Steve Kistulentz - Panorama

He extracted himself from under her, and she fell back on the bed. He kissed his way down across her stomach, and that’s when she touched him under the chin, pulled him back up until his head came to rest on her shoulder, and told him that was enough.

THE VOICE on the phone kept referring to Ash as Warren. He bit his tongue. He hated to be called Warren.

A doctor was explaining, and Ash kept telling him to go back to the beginning, which he obligingly did. That was how Ash knew it was bad. The hospital, the doctor said, has Warren Eugene Ashburton, thirty-four, lately of Salt Lake City, Utah, on record as the possessor of both durable and medical powers of attorney over his mother, Geneva. He was the sole contact in case of emergency.

Warren listened as the resident physician explained the events of the morning. Apparently, his mother had been suffering some nonspecific confusion (Warren wrote a note to look up what exactly Lewy body dementia was). The resident had diagnosed Geneva with three possible fractures—each wrist (X-rays would later confirm cracks in the hamate and sesamoid bones of the right wrist, which had absorbed the brunt of the impact) and the left hip. There was more news to come, and the news would get worse before it got better.

The hip would be problematic, an orthopod would need to see the film, but, he was explaining on the phone to Warren— Can I call you Warren? —Geneva was likely to spend New Year’s Day having emergency surgery to insert a series of screws into the compromised socket of her hip.

The guilt of children too, with regard to the treatment of their elderly parents, is commonplace, as was Ash’s first thought upon hearing of his mother’s injury; her broken hip was retribution, karmic payback for his decision not to travel home to Texas for Christmas. He was studying for the bar, after all, an excuse that two weeks ago had seemed legitimate. Guilt on this scale is what makes the Wednesday before Thanksgiving and the Saturday before Christmas the busiest travel days of the year.

But Ash and Sherri hadn’t flown to Texas this year. Instead they’d spent thirty-seven dollars to send a large box overnight, and the box had arrived on Christmas Eve, its tardiness making Geneva wonder if her only child had even bothered with a token remembrance of her for the holiday. She’d said as much on the phone, I thought you’d forgotten about me, in a depressed yet even tone that reminded Ash of Eeyore and his end-of-the-world pronouncements.

The fact that she’d said all of this while narrating her unwrapping of a cashmere cardigan sweater in her favorite color (lilac) made Ash wish that he’d done nothing at all, not even made the phone call. If he’d shown up with a catered dinner, a marching band, and the president of the United States in tow, Geneva would have complained about the fuss. Whatever he managed was never enough.

What made it worse was that she knew how tough it was on Ash and Sherri. Sometimes Geneva resorted to a particularly passive-aggressive kind of blackmail, sending money for one plane ticket, not two; Ash suspected that his mother knew that he had neither the cash nor the available credit to buy a second ticket for his wife.

Ash asked the doctor, who spoke with the lilt of colonial India in his voice, to run through the probabilities again.

“It is almost certainly surgery,” the doctor said. He had a four-syllable last name that Ash hadn’t caught. “She will need to start physical therapy as soon as possible after surgery if she wants to continue to walk unassisted.”

Nine forty-seven a.m. Mountain Central Time, and Ash was on the phone making plans for an emergency trip to Dallas. Sherri moved past him to the bathroom and started the shower; only when he heard her turn the water off did he realize that he’d been on hold with the airline for more than ten minutes. The airlines made contingency plans for grieving relatives, half-off fares and customer service representatives who seemed to actually give a damn, but a broken hip was to them an everyday occurrence and didn’t have anything to do with whether Warren Ashburton possessed the $874 available credit for the ticket home.

While the customer service agent looked again for a cheaper fare, Ash thought about his mother. He hadn’t realized how nebulous a concept home could become. Home wasn’t where his mother lived; in the years since his father’s death, she’d shed nearly everything that had once belonged to the both of them. Once she’d moved into the care facility, she seemed to spend her afternoons handing off her personal items to whoever happened by for a visit; Ash himself had collected pot holders and odd photographs and stainless-steel flatware and a patriotically colored afghan that his great-aunt had knit out of acrylic yarn in celebration of the Bicentennial. The reservation agent apologized for having nothing cheaper, advised him to check at the gate; there was still time for him to make the noon flight if he was willing to hold the seat now with a major credit card.

Sherri exited the bathroom and walked naked to the bedside. Ash wrote flight numbers and a total on a blow-in card that had fallen out of her most recent issue of Vogue. She took the towel from around her head and wrung the excess water from her hair into it, and Ash pulled her close by snaking his left arm around her waist. He kept talking to the reservation agent, and even as he was confirming the expiration date of a MasterCard that was nearly at its limit, he was kissing his wife on the stomach, just above the hip bone, and then down toward the feathered tail of her appendectomy scar. He covered the receiver, whispered, “It’s Mom.”

FEAR. IT was part of the dialectic now, the foundation of the language. Fear of terrorist strikes, fear of the devaluation of currencies in the developing world, fear of the twenty-four-hour news cycle, fear of carcinogens lurking in our food supply, fear of Alar and malathion and sodium laureth sulfate, fear of nitrates and nitrites, fear of genetically modified foodstuffs, fear of high-fructose corn syrup, of partially hydrogenated oils, artificial sweeteners, fear of crumbling infrastructure, fear of human immunodeficiency virus and dwindling T-cell counts, fear of fear, fear of a vague and unidentifiable spot on a chest X-ray, fear of teenagers in hip-hop regalia crossing an unlit street, fear of sleeping alone, fear of the inevitable prostate problems and urinary difficulties, fear of a black planet, fear of a dwindling Nielsen or an irrelevant Q rating, fear of thinning hair and drooping jowls, fear of being discovered, fear of being ignored, fear of the hard truths, fear of death and dying and especially of dying alone. Fear was the exact way we were being taken apart, this fear that cleaved the country in two, the runny albumen from the solid core of the yolk, fear of us versus them.

And Richard’s entire professional life was us versus them. He wanted for once to find a way to win an argument without resorting to cheap stunts, theatrics, or rhetorical flourishes, or just by being lucky enough to get the last word before the commercial break. He dreamed of the day his opponent would simply scratch his head and say, “You know, you’re right,” a phrase he figured he had never actually heard uttered in all his years in Washington.

In other words, Richard MacMurray had qualms about the product he was selling.

He settled in for coffee and a survey of the morning news. One network thought the most important story of the week was the death of a comic actor—cause undetermined but suspected to be blunt head trauma, the result of a drunken fall in his own bathroom—as narrated by film clips and interviews with the coroner to the stars, who had managed to present himself and this theory on three different networks in just under ninety minutes.