about you?”
“Can’t complain.”
“You’re sure. No problems?”
“Just the usual,” Abraham said, his voice coming heavily through the telephone. “I’m falling apart and no one can do a damn thing about it but other than that everything’s fine. How’s Linda and the girls?”
They continued in this vein for a few minutes, Abe catching up on events in his son’s household, then sharing the most recent news of Jay’s sister Ellen, her husband Sam, and their three kids. Pretending that Jay actually cared. Finally, though, he came to the meat of the conversation.
“Jay, how about you and the ladies coming out here for Thanksgiving this year?”
“But Dad, that would be too much trouble for you. All that work. Having us all descend on you like that. We couldn’t.”
“Now you listen to me, young man. I’m old and retired, but I can still whip up a turkey dinner like you wouldn’t believe-I had the world’s best teacher, remember? And besides”-here his voice took an edge of seriousness-“besides, you’ve had me out there so many times that I’m beginning to feel guilty. I’d really like to have my children home for the holiday this year. All my children.”
Jay thought for a moment. Dad was right, he realized suddenly. It had been, what…almost two years since Jay and his family had made the four-hour trip from Palm Springs to Tamarind Valley. It hadn’t been that long since they’d seen Abe, of course. He came out for a weekend or so at least three or four times a year. But for the last while, instead of them visiting him on holidays, they’d paid his round-trip bus fare, convincing themselves that the ride in an air conditioned bus would be more comfortable for the old man than having the four of them descending like marauding locusts. Besides, to be honest, there wasn’t really that much to do at Dad’s place.
Jay sighed, thinking of how bored his girls had been the last time they had been there-almost a week at Christmas, 2003, and both Elizabeth and Anna had nearly gone out of their minds with not having anything to do. No friends, no toys, no nothing except walking up and down the street and watching TV. Dad had been recovering from his attack, so even short sight-seeing trips had been out.
No, Jay decided, no matter what, that house would never mean as much to his kids as Jay’s own grandparents’ farmhouse had meant to him when he was that age. There they had dogs and cows and horses and pigs and chickens to watch and feed and play with, attics to explore, creepy dark corners of the cellar to dare, alfalfa fields full of was-that-a-snake! remnants of dried hay to wander. There had even been a swaying, single-board bridge over a rippling creek that threatened to spill him into the water each time he crossed. That had been a real Grandpa-house.
Grandpa Abe’s was just another tract house in an older part of a typical southern California suburban complex.
Still…
“Let me check with Linda, Dad,” Jay said. “I’ll get back to you later tonight or tomorrow. Okay?”
“Sure, but Jay…,” Abe’s voice crackled into a surge of static that startled Jay.
“What? I didn’t get that. We must have a bad connection.”
“I just said,” Abe repeated, his voice enunciating every sound carefully, “that I really want you folks to come out. It’s real important to me. Okay?”
“Okay. Sure.”
“Fine. Now let me talk to that other princess you got out there.”
“Here, Anna,” Jay said, handing the receiver down to his younger daughter. “Grandpa wants to talk to you.”
She began a murmured chatter that Jay hoped would carry across the bad connection.
He looked at his wife and mouthed his question, “What about it?”
She shrugged, her eyebrows tugging up in concern-for his father, Jay knew, not for herself. “If it means that much to him,” she whispered, “Okay.”
Jay nodded. As soon as Anna finished telling Grandpa Abe about her new goldfish, he would get back on the line and tell the old man it was a Go for Thanksgiving.
He remembered how frail his father had looked when he came out for the Fourth of July weekend. His eyes had been persistently slightly bloodshot, the lids wider open than usual. At times Abe had a faintly frantic, faintly crazed expression. He had occasional trouble speaking as well. His words sometimes slurred, and more frequently than usual his voice cracked upward into treble like an adolescent suffering through puberty in reverse. The Parkinson’s was visibly worse. His fingers and hands shook so hard that at dinner the first night, he could barely feed himself. Jay noticed how translucent his father’s fingers and lips had become. The flesh seemed almost bloodless.
That weekend had seemed to help. By the time Abe caught the bus into Los Angeles on Wednesday, he looked and sounded much more like the old Abraham Morris. Jay remembered wishing that they lived closer to him, but Abe had reassured his son that he was doing fine, that everything was going well. Jay had believed him.
But now, listening to his father’s voice over the telephone, he wasn’t so sure. There was something in the sound that bothered him. He shook his head.
Quit borrowing trouble. Dad wasn’t one of those parents who waited until after they were dead to let their kids know that they had a problem. He’d kept Jay and Ellen posted on every change in his health. He’d called at least once a week. He wrote as often as he could, although the Parkinson’s did make that more difficult recently.
Jay shrugged. Nothing he could do about his father right now, anyway. He’d wait until Thanksgiving, only four weeks away. Then he’d see.