Michael Collings - The Slab

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.

Ellen Cameron, her husband Mitch, and her three children-Thad, Josh, and Colin-were already at Abe’s place when Jay and his family arrived just after noon on the Wednesday before Thanksgiving. Their brass-toned Ford van squatted dead center in the two-car driveway, forcing Jay to angle alongside the curb.

“Look’s like it’s going to be a family reunion, after all,” Jay said to Linda in what he hoped would come across as a light, optimistic tone. Linda and Ellen did not get along that well. Linda and Mitch in one house were even worse. And those three kids of Ellen’s-it would help if someone had bothered to teach them discipline and self-control somewhere along the way. Most of the time they behaved like what Linda referred to as a bunch of wild-eyed, foul-mouthed hooligans. Jackanapes, would have been Abe’s word, Jay thought, although Dad would never have applied it to his grandsons. Still, Jay had no trouble agreeing with Linda on the point. He sighed. He already wondered if agreeing to get together as a family had been a big mistake.

“We’re here,” he called over the seat to where Elizabeth and Anna cuddled together asleep. He reached back and gently shook Elizabeth’s knee. “We’re at Grandpa Abe’s.”

Elizabeth sat up and began the more lengthy process of waking Anna. Jay killed the engine and glanced up at the house. The hair on the back of his neck prickled.

It was a shambles.

Abraham Morris had always been a proud man, but more than anything (except perhaps his collections), he consistently prided himself on one thing-having the neatest yard in the neighborhood. Mattie and he had loved kneeling side by side, working with rich black soil. They loved plants and flowers and shrubs and trees, loved neatness and growing things. Jay remembered summer after summer, his bare back baking to a golden brown in the heat as he and Ellen had bent over weeding in gardens, trimmed lawns twice weekly, raked, swept, pruned-whatever was needed to make the place neat (whatever place it was-because of Abe’s job they had moved far more frequently than Jay had found comfortable).

But this…

Except for a ragged fringe of green along the edge closest to the sidewalk, there was no lawn. As the yard sloped slightly upward to the foundations of the house, the desolation became worse. The few straggling clumps of St. Augustine grass and Bermuda grass-normally impervious to almost all attempts to eradicate them-quickly died away completely. In the middle of the yard, the ground was bare, naked earth packed to concrete-hardness. The cold shadow cast by the house obscured skeletal remains of what had once been roses. The canes might have been bare simply because it was November and because the weather had been unusually cold for this part of Southern California, but Jay knew at once that he was looking at more than just normal winter kill. Those plants were dead. No amount of judicious pruning and feeding and watering would bring them to bloom the next spring.

In what should have been narrow borders of color along the sidewalk there was more desolation. Irises were nothing more than clumps of wilted, brittle brown and yellow spears, and the chrysanthemums, short stubs of blackened growth without leaves or greenery.

Along one edge of the driveway, a ragged clump of dense shrubs covered in unattractive grey-green leaves provided the only break from the sense of utter devastation.

Jay shook his head wonderingly. The house was in bad shape, too. This close he could see the paint peeling from the stucco wall as well as from the hardwood trim around the eaves, the windows, and the doors. A hairline crack started four or five inches above the foundation line, midway beneath the front bedroom window and jagged continuously for six feet or so to the corner.

Jay whistled under his breath.

“What’s wrong,” Linda asked, shooting him a worried, questioning look.

“That,” he said, nodding toward the yard and house.