Lorrie Moore - Bark - Stories

When she twice stayed into the afternoon to fix Milt something to eat and once stopped by later to cook a simple dinner, Dench confronted her. “Once more I must ask: What are you doing?”

“He’s a frail old man on the outs with his stepdaughters. He could use someone to help him with meals.”

“You’re fattening him for the kill?” They were looking into the abyss of the other, or so they both probably thought.

“What the hell are you talking about? He’s alone!”

“A lone what?”

“A lone ranger for God’s sake, what is wrong with you?”

“I don’t understand what you’re pretending.”

“I’m not pretending. What I don’t get is you: I thought I was doing what you wanted!”

He tilted his head quizzically the way he sometimes did when he was pretending to be a different person. Who are you doing that head-tilt thing for, she did not say.

“I don’t know what I want,” he said. “And I don’t know what you’re doing.”

“You know exactly what I’m doing.”

“Is that what you think? Hmmmm. Are we always such a mystery to ourselves and to others?”

“Is a disappointment the same as a mystery?”

“A disappointment is rarely a mystery.”

“I’m starting to lose confidence in you, Dench.” Losing confidence was more violent than losing love. Losing love was a slow dying, but losing confidence was a quick coup, a floor that opened right up and swallowed.

Now he lifted his face beatifically, as if to catch some light no one else could see. His eyes closed, and he began rubbing his hands through his hair. It was her least favorite thing that he did in the head-tilting department. “Sorry to interrupt your self-massage,” she said and turned to go and then turned back to say, “And don’t give me that line about someone has to do it.”

“Someone doesn’t have to. But someone should.” The muttered snark in their house was a kind of creature — perhaps the one in their walls.

“Yes, well, you’re an expert on should .”

It broke her heart that they had come to this: if one knew the future, all the unexpected glimpses of the beloved, one might have trouble finding the courage to go on. This was probably the reason nine-tenths of the human brain had been rendered useless: to make you stupidly intrepid. One was working with only the animal brain, the Pringle brain. The wizard-god brain, the one that could see the future and move objects without touching them, was asleep. Fucking bastard.

The books she brought this time were Instinct for Death and The Fin de Millennial Lear . She and Milt stood before the nook and placed the volumes inside.

“Now you must come in and play the piano for me. At long last I’ve had it tuned.” Milt smiled. “You are even allowed to sing, if you so desire.”

She was starting again to see how large the house was, since if they entered through a different door she had no idea where she was. There were two side doors and a back one in addition to the front two. Two front doors! Life was hard enough — having to make that kind of decision every day could wear a person out.

She sat down at the piano, with its bell-like sound and real ivory keys, chipped and grainy. As a joke she played “The Spinning Song,” but he didn’t laugh, only smiled, as if perhaps it were Scarlatti. Then she played and sang her love song to the chef, and then she did “Body and Soul” and then her own deconstructed version of “Down by the River,” right there inside the house with no requests to leave and go down by an actual river. And then she thought that was probably enough and pulled her arms back, closed her mouth, and in imitation of Dench closed her eyes, lifted her face to the ceiling, and smoothed back her hair, prepping it for the wig maker. Then she shook her arms in the air and popped her eyes open.

Milt looked happier than she had ever seen him look. “Marvelous!” he said.

No one ever said marvelous anymore.

“Oh, you’re nice,” she said.

“I have an idea! Can you drive me downtown? I have an appointment in a half hour and I’d like you to come with me. Besides, I’m not allowed to drive.”

“All right,” she said. Of course she had guessed that soon she might be taking him to doctors’ appointments.

Instead, she drove him in his old, scarcely used Audi, which she found stored in the garage with a dust cloth over it, to his lawyer’s. “Meet my lovely new friend, Casey,” he said, introducing her as they were ushered into the lawyer’s gleaming office and the lawyer stared at her skeptically but shook her hand.

“Rick, I would like to change my will,” Milt said.

“Yes, I know. You wanted to—”

“No, now I want to change it even more than I said before. I know we were going to leave the house to the Children’s Hospital, which was Rachel’s wish, but they’re doing fine without us, their machinery’s over there tearing things up every day on that new wing. So instead I’d like to leave everything, absolutely everything, to Casey here. And to make her executor as well.”

Silence fell over the room as Milt’s beaming face went back and forth between pale-feeling KC and pale-looking Rick.

“Milt, I don’t think that’s a good idea,” KC said, clutching his arm. It was the first time she had actually touched him and it seemed to energize him further.

“Nonsense!” he said. “I want to free you from any burdens — it will keep you the angel you are.”

“It hardly seems that I’m the angel.”

“You are, you are. And I want you and your music to fly untethered.”

Rick gave her a wary look as he made his way slowly behind a mahogany desk the size of a truck flatbed. He sat down in a leather chair that had ball bearings and a reclining mechanism that he illustrated by immediately beginning to bounce against it and spin slightly, his arms now folded behind his neck. Then he threw himself forward onto a leather-edged blotter and grabbed the folder he had in front of him. “Well, I can get Maryanne to change everything right now.” Then Rick studied KC again, and in a voice borrowed from either his youth or his son, said to her, “Nice tats.”

She did not speak of it to Dench. She did not know how. She thought of being wry — hey, Villa is back! and this time it’s an actual villa — but there was no good way. She had been passive before Milt’s gift — gifts required some passivity — and she would remain passive before Dench. Besides, the whole situation could change on a dime, and she half hoped it would. Like almost everything, it existed in the hypothetical — God only knew how many times Milt had changed his will — so she would try not to think of it at all. Except in this way: Milt had no one. And now he had no one but her. Which was like having no one.

Dench appeared in the bathroom doorway as she was cutting bangs into her hair with nail scissors. “I thought you were growing your hair,” he said. “I thought you were going to sell it.”

“It’s just bangs,” she said, threw down the scissors, and brushed past him.

She began to take Milt to his doctors’ appointments, though she sat in the waiting room. “I’ve got reservations both at the hospice wing where your grandmother was and also right there,” he said as they passed the Heavenly Sunset Cemetery.

“Do you have a good tree?”

“What?”

“Do you have a good space beneath a strong tree?” she said loudly.

“I do!” he exclaimed. “I’m next to my wife.” He paused, brooding. “Of course she has on her gravestone ALONE AT LAST. So, I’m putting on mine NOT SO FAST.”

KC laughed, which she knew was what he wanted. “It’s good to have a place.”