WE’LL HAVE A GOOD TIME THEN | Nicole Mazzarella
Kevin wonders if some day his nursing home will play '80s music to make visitors feel nostalgic on his behalf. Will they prop him in a lobby chair near the popcorn machine that suggests movie nights they never have? Will he believe anyone who tells him it’s for the best?
His grandfather hasn’t accepted any of this, at least that’s what Kevin tells his wife when she complains about his every Saturday and Sunday visits. His wife says their daughter needs him more than his grandfather does. But Kevin hasn’t missed a weekend. He won’t. Not since his mother dumped his grandfather here a year ago and sold his house out from under him.
Here in front of the activity board with his grandfather, Kevin can forget his wife’s worries about their daughter.
“I can’t read a damn thing.” His grandfather waves toward the board, January-themed with sleds and snowmen as if the residents still play in the snow.
His grandfather repositions his walker in the direction of the couches, and they slowly walk toward the prime spot his grandfather claims each morning. A better place to watch the pretty women who walk in the front door, he tells him, each time.
It’s all bluster. More than women, his grandfather wants attention. It’s the excuse Kevin’s mother gave for dropping him here to wait for his end. She believed only an entire staff could bear her father’s need for attention.
On Fridays Kevin’s mother, looking more frail in her late 60s than his grandfather in his late 80s, hands him ten dollars of his grandfather’s money. “In case he goes out for ice cream,” she says every time. This is her only point of contact with her father.
Kevin pockets the ten each week and gives his grandfather a twenty-dollar bill. He asks the teller to pick out the crispest $20 she can find.
“Pay day,” Kevin says when he hands it to him.
“Still doesn’t look right. This European funny money.” But he smiles as he snaps the bill in front of him.
“Ice cream this week?” Kevin asks.
When his grandfather glares, Kevin notices he’s trimming his eyebrows again. He cuts them straight across, mostly too short. Maybe he is aiming to catch the eye of another resident.
“You know I hate that damn bus ride.”
Kevin likes getting him worked up about the ice cream bus. Nothing makes him seem more himself or more alive.
He says they cram them on a short bus like the school kids who need that sort of thing. They don’t even let them off the bus at the Dairy Queen. They deliver the ice cream four at a time without asking what they want. Just a collection of Dilly Bars, Buster Bars and Dipped Cones. They can’t even enjoy it. It melts too damn fast. His grandfather says damn a lot. Kevin remembers when it used to make him feel older that his grandfather swore in front of him.
His grandfather saves his money for Walmart where they let the able ones off the bus for a half hour. He spends the entire $20 on a string of scratch-off lottery tickets.
Last week as Kevin fought with his wife, June said the money would be better spent if his grandfather still smoked it away, and, if they were lucky, lung cancer would take him sooner. Her melodrama reassured Kevin that her tearful pleas about their daughter were no different.
Why would a ten-year-old want to die? So what, the other kids don’t like her? There were worse things in the world. Surely June only wants to shock him into spending time at home to do yard work and house projects.
His grandfather saves the scratch-off ticket for him each week. They talk for the next hour about how to spend the lottery money as they take turns scratching tickets. They make plans to pay off everyone’s houses and then send all the grandchildren to college. He doesn’t tell his grandfather that his daughter refuses to even go to fourth grade. He suggests this time that they travel to Mexico. But his grandfather prefers the idea of Florida. They talk about steak dinners and the types of grills they’ll buy.
This week his grandfather asks him something new. “Do you need a spare apartment for another lady?”
“No, Grandpa. It’s just June.”
“Women expect too much these days.”
For a moment, his grandfather thinks he’s just another guy next to him on the assembly line. He believes they drink Joe’s burnt coffee that he makes right there on the line and hands it out for a quarter a cup. It’s god-awful coffee, but it keeps the foreman from tracking their breaks.
There’s not much more to say about Joe than his coffee, so Kevin turns his grandfather’s memory toward the forklift driver. “That bum Fred,” Kevin says. He hopes this will get his grandfather talking about the men on the line rather than trying to talk him into a mistress, though he might as well have a mistress. It wouldn’t make June despise him any more than she already does.
“No man ever worked more overtime than Fred? But you met his wife, right?” his grandfather asks.
They’ve had this conversation so many times that it almost feels true when he says, “Sure, I did,” then he says the line his grandfather waits for, “Who wouldn’t work overtime with her at home?”
His grandfather laughs at that. “That bum, Fred. Least he could do is put down his book and pretend he’s there to work.”
Kevin knows what to say next. “He sits in that forklift like it’s his La-Z-Boy.”
He wishes he had a script yesterday. June did all of the talking with the psychologist at the day program. Kevin wouldn’t say a word of this to his grandfather. What child avoided school back in his day? They told children to go and they went. When Kevin said as much to his wife, she looked like he’d slapped her.
They toured the facility where their daughter would go until she could return to school, met the group therapist and the exposure therapist. Ridiculous, he told his wife as they drove the hour home from Columbus. No one needed hours a day to focus on their problems. How many problems could a ten-year-old have? Why doesn’t his wife take her to one of her prayer meetings?
His grandfather is staring at him, and he realizes he’s missed his next line. “But it’s god-awful coffee, isn’t it?” Realizing after he’s spoken that they’d moved on to complaining about forklift driver.
His grandfather isn’t the sort of man to study him, but today he does. “Is work on your mind?”
“Nah. It’s an easy month. Hardly anyone submits returns this early. Most come in February.”
“What’s troubling you then?”
“June’s decided our daughter’s some sort of troubled kid. That’s June for you.”
“What sort of troubled?”
“Doctor called it ‘school avoidance.’ More like life avoidance for her. June can’t get her to leave her room.” Why did he admit this? He waits for his grandfather’s laughter.
“That’s not troubled. That’s our family. That’s Eloira and Mammah.”
“Who?”
“My aunt, your grandmother, or great-grandmother, dammit, my mother. I can’t keep it straight. Family.”
His grandfather has never spoken of either of them. He should appreciate his grandfather’s attempt to reassure him, but all Kevin can think is that there’s no way he’ll tell June this. It would only give her another reason to blame him for their daughter’s problems.
The nursing home decorates for Valentine’s Day like it’s Christmas. Pink lights on the Ficus trees. Glittering rose garland over the activity board. They’ve themed the entire month on a single day, in a place where most of the residents are single.
His grandfather is quick to correct him on this point. When Kevin tries to get him to laugh at the swirling cardboard cupids above their dining table, his grandfather says, “Easier to get a woman here than those church bereavement groups.”
Kevin looks around at cardiganed women with their thick ankles and thicker waists. The resident beauty parlor fluffs all of their thinning hair the same. He remembers that it was his grandfather who gave him dating advice. His grandfather believed that a man, not Kevin’s abandoned mother who couldn’t keep her man, ought to teach him about women.
“Stand them on their head, and they all look the same,” his grandfather told him. Kevin blamed being twelve years old and inexperienced for the twinge he felt in his stomach. He knew he ought to listen to his grandfather who managed to stay married, unlike his mother.
Now he wonders how his grandfather kept his grandmother happy and why he so utterly fails at keeping June happy. He’s never once cheated on June, and yet he never comes home to a cold beer waiting with the ball game turned on just for him. He doesn’t even get a lousy sandwich anymore.
“Your girl still not going outside?”
He imagines June saying, see he doesn’t even remember her name, and you still choose him over her.
“She’s still in the day program. June drives her there and back every day to Columbus.”
“That’s a hike. Is it working?”
Kevin doesn’t want to tell his grandfather that they now have a small safe in the kitchen for the scissors, razors, and knives. June doesn’t make his lunch anymore, so just to cut the sub bun for his sandwich yesterday, he fiddled with the safe for a good five minutes trying to remember the combination. The numbers jumbled in his mind as he tried to ignore that this microwave-size metal box sat on their counter, seemingly as necessary as the toaster.
She’s ten years old, he insists to June. Aren’t they all making too much of it? June won’t even answer when he asks her questions like this. Her contempt feels different now, colder, more solid.
“She’s out of the house every day. I suppose that’s progress,” he tells his grandfather.
Colder than most Aprils, Kevin now owns a Field & Stream heat-a-seat cushion and boxes of Hothands, so he can sit outside his grandfather’s window and write messages on a white board. The staff sanitized the board and marker that Kevin bought for his grandfather and commended him for his dedication in the cold. Few family members had found a way to visit since the shutdown in March.
His grandfather waits for him today by the window. He pretends to clink a coffee mug to Kevin’s thermos, like they’re watching the Cleveland Indians in the 9th inning and tapping their beer bottles together. Kevin pulls his camping chair closer to the window and drapes the wool stadium blanket over his legs. He wonders if either of his uncles stand outside the window to see his grandfather.
Does anyone else visit? Kevin writes.
Cat’s in the cradle, his grandfather replies. His grandfather took up the song like an anthem the year it was released. He’s quick to sing the lyrics when Kevin brings up family. It’s the way of things.
He sings the song now, even though Kevin can’t hear him through the double-pane glass, and he strums an air guitar to make Kevin smile, but Kevin doesn’t smile this time.
When Kevin and June visit their daughter at Nationwide Children’s, they’re allowed inside. They wear masks, have their temperatures taken, and have exactly one hour to sit in her room. His daughter tells them she’s become friends with the girl in the room next to hers. She’s eight years old.
He knows they’re supposed to feel fortunate that their daughter received the only empty room. Her psychologist used to work for Children’s, and he let it be known he called in a favor when she needed to be hospitalized. Kevin doesn’t feel any gratitude. Hadn’t this man failed them? Wasn’t the point of driving two hours a day for his day program for months to keep her off a psych ward? When did they even start having psych wards just for children? He’s never heard of a thing like this.
The medication changes haven’t gone well. It’s the second Saturday that he’s visited his grandfather without June complaining. It’s been the two of them for eight days, and she says nothing when he pours his coffee in the travel mug. She says little during the week as they work across from each other on laptops at the kitchen table. She meets with their clients on Zoom to assure them of the extension for filing. He works on the returns for the ones who can’t imagine an April 15th passing without their taxes complete. Yesterday she told him she would divorce him if she had the energy for it.
At least as he sits outside this window, he’s a better man in the eyes of the staff. A dutiful grandson who doesn’t let a virus or the weather stop him from sitting with his grandfather.
His grandfather writes in all caps on his white board, This is bullshit.
Kevin fills the board with Yes.
What you get with women running the world.
It would be easy to write Hell, yes, but he thinks of June at their kitchen table. He’s watched her with their clients, calming them, telling them this will end, assuring them they aren’t alone. She’s good with them. Like she’s good with their daughter. She knows what to say when they have only an hour with her.
She brings irreverent coloring books that make her daughter laugh. She prints pictures of mother pandas holding their babies and llamas grinning and penguins flopped on their bellies and changes out the bulletin board in her room each day with new pictures. She gives her a comic book Bible that’s easier to follow than any Bible he’s ever seen. She brings a fresh pillowcase every few days, that somehow smells like vanilla. She orders drive-up orders from Target that they pick up on their way to the hospital, so their daughter has new fuzzy socks or candy. When she talks to her, she holds her hands and looks her in the eyes. His daughter’s scratching of her wrists slows, and she settles into her body with June near.
The April morning feels colder with the wind. His white board is still blank. He no longer knows what to say to his grandfather.
Instead he imagines that later today he might pull the desk chair close to his wife and daughter as they sit on the single bed covered with the comforter that June brought from home. He wishes he could bring this white board. He wishes it would be enough to write I’m here now.
Nicole Mazzarella has published an award-winning novel This Heavy Silence and short stories in publications such as Antioch Review and Cimarron Review. She lives outside Chicago where she teaches creative writing and is working on her second novel.