Jack Ketchum - I'm Not Sam

“Tell him I said hi.”

“I will.”

There’s a pause on the other end and I hear the flick of a lighter. My father’s Zippo. My dad’s got emphysema. He shouldn’t be smoking at all but he figures half a pack a day will buy him a little more time than two packs would. He’s content to leave it at that for now.

“How’s the weather been?”

“You know, sunny Sarasota. Weather’s fine. I just wish the snowbirds would hurry up and go home. You can’t get a parking space anywhere in this damn town. I went to visit your mother yesterday and then decided to grab a bite to eat. I had to walk five blocks to the Bonefish Grille and then waited half an hour for a table. Sometimes I think everybody down here’s from Minnesota.”

So here comes the inevitable. The dreaded question. The reason I don’t call too often. But I have to ask.

“How’s Mom?”

I hear him pull hard on his Winston.

“She asked me who I was, Pat.”

He lets it lie there a moment. On this end, I’m frozen.

“Sometimes she knows me and sometimes she doesn’t. I wanted to take her out for some ice cream. You know she loves ice cream. They tell me that’s typical. That with Alzheimer’s the sweet tooth goes last. But she gets so confused, you know? She wanted to get a sweater even though I told her she didn’t need one. She couldn’t find her own clothes closet. She went looking in the bathroom.”

My father knew he needed to put his wife of forty-two years in a managed care facility when she decided to make a frozen pizza for a snack one night and put the pizza in the oven, box and all.

“Anyhow I got her out of there and we went for a drive and I got her a chocolate sundae. She seemed to enjoy herself, to have a good time. She even reached over and smiled and had some of my banana split, just like a little kid. She was sweet. But, you know, she never once asked about you or your brother. And I’m not sure she knew who I was, even when I kissed her goodbye. Even then she looked puzzled.”

He sighs, coughs. After two years this is still always rough for him. He changes the subject.

“You hear anything from your brother?”

“No.”

And now the pause is on my end. My brother Ed is two years older than me — he became a D.C. cop after the Marine Corps. He thinks what I do for a living is ridiculous. I think what he does is probably just short of criminal.

Besides, I’m thinking about Sam.

“Something wrong, son?”

“No, Dad. Everything’s fine. I’m just a bit tired, that’s all.”

“How’s Sam?”

“Sam’s fine. She’s glued to the television.”

Which is true. I just don’t tell him what show it is.

“Give her my love, will you”

“Sure, Dad. Of course I will.”

Another pause from me. I’m picturing my mother and her chocolate sundae, her reaching across the table.

“You sure you’re okay, Pat?

And I almost tell him then. I almost blurt out the entire thing, because I love my father and maybe he can comfort me, maybe he can tell me it’s going to be all right and make me believe him the way I always believed him when I was young and he was the dad, the schoolteacher you could always go to, who always knew that you treated kids the same as you treated adults, with respect and an open heart.

I want to tell him that I miss her — that I miss us. Because we’ve always been one hellova pair, Sam and I, not just lovers but the best friends either of us has ever had, who tell one another when we’re hurting or need help and love to crack one another up with some silly goddamn joke. We love the same cat. Respect the same books. Smile to the same Tom Waits CDs in the car. Share a grave distrust of politics, lawyers and Wall Street.

I want to tell him that I feel abandoned. Like part of me’s living alone.

But my mother’s burden enough for him.

“I’m fine, Dad. Honest.”

I can’t tell if he buys that or not. Finally he breaks another silence.

“Okay. The two of you come visit your old dad one day soon, all right? It’s been too long.”

“Sure, Dad. We will. I promise. Love you.”

“Love you too, son. Love to Sam. ’Bye.”

Over the next two weeks I slash away at Samantha. I’ll tame that lovely bitch, keep her juicy ass big if it takes everything I’ve got. My deadline’s not until the end of next month but when I’m not with Lily I’m obsessive about this. The pages don’t exactly fly — I keep having to correct them — but I’ll have it done way before then.

We’ve fallen into a kind of pattern, Lily and I. She fixes her own cereal in the morning and I make lunch and dinner. I work while she plays. I make sure she has a bath every day and — over her protests, at first — that she washes her own damn hair. Once was quite enough for me. I order out for groceries. I do the laundry, skid marks and all. Can’t seem to bring myself to talk to her about that.

But Lily’s meanwhile become more demanding. Can’t blame her. She’s bored. Television and beads can only go so far. Same for Barbie’s two-story Glam Vacation House, Glam Convertible and Glam Pool and Slide. For a few days she’s into her Easy Bake Oven. She masters Barbie’s Pretty Pink Cake and goes on to Snow Mounds, Raisin Chocolate Chip Cookies, S’Mores, and Easy Bake Brownies.

All a bit sweet for me. But I pretend to like them fine.

Her Baby Alive Doll likewise exerts its pull. Temporarily. She feeds it, bottles it, listens to its inane prattle and changes its diapers. Teddy seems to be acting as surrogate daddy for a while but I sense his ultimate discouragement. Baby Alive is so screamingly dull.

The weather’s been fine. She wants to go outside, meet other kids. She wants to go out and play.

But other kids are out of the question.

When she asks me why, I tell her that you have to go to school to meet other kids and she’s not going to school right now. Which puzzles her. But for a while at least she lets it lie.

Zoey wants to go outside too from time to time I think. Always has. I’ll see her gazing out the window, chattering at the birds, or else she’ll be peering around my legs at the door. But there are critters out there who’d be all too happy to tear her limb from limb. There are critters of the two-legged variety who’d do the same for Sam.

Re-tard.

There’s an old rusty swing set and slide left here by the previous owner over by the side of the house. We never use it. But now I set it in order for her. I sand down the rust on the slide, steps, chains and wooden seats and test the chains. I oil the hangers. I have to solder one of the hangers and two links on the chains but other than that it’s in remarkably good shape.

I buff the slide with SOS pads, hose it down to a shine and test it out myself. I land hard on my ass, which makes Lily laugh. I’ll have to get some sand. She lands gracefully of course on both feet and giggling, on a run.

Never mind the sand.

She’s happy to be out. Happy with the swing set in particular. Some days she wants me to push her so I do and it’s a curious feeling. It’s like I’m playing two roles here at the same time, parent or playmate to the kid who shouts higher, higher — but then in our quieter moments it’s almost romantic, like we’re a new pair of lovers again, doing the kinds of silly kid-things that lovers do.

I think of Sam and me at the amusement park in Kansas City years ago, before we were married, the way she kissed me from a bobbing horse when I managed to grab that brass ring.

Then there’s the river.

She wants to know if it’s okay to go swim in the river.

There are water moccasins and snapping turtles in there. Snappers are shy usually but water moccasins can be aggressive as hell. They’ll swim right at you. Sam knows enough to look out for them but would Lily? Lily would not. I figure I can be her eyes, though. She wants to swim. It’s hot. We’ve got a dock. Might as well use it.