he put on his coat and tried to walk out the front door. He’d had no idea that that alarm was triggered by the plastic bracelet around his ankle, or even that he was wearing a bracelet. Lolly visited Grandpa twice a day, at lunch and dinnertime, usually, figuring that if she bibbed and fed him herself, she wouldn’t have to worry that he wasn’t eating enough. I dragged myself there once or twice a week at first, less frequently as time went on. Entering his sour-smelling room, I’d often find him rifling through his dresser drawers, searching furiously for something he could never quite identify. Eventually, his restlessness subsided and he became sullen and withdrawn, sometimes rapping his knuckles against his skull in frustration. Toward the end, he sat listlessly, recognizing no one.
It was during that final phase of Grandpa Quirk’s life that I met Maureen. A recent divorcée, she had just become Rivercrest’s new second-shift nurse supervisor. Our first conversations centered around my grandfather. Who had he been before the onset of his disease? How had he made his living? Who and what had he loved? It moved me when she said that my answers to her questions would help her give him better care. I’d been divorced from Francesca for three years by then. I hadn’t dated since, or wanted to. But Mo was as pretty as she was compassionate, and my visits to Grandpa Quirk increased. On the night I finally got up the nerve to ask her out, I felt the heat in my face when she said no. Too soon after her divorce, she said; she hoped I understood. “Of course, absolutely,” I’d assured her, nodding my head up and down like freaking Howdy Doody. But a week later, Mo stopped me in the hall to ask if my offer was still good.
I picked her up at the end of her shift and took her to the only place in Three Rivers, other than the dives that my father used to haunt, that was open after eleven p.m. Over mugs of coffee in a booth at the Mama Mia Bakery, we talked about our lives—families, marriages and divorces, the way personal goals and actual outcomes could diverge. And we laughed: about my adventures working for the Buzzi family, about the funny things her patients sometimes said and did. God, that felt good. And when Alphonse came out from the back with a couple of just-made cinnamon doughnuts, it more or less sealed the deal—for me, anyway. Biting into that aromatic deep-fried dough, watching the way sugar clung to her lips as she ate hers: the warm deliciousness of that moment reawakened in me a hunger I hadn’t felt in years. Two dates later, at her place, we made love. And afterward, when I was spent and sleepy, she told me in the pitch-dark that if part of what I was looking for was kids, I was going to have to keep looking because she couldn’t have them. A nonissue, I assured her, with all the certainty of a guy still in his thirties—a guy whose childhood had been an unhappy one, and who didn’t particularly want to be in charge of some theoretical future child’s happiness.
We were married seven months after that first date of ours—a month or so after Grandpa’s passing. November 8, 1988. Mo was twenty-nine and I was thirty-seven, a third-time groom in a charcoal gray suit with a red carnation pinned to my lapel. Lolly and Hennie were our witnesses. After the exchange of vows, the four of us went out to a nice restaurant and then returned to the farm. Hennie had baked that morning: a wedding cake for Mo and me and a birthday cake for Lolly. “Damn, Lolly,” I said. “With everything else going on, I forgot about your birthday.”
“Your father’s birthday, too,” she reminded me.
“Best Wishes Mr & Mrs Quirk,” Mo’s and my cake said. In Lolly’s cake, Hennie had stuck candles and a little cardboard sign: “Good God in Heaven! Lolly’s 57!” Fifty-seven, I remember thinking—if he had lived. Shoveling frosting and sponge cake into my mouth, I did the math. My father had been only thirty-three when he died. I had, by then, outlived him by four years….
I WALKED TENTATIVELY TOWARD THE stairs, stopping at the threshhold of the room I’d slept in as a kid, and later had returned to during bouts of marital troubles. Marital and legal troubles, the last time I’d had to come back home. I didn’t particularly want to admit it, but I guess I’d been like my father in that respect: screw up, then come back home to regroup, to be good for a while…. My old room had been preserved as a museum of my boyhood. Red Sox and Harlem Globetrotters pennants on the wall, stacks of comic books and Boy’s Lifes still sitting on the pine shelf I’d made in seventh-grade shop class. The room had been a closet when the house was new, they’d told me, which was why it was windowless. I snapped on the overhead light. The twin bed pushed flush against the wall was covered with the same cowboys-and-Indians spread my mother had bought at the Durable Store, back when I’d watched Wagon Train and Bonanza each week without fail. To enter that claustrophobic former closet was to become, again, the boy whose father was a public nuisance, whose mother washed priests’ dirty clothes and answered sass with a stinging slap across the face. This was that boy’s room, and I backed out again. Escaped down the front stairs and out into the morning sunlight.
AFTER I DROPPED OFF LOLLY’S suit, I swung by the bakery to see Alphonse. “He’s in back in his office,” the counter girl said. “Supposedly doing his payroll, but he’s probably looking at Internet porn.” She had spiky red hair, a pierced eyebrow. Her nipples were poking out nicely from beneath the thermal undershirt she was wearing. This must have been the one Alphonse had been salivating about in his last few e-mails. “Make sure you knock first, or he’ll bite your head off,” she said.
“Or shoot me with his paintball gun,” I said.
Instantly, I was her ally. “I know! Isn’t that lame? He’s like my father’s age, and he’s still playing army over at that stupid paintball place.”
When I opened his office door without knocking, Alphonse hit the off button on his computer and popped out of his chair like a jack-in-the-box. “Quirky!” he said. “What the hell you doing here?”
“You know, if you don’t shut that thing down properly, you’ll shorten the life of your hard drive,” I said.
“Yeah? Well, don’t tell Bill Gates on me. So what’s up, bro? You get homesick or something?”
He seemed genuinely sorry to hear about Lolly. “She used to come in here every once in a while,” he said. “Her and her friend. What was her name?”
“Hennie.”
“Yeah, that’s right. They were a matched set, those two, huh? Always got the same thing: blueberry muffins, toasted, with butter—not margarine.”
I smiled. “Gotta support the dairy farmers,” I said.
“Hey, remember the summer when your aunt found those pot plants that you, me, and my brother were growing out behind your apple orchard?”
I rolled my eyes recalling the incident. “The three stooges,” I said.
“And remember? She made us pull them up and burn them in front of her? And we all got stoned from the smoke—Lolly included.”
“She didn’t get stoned,” I said.
“The fuck she didn’t! I can still see her standing there, scowling at first and then with that goofy grin on her face. She was toasted.”
“What I remember is that she didn’t rat us out to my grandfather,” I said. “Which is probably why we’re still alive.”
The comment dropped like a stone between us. One of the three of us wasn’t still alive. Rocco had died of leukemia in 1981.
“Aunt Lolly, man,” Alphonse said. “A buon anima.”
I asked him if he’d be one of her pallbearers.
“Sure I will,” he said. “Absolutely. Whatever you need. Hey, you gonna feed people after the service? Because if you
