his coffee. “If that goddamn kid throws my paper in the bushes one more goddamn time…”
“Thanks, Dad,” Mom says.
“‘Thanks nothing,” Grandpa says. “Boy shouldn’t be talking to his mother like that.”
We moved Grandpa into our first floor guest room last year. Dad said it was the right thing to do. Grandpa had lived alone since Grandma Eleanor died of cancer in ’81, but sometime after the beginning of Reagan’s second term, he started forgetting things. He’d go out to meet his friends for breakfast, walking the same route along Kentucky Avenue on the southwest side of Indianapolis that he’d been walking for fifty years, and he’d get lost. Kentucky Avenue was no longer the best place to get lost. The old neighborhood wasn’t safe anymore. His favorite neighborhood stores—Murphy’s Mart, Woolworth’s, and Linder’s Ice Cream—had all gone out of business and been replaced by Mega Liquor World, Instamatic Cash Checking, and Rent-to-Own Furniture and Appliance Store. The Laundromat that used to have quarter washes and the machine that dispensed free popcorn now had ten-dollar hookers and a machine that dispensed fifty-cent condoms, and the house across the street that used to leak puppies and shirtless toddlers now leaked meth addicts and shirtless adults.
Within months, Dad’s selfless act started backfiring. Incontinence, feebleness, dementia—Grandpa George’s body and mind has been giving out on him, but we’re always there to patch him up. The other night, I caught Dad hovering over Grandpa’s bed when he slept. I asked him what he was doing. He told me he was praying for God to make his father whole again. Even though we keep starting over with a puzzle that’s missing another piece, Dad refuses to entertain the idea of a nursing home or assisted care living. Our house has started to reek of urine—the smell of mortality and a son’s well-intentioned but misguided love.
A part of me cherishes Grandpa George living with us, and not just because he’s a convenient scapegoat when Mom and Dad discover half-empty bottles in the liquor cabinet. Grandpa was my best friend for the first ten years of my life, and we had our rituals. Every Saturday morning when I was a kid, we’d walk to Mr. Dan’s Diner for breakfast. We’d sit with Grandpa’s World War II buddies—guys with inexplicable nicknames like Beef, Old Crow, Buddha, and Skeckel—and we’d order biscuits and gravy with coffee. The gravy at Mr. Dan’s had too much pepper for most people, but that was the way Grandpa and I liked it. After our breakfast, we’d hop on a bus to downtown. Our schedule was pretty much the same every Saturday. We walked through the Children’s Museum and ate lunch at Shapiro’s, the old Jewish deli in downtown Indianapolis—Grandpa George’s favorite restaurant. After lunch, we stopped in at St. John’s to kneel down and say some Hail Mary’s, and then Grandpa would buy me a model airplane at L. S. Ayres department store.
At the end of the day, Grandpa and I would get on a bus and then hop off a couple miles short of his house. This gave us time to pick boysenberries from the bushes growing alongside the railroad tracks on Kentucky Avenue for Grandma Eleanor’s pies. The crickets chirping and that creosote smell of railroad ties would always make me think of summer. One day Grandpa told me the boysenberry bushes had come from the seeds left by passenger trains “dumping out their crappers.” I stopped picking boysenberries after that.
But back to the kitchen and my father’s testicles.
Grandpa George sets his coffee cup down on the table. “Now you listen here, Johnny, uh, Hank. What your mom and dad do behind closed doors is their own business.”
“Johnny-uh-Hank” has been Grandpa’s unintentional nickname for me my whole life, as he never quite remembers that I’m his grandson instead of his son until halfway into my name.
“Well, Grandpa, I assumed Dad made it my business when he shoved his vas deferens in my face.”
“Take it easy, son,” Dad says, smiling. Smiling! And it isn’t just any smile. It’s one of those irrepressible John Fitzpatrick smiles that lights up a room while at the same time diffusing any situation. Dad tilts his head down, still smiling. He arches his dark, I-know-better-than-you eyebrows and points his pronounced Fitzpatrick nose at me.
“I’m going in for the procedure on Monday morning, and your Mom and I are taking this one day at a time. I only have a fifty-fifty shot at even regaining my fertility.”
He says fertility with an unmistakable reverence in his voice, as if his sperm is akin to the holiest of holy oils as opposed to what I dispense daily like party confetti. Chrism, jism—what’s the fucking difference?
“Whatever, Pops. They’re your balls.”
“Henry David Fitzpatrick!”
She nails me across the back of my bedhead with her open palm. It’s more annoying than punitive, but it gets the job done. “Dammit, Mom!”
She smacks me again. “Don’t think you’re too old for me to wash your mouth out with soap,” Mom says.
Dad shoves two pieces of bacon into his mouth, smothering his laughter. Grandpa left the room unnoticed, shuffling out for his morning walk around the neighborhood with his sassafras cane.
“Well, if we’re talking about another kid,” I say, “can we have the dog conversation again?”
My mother hates animals. In my first fifteen years of life, various people—no fewer than three babysitters, Aunt Claudia, even a couple girlfriends—conspired to get me a dog. And each time, Mom was steadfast in her opposition.
“Hank, as long as you live under this roof…”
“I know, I know. Fish are the only pets I’ll ever get.”
Dad washes down his bacon with a swallow of coffee. He looks out the kitchen window at our backyard. Our lawn is bordered on the left by a willow tree stump, and on the right by a purple martin house. The ankle-high bluegrass waves in the morning breeze, its silver-green tapering off at the edge of the pond behind our house. “That lawn isn’t going to cut itself,” he says.
I grumble as I walk outside. I raise the garage door, step out onto the driveway. The morning dew on the grass mocks me with its promise of matted clumps clogging the lawnmower and two hours of frustration and engine-masked profanity. The mower greets me with predictable ambivalence. A dozen futile pulls on the starter send me back into the house.
I don’t know when Dad ceded lawn duties over to me. The transition was imperceptible. Yesterday, I was a little kid sitting in the family room wearing my Miami Dolphins helmet and cursing the New York Jets—this was back in the late seventies when Shula was God in my world, long before the Colts came to town—while Dad was outside coating himself in layers of grass, fertilizer, and gasoline. Today, I’m a teenager, no longer a Dolphins fan but still not enough of a Colts fan to care, bursting in on Mom and Dad coating themselves in pre-sex sweat.
I wish I could say this is the first time I’ve walked in on them. Hell, I wish I could say this is the first time I’ve walked in on them this week.
“Seriously, you two? I’m outside for five minutes, and you’re already dry-humping on the couch?” The inherent repulsiveness of parental copulation sends an acidic bacon and coffee burp up from my stomach.
“What’s the problem, son?” Dad stands up, erection in tow, trying to cover himself. His robe leaves little to the imagination, so he turns sideways with his back to me.
“Well, other than my disintegrating psyche, the stupid lawnmower won’t start.”
“You
