tell you about that year? 1974, it was. We got nine dollars per hundredweight. . . .” Then all of a sudden his shoulders sagged. “Don’t know what we were thinking, eh, Momo? What were we thinking?”
Momoko didn’t hear him. She was watching Cass. “You are Yumi’s friend?”
Cass nodded. “I used to be.”
“She not here, you know.”
“I know. Have you heard from her . . . ?”
“She was too-pretty girl,” the old woman said. “If she was more ugly, maybe she not get into trouble.”
“Momoko!” Lloyd struggled to stand, but the old chair seemed to stick to his buttocks. His skinny knees flapped open and closed and he looked like some long-legged marsh bird caught in a sump pond, throwing his weight forward again and again. Finally, breathless, he sat back. His bony chest heaved. He closed his eyes.
Will coughed. “If this isn’t a good time, we can take a break—”
Cass frowned at him. No point in putting it off.
“Good time?” asked Lloyd, voice tight, speaking to no one at all. “There’s no good time. There’s no time at all.”
He opened his eyes and spoke to Will. “My wife and I want it guaranteed that we can go on living here in this house. That is nonnegotiable, Will. And we keep five acres for Momo’s seeds.” He turned to the lawyer. “We’ve made quite a nice little business out of the seeds in the past few years. All Momo’s doing, really. Haven’t been much use, ever since my heart . . .”
“Of course, Lloyd,” Duggin said. “The house and five acres are guaranteed. For as long as you like. Or until—”
Lloyd closed his eyes again and let his head fall back against the upholstery. “I’d always hoped . . .” He rolled his head from side to side as though his hopes were a muscle he could loosen. “Don’t know who we’re going to get to take over our seed stock. We got hundreds of varieties, some of ’em quite rare.”
His white hair, fine spun and charged with static from the friction, clung to the nubbly fabric. When he opened his eyes again, the pale blue irises were covered in a greasy film. He blinked, then let his watery gaze roam around the room to the lawyer, then to Will, to Momoko, and finally to Cass. Looking for answers. Cass looked away.
“All right,” he said. “Give me a pen, then. Let’s get this over with.”
“That’s right, Lloyd,” Duggin said, handing him a ballpoint. “It’s the only sensible thing to do.”
“Lloyd? Momoko?”
Cass slowly climbed, listening to the groan of the stairs underfoot and Momoko’s murmuring from above. As her head came level with the floorboards, the odor she’d noticed downstairs grew stronger. She ran up the remaining stairs.
She knew the house. She’d known it since she was a child, running along the creaky corridors, adding scuff marks to the doors, sliding down the rickety banister and fingering the scratches in the plaster walls. For all its flaws it was a far better house than her parents’ ranch-style prefab, where she and Will lived now. She was looking forward to the day when they could move in and start fixing it up. The door to the master bedroom was closed. She knew that the knob was loose, that it wiggled, and its screws were in need of tightening. She knocked, then peeked in. The bed was messy, but no one was there. She hurried down the hallway to the bathroom.
Momoko was perched like a child on the edge of the bathtub, rocking back and forth and talking quietly to herself. Lloyd lay on the floor in front of her, toppled like a giant on the slick tiles in front of the toilet. He had apparently been using it when he fell, because there was dark yellow urine pooled on the tile around him, and his pajama bottoms were wet in front. His toes, normally pale and waxlike, had turned dark, the color of a bruise. The small nub of his penis stuck out from the slit in the damp flannel.
Cass knelt down and put her hand on the side of his neck, then felt for his pulse. The acrid smell of old man’s urine made her gag. She cupped one hand over her nose and the other hand over his mouth. She felt warm breath in the palms of both. She slid open his eye with her thumb.
“When did this happen? When did he fall?”
Momo shrugged her shoulders.
“When did you find him? Was it just now?”
Momoko pointed to her husband’s penis. “O-chin-chin ga dashite iru wa panashi . . .”
There was a phone in the hallway. Cass dialed for an ambulance. If it gets too much, Will had said. Yes, suddenly it was much too much.
From the bathroom, Momoko cried, “Damé! Damé! O-shikko tarashite!”
Cass finished with 911 and ran back to the bathroom. Momoko was squatting down next to Lloyd, slapping his thigh with her tiny, crooked hand.
“Mrs. Fuller! Don’t!”
The old woman looked up at Cass, her silver hair hanging down on either side of her face. She shook her head, sternly.
“Damé! Very bad. He did o-shikko in his pants!”
Then she stood up as straight as she could, which wasn’t very straight at all, brought her hands to her eyes, and let out a low, keening wail. She shuffled backward, two baby steps, just far enough to bump the backs of her knees against the edge of the tub, whereupon she sat abruptly on the tub’s rim, then kept on going, sliding with her behind first into the smooth porcelain depression. She lay there on the bottom, in a small curl, sobbing quietly.
“It’s his heart,” Cass explained for the hundredth time to yet another social worker. “He’s had a couple of heart attacks, plus a bout with colon cancer. He had a colostomy last year and wears a bag, but he can’t change it himself. And she’s pretty senile. They really need services.”
The social worker nodded. “I agree, but it’s just not practical to be sending aides all the way out to the farm several times a day. In a case like this, usually we recommend one of the children or a family member helping out. . . .”
“I’m not a family member,” Cass said quickly. “I just live next door.”
“Don’t they have any children?”
“A daughter. But nobody knows where she is.”
“Have you asked them?”
Cass tried, but she knew there was no point. “Lloyd? Can you hear me?”
Momoko shook her head. “He can hear. He don’t want talking.”
“Wouldn’t you like Yummy to come home and take care of you?”
Lloyd lay perfectly still under the thin sheet.
“He
