David Hopson - All the Lasting Things

“Yes, the twee. If we’re lucky, we get a few that feed a lifetime. One. Maybe two. They’re strong, substantial. They put down roots. But most of them, most friendships, are leaves. They’re here. A nice little blossom for a time. A bit of color. Then they fade. We shed them. It’s natural that we shed them. You’re not supposed to know what the girl you took to the prom does with her day. Joanna Goverski is eating at IHOP! Who cares?”

“‘Who cares?’” The echo came from the opposite side of the biscuit-colored curtain, followed a moment later by their mother. “Who cares about what?” Evelyn lacked the bearing and attitude to be called regal, but she had the face for it. She was tall and trim, with a fine, upturned nose, lips drawn thin by perpetual sufferance, and a helmet of immaculate silver curls. “Come on,” she called, glancing irritably over her shoulder at Henry as he shuffled into view.

“Tone,” Henry warned. “I’m not a dog.”

Ignoring this, she stepped to the far side of the bed and bent to kiss Benji. A tightness around the mouth let him know he hadn’t been forgiven. Not for nearly dying. That offense proved so mountainous, so impossible to scale, she could do nothing but overlook it. Benji knew: her anger burned for another reason, for the fact that he had lived so close for nearly two months — a half hour away! — without telling her. He hadn’t visited. Hadn’t told her where he was staying or invited her to see the show. As if she, of all people, wouldn’t have welcomed a night out. Not, as Claudia reminded her, that she would have taken it. “Who cares about what?” Evelyn asked her daughter in lieu of a hello.

Claudia got up and, hugging Henry, steered him into her chair. “They’re discharging Benji, but he needs somewhere to go.”

Perplexed, Evelyn stared across the gulf of the bed and asked, “What do you mean ‘somewhere to go’?”

“He needs supervision.”

“Why would he need supervision?” Evelyn asked, smoothing a wrinkle out of the bedspread.

“He tried to kill himself, Mother. That’s why.”

“I told you to stop saying that.”

“She’d rather admit I wet myself last week,” said Henry with a rattling struggle to clear a plug of phlegm from his throat. He swallowed. “And we all know how willing she’s been to do that.”

“Henry.” Evelyn reached for the plastic pitcher sitting on Benji’s nightstand and filled a cup with water. “Take a drink instead of sitting there hacking.”

“Henry come. Henry drink. Henry roll over and play dead.”

Like a conductor bringing his orchestra to attention, Benji tapped the baton of his marker on his pad and, with large, wounded eyes, held up the paper for Evelyn to see.

She wants me to go to a nursing home.

“It’s not a nursing home, drama queen!” Claudia jabbed the promotional pamphlet into her mother’s hand and watched as Evelyn pored over it. “He thinks he should stay with a friend.”

“What friend?”

“He doesn’t know. Someone on Facebook.”

“Facebook?” Evelyn grimaced. “That’s nonsense. He’ll stay with us.” Evelyn dropped Treadwell Acre’s best pitch into the trash as if it were a bill she had no intention of paying, then surveyed the flower arrangements next to Benji’s bed. She snapped off a daisy’s browning head. “Your room is ready for you.”

“His room is the Shrine of Guadalupe.” Henry laughed. “Let me see that. What you just threw away.”

Evelyn stopped pruning the flowers long enough to retrieve the brochure and deliver it to Henry.

“She’s starting her very own assisted living community.” He considered the hazily happy invalid on the cover and said, “You move home. I’ll move here. At least they wouldn’t talk to me like they’re training a Saint — a Saint… Jesus fucking — what’s the name of it?”

“Saint who? How would I know?” Evelyn answered. “We’re not Catholic.”

“The dog, the name of the dog!”

It was onto this battlefield that Benji was about to pitch himself. He saw a week into the future, waking in his childhood bed under the watchful eyes of his Star Wars figurines. The sound of his parents’ latest skirmish would rise with the smell of coffee from the kitchen, and Benji, hobbling downstairs as if he’d had a bull’s-eye painted on his chest, would become his father’s newest target.

“Bernard, Daddy,” said Claudia, rubbing Henry’s back. “Saint Bernard.” She turned to Evelyn and, packing away her lullaby voice, asked, “You plan to take care of Benji and Daddy by yourself? At the same time?”

“I’m not by myself. I have Sandra.”

“For six hours a day. That leaves eighteen.”

“You make it seem like I’m about to climb Mount Kilimanjaro.”

“Either way you’ll be running around until you break your hip.”

“You and your broken hip.”

“You and your broken hip, Mom. And who will have to take care of you then?”

“Don’t worry. I know better than to ask you.”

“Stop it!” Henry called out. “Both of you.”

Benji’s marker moved across a fresh sheet of paper with the high-pitched sound of a hungry mouse. I have something to tell you. He flipped the page: I

Henry pointed and snapped, “Philomela’s trying to tell you something.”

New page: DIDN’T

Oblivious, Claudia still faced her mother. “Benji and I agreed that he’s not going to put that kind of strain on you. Didn’t we, Benji?”

Now that he had stepped up to the edge of the cliff, Benji stopped. Jump. He was one word away — a few sharp little mouse squeaks, a simple J-U-M-P — from the truth, one syllable with the power to allay his family’s fears, to free himself from an untenable tenancy. Or would he simply be convincing everyone that his primary problem wasn’t a suicidal tendency but a psychopathic one? If his family thought he was troubled before, what would they think when he pulled the curtain back on his latest charade? They’d call him psychotic. Alcoholic. Nutcase. He’d be spared the unthinkable stay at 34 Palmer Street, but roundly delivered into a sequestered twelve-step program in the remotest Adirondack woods.

He took a deep breath before placing pen to paper, but before he could finish his sentence, he heard a voice— that voice — that made it impossible to go on. “Knock, knock.” He turned to see Cat McCarthy standing there shyly, half obscured by the curtain, smiling a smile of uncertain provenance. She’d traded her stylish dress for ragged jeans and a boxy yellow (but still unaccountably sexy) T-shirt emblazoned with the words “Save Compton’s Mound.” She took a hesitant step toward the bed, but managed by the time she reached him to shed all signs of apprehension. The smile surprised him with its tenderness. Even if this was a performance, even if Cat was slipping comfortably, convincingly, into another skin as he’d seen her do five nights a week for the last two months, Benji didn’t mind.

As she leaned over to kiss King Hamlet on his unbandaged cheek, Henry made a sharp warning sound, as if she were about to step off a curb into a puddle.

“Careful,” he said, the tone of his voice traveling two orbits closer to congenial. “You’ll catch a cold.”

Cat stopped, uncertain. She looked to Benji, who shook his head to erase the interruption and ready himself for that long-deferred kiss — delivered at last — while Claudia, hands on knees, bent toward Henry with the loving indulgence of a nanny. “Daddy, you know where you are, don’t you?”

“Why wouldn’t I? We’re in the hospital.”

“And you know why we’re in a hospital?”

“Benjamin’s sick.”