Amy Bloom - Where the God of Love Hangs Out

His hair was going in four different directions and there were little scabs on his chest and the backs of his hands. He scratched a scab until it bled and he pressed his bleeding wrist against the sheet.

“Where’s Bea?”

“She’s gone to see her mother. In Poland. Her mother’s not well,” I said, and I was trying not to yell because I knew that yelling did not help people understand you better.

“That’s a shame,” he said. “My mother died when I was nineteen and my father, I don’t think he got over it. He became an old man overnight. You know what I mean?” I did know what he meant, of course, but since I had never heard my father mention his mother or his father or the emotional state of any living being, I was speechless.

“An old man overnight, Alison,” he said.

“I know what you mean,” I said. “You want some lunch?”

I made two grilled cheese sandwiches and I wondered whether I should offer my father a beer, since on one hand, I had no idea who he was and in his altered state, alcohol might be bad for him, and on the other hand, what the hell. My father and I had our sandwiches. (“Burn it,” he said. “That’s what they used to say in the diner. Put a farmer on the raft and burn it.” “What diner?” I said, and my father said, not unkindly, “Well, you’re no Julia Child.”) And we drank our beers.

“Salud, amor, y dinero,” he said and clinked my bottle. “Is everybody okay?”

“Sure,” I said. I didn’t know who everybody was. He called Andy Fatso, he called Michael The Faigele, he called Jay Babe, the Blue Ox, and my mother had been dead for two years.

“I’ll take a grilled cheese sandwich,” he said.

“Another? Okay.” Was this good? It could be good, an appetite for life or something like that, or it could be that he didn’t know if he’d eaten or not.

“Can’t I get some lunch?” he said, and I made the sandwich, which he nibbled and then he said, “I’m gonna take a little nap.” He stood up and waited for me to stand up.

I walked him to the bedroom and to his bed and he used my arm to swing himself into bed.

“Good kid,” he said, patting my face.

I called Jay and he said, “You are too Julia Child,” and we exchanged I love yous and he said, “Hurry home,” and I said I would.

I called my brother and told him that he might not want to miss the Second Coming of Alvin Lowald, in which our father had been snatched by pod people who’d sent us a nice old man who thanked me and called me a good kid.

“Is this permanent?” Andy asked.

“I don’t know. Maybe he’ll be back to normal tomorrow.”

“Great. Back to the crypt. Does it seem like he’s dying — is this pre-death niceness?”

I swore to him that our father did not seem to be dying, that he had done a good job on one and a half grilled cheese sandwiches and all of a Heineken and was now snoring loudly in his bed. Andy swore back that he would get on the redeye Thursday night, as soon as they were done casting a police drama in which none of the criminals or women could be more than five feet five, which was the height of this particular TV detective.

“Does he know you?” Andy said.

“I don’t know. He looks glad to see me, so no. But he called me Alison, so yes.”

“See you Friday, unless he completely recovers, in which case you won’t see me at all.”

“You better get me those earrings,” I said, and we hung up. I read my father’s magazines until I fell asleep.

In my dream, it is pouring rain and I am driving our old Dodge Dart. My father’s standing patiently on the steps of the old library, without a coat or an umbrella. He gets into the car and I have to help him with his seat belt. He clasps his wet hands in his lap. I want to drive him to his new apartment in the assisted living place, but he doesn’t know the address and neither do I.

I’ll just pop out here for directions, Daddy, I say, hoping that the two women I see standing under the green awning of a pretty restaurant will be knowledgeable and helpful and guide us to the assisted living place. They’re not and they don’t. One of the women says, Is that your father in the car? And I say, yes, that’s why we’re looking for his apartment, and she says she certainly never drove her father all over kingdom come in a goddamned monsoon without even an address, and the other one says, What a harebrained scheme, and they sound, together, exactly like my father, as I’ve known him. I get back into the car and my father looks at me with hope and just a little anxiety.

Is everybody okay? he says.

Yes, we are, I say, and I just start driving in the pouring rain, hoping that one of us will see something familiar.

My father yelled, “Bea, Bea,” and I woke up and ran down the hall. I turned on the overhead light and handed my father his glasses as I sat down on the edge of the bed.

“Oh,” he said, and he clutched my hand. Any fool could see that he knew it was me. “You’re here.”

“I’m here. You probably had a bad dream,” I said.

“Could be.” He’d already lost interest. “That’s a pretty necklace,” he said. “Was it your mother’s?”

“No. I don’t have any of Mom’s jewelry.”

“That’s a shame,” he said. “I would think you’d have kept a few of her things, to remind you.”

I nodded.

“Well, we were a lucky family,” he said. “All around us those years, kids were doing drugs, getting in trouble. People were divorcing, right and left. I always used to say, you know, at parties or things, ‘This is my original wife.’ We were lucky.”

I nodded again and took such a deep breath I felt my ribs separating from my sternum.

My father lay back down and I patted his hand. I smoothed the sheet.

“I’m going to turn out the light. I’ll see you in the morning.”

I got to the door and turned off the light.

My father said, “Is everybody okay?”

Terrible is terrible, Frances thought. There’s no comparing one bad thing to another. Whatever it is — hands blown off in Angolan minefields, children in Chernobyl with tumors like softballs, a car accident right around the corner — there’s no measuring suffering. Mrs. Shenker disagreed. At night, while her daughter, Beth, was knocked out by morphine, Mrs. Shenker sat in the solarium, the waiting room for the adolescent-medicine unit. She sat back in a recliner and read aloud from her stack of printouts about the flesh-eating bacteria that had attacked Beth nine days ago.

“Listen to this one,” she said to Frances. “And hold on to your hat. ‘I was diagnosed with necrotizing fasciitis after a vacation in the Bahamas. We still don’t know what caused it. Even though I’ve had approximately thirty-four operations and three skin grafts on my legs and groin and continue to have some trouble with my lungs and kidneys, I consider myself lucky. My wife and I have run into some financial difficulties and I am unable to drive but we count our blessings every day.’ Can you fucking believe this? Well, you probably can — you’re a social worker.”

Frances could believe it. Frances’s father raised Frances and her sister, Sherri, on stories of polar expeditions that began with terrible errors in judgment and ended with men weeping over frozen corpses, with people suffering horribly and still thanking God for not having killed them outright when they got on the ship. When Sherri was eighteen and Frances was eleven, Sherri said, “I want to experience Jesus’ love and I want to help other young people know that they are not doomed.” “Doomed to what?” Mr. Cairn had said, but he said it to the front hall because Sherri had already run out the door, and it was no different, really, than a girl going off to be a Deadhead or driving to Los Angeles with some badass to become a porn star. When people in the neighborhood asked where Sherri was, Mr. Cairn said, “We lost her,” and nobody pressed him and they certainly didn’t know he meant she’d gone to join the Exodus Ministry in Indianapolis. Sherri sent a Christmas card every year, and other than that, it was just Frances and her father, the storyteller.