Sugarhouse: Turning the Neighborhood Crack House Into Our Home Sweet Home (19 page)

We’d been playing a pretty good set of holes that day in Pekin. It was unbearably hot, as usual, and he hadn’t been feeling that well—he kept stumbling after he swung and was slouching in the cart such that I was afraid he’d roll out if I wasn’t careful. We decided we’d go in after nine holes, have hot dogs and martinis and call it a day. I was on the eighth tee, trying to keep my drive in bounds without ending up too short to set up a good approach, and the next thing I knew Grandpa was slumped down in the cart, slurring something about my shot.

I asked him what was wrong—did he want to go in? did he need a glass of water or a Coke or something?—but I couldn’t understand what he was saying and he was getting angry.

Gram and I took him to the emergency room at Pekin Memorial, where he was the chief radiologist. We parked in his regular spot. The next thing I knew we were all in an examination room, and despite the fact that everybody was calling my grandpa Dr. Tucker, he was the one on the exam table, paper crinkling under his saggy bare butt, and he was crying. My grandmother held me tight; if she hadn’t, I’m not sure I would have made it out of the hospital intact.

Today, the eve of Christmas Eve, nobody is crying. Despite the fact that we have a lot to cry about, we’re all so mad at Grandpa that we can’t even think about missing Gram. If he does, he has chosen an odd way to express it, by daring to bring Tonya to sit in Gram’s old chair.

“You want to watch something else?” he asks, gesturing toward us with the remote control. There are two other remotes on the coffee table in front of us.

“This is fine,” I say.

“What?” he says. His hearing has been deteriorating for years, which is fine with him. He doesn’t like to listen to other people, and if it’s TV he wants, he can crank the volume up as high as he pleases. If it’s annoying to anyone else, they’d need semaphore or sign language to tell him about it. He futzes with the remote, trying to find the mute. He does this with both hands, as though it were a live bird.

I pick up the remote in front of me, mute the TV.

“This is fine,” I say.

“Fine,” he says.

Jenae is not good at this. She is good at talking when we need a distraction. She has a way of putting herself into the middle of a conversation and chatting until we all relax a bit or until we can’t stand talking any longer—either way, she gets us together. But today, our first full day back as a family without Gram, and with only Jenae caught between Grandpa and me, such a foray would be suicidal, like windsurfing between Scylla and Charybdis.

“I’m sleepy,” she says, yawning dramatically. “Can’t believe how sleepy I am. Wake me up for the next happy hour.”

She goes upstairs and I un-mute the TV.

Grandpa and me. We sit. Over and over again, Leadbetter gets out of the trap. The club head descends, slices well behind the ball—close-up now, slow motion—it looks like a blade passing beneath the sand, rippling the sand, creating a wave that lifts and carries and now propels the ball, up and up and over and out and then down the ball drops, bounces once, twice, three times, and then rolls gently toward the cup.

Grandpa grabs the remote again. He looks at it carefully. He reads every button, every time he picks it up. He holds it in his left hand and with the index finger of his right hand presses the power button.

It’s the middle of the afternoon, we’re alone, and drunk. There is a lot to talk about, but nothing I want to say.

“So,” he says, but does not continue.

“Yeah?” I say.

He exhales as though the air he is forcing from his lungs is air I had just made him breathe.

“You seem pretty upset about something,” he says. He is facing south, sitting deep in an overstuffed chair. I am on the couch, across the room, facing east. “You have something to say, I’d love to hear it.”

I am drunk enough on a cache of Gram’s Scotch that I should be able to say whatever I want, but I also know that I have never been drunk enough to forget regrettable things I’ve said, and I also know that my grandfather has never forgotten a single ill word anyone has ever spoken to him. It’s not that I want to hurt him. It’s not that I am scared of saying what I believe is true. And I’m not afraid of losing my inheritance or jeopardizing our special Golf Channel–watching relationship. The thing is that we’re just about all that we have left, and I don’t know what to say to make it any better. Right now, things feel as if they’re getting worse, and he’ll have to end up in a motorcycle accident or a bar stabbing in order to get out of his relationship with Tonya. It’s killing my mom and I can’t handle not being able to do anything about it.

“I guess,” I say tentatively, “I just don’t understand where you’re headed in your relationship with Tonya.”

“Oh, for Christ’s sake,” he says. “Is that what you’re so uptight about?”

“Yeah,” I say, “that’s what I’m so uptight about. The fact that you’re in some kind of sordid relationship with a woman who is clearly just after your money. You told me yourself that she wouldn’t marry you because of her ‘morals.’ What the hell do you suppose that means? That she wouldn’t marry you because you’re Methodist or like musicals?”

“Don’t be such a baby,” he says. “What the hell difference does it make to you? So what if she’s not a role model? We’re just having fun. It’s not like I’ve got anything else to live for.”

I can feel my heart beating, pushing blood through every artery in my body. My blood feels too thick, gelatinous. I wonder if this is how he felt when he had his stroke.

“I thought you’d show a little more decorum in the wake of Gram’s death. It’s like you don’t miss her at all and don’t have any respect for the fact that Mom and I—especially mom, your
daughter—
are still mourning.”

“Jesus Christ,” he says. “You think everything has to be about how
you
feel? Like I don’t get to mourn in my own way? Or that I don’t get to move on, whether you’re ready or not? Well, I’m sorry, but I’m fucking sick of it. I don’t have forever to live. I’m sick of caring about all that shit.”

I have heard my grandfather swear before, but not like somebody who might pistol-whip me. He is still folded up in his easy chair, but he sounds as though he’s about to leap up and start hitting me with a length of pipe.

“Far be it from me to try to make you care,” I say. “I’m just trying to tell you that you’re basically killing your daughter and not doing me any good either.”

“What the hell do you care? Who the fuck do you think you are?”

“I’m not supposed to care that you have replaced the lady who was your wife and mom’s mom—my grandmother—with a not-so-glorified hooker?”

Despite the fact that I can’t breathe or move, I find that I am crying. Much to my surprise, so is my grandfather.

“It’s just that I love her so damned much,” he says. He sobs, as I have only ever seen my mother sob. Heaving between breaths, his body unable to breathe regularly, unable to stop, unable to move forward. He sounds like a car stuck in deep snow, tires spinning, the engine hopelessly revving.

“I just love her too goddamned much,” he says again.

I do not know if he is talking about Tonya or Gram.

Neither of us gets up. Neither of us moves toward the other.

Before long, David Leadbetter is back on. He is still in a sand trap. He makes it look as if it takes only willpower to get up and out.

Just when my family thought it had a lock on trauma, Jenae’s grandfather died. Raymond, Lee’s father, was in his nineties and had been in a nursing home for years, after a stroke left him debilitated and unable to tell the past from the present. Lee or Diane would visit Raymond daily in the nursing home. Every day Raymond would tell them the story of his morning and how he had spent it slopping feed or mending fence. In one sense, he was staying very busy. In another, he had left his body a long time before he actually died; his memories had taken over his body in a kind of revolt against the present. From then on, there would be no new memories. It was devastating to everybody but Raymond.

Jenae and I go to the funeral under odd circumstances. My adopted dad’s son-in-law, Kevin, has just been named defensive coordinator of the Nebraska Cornhuskers. The Cornhuskers are to Nebraska what, say, the Catholic Church is to Italy. It was the only game in town and therefore a combination of your civic, cultural, and religious duty. The only way you could escape it was to flee. And even then, like a TB stamp on your passport, you’re never really free.

As far as Lee is concerned, he has just discovered I am related, however tenuously, to a cardinal, a potential future pope. If I were related to the actual pope, it wouldn’t have been nearly as significant to Lee as the fact that I am related via two marriages to the Cornhuskers’ ruling elite. Suddenly it doesn’t matter that I am not from Nebraska, not good with a pair of pliers, not handy around a shotgun.

We drive into the Republican River valley the day before the funeral and meet Lee and Diane for lunch at the café in Orleans, Jenae’s hometown. It is a little diner that serves weak but scalding-hot coffee and chicken-fried everything. The mugs all have local business advertising on them, despite the fact that there are so few businesses everybody already knows them. Tripe TV and Carpet. Bose Transmissions. Mama’s Salsa. Tripe Chevrolet. Bugby’s Café. Nothing on the menu is over four dollars. Not even the steak.

The only people inside are farmers too old to work the fields anymore but too ornery to be put away in a nursing home. They all wear overalls, pearl-snap shirts, and mesh-backed seed caps. They all know Lee and Jenae.

“Boys,” Lee says.

“Lee,” they say. They shake Lee’s hand and doff their hats at Jenae. They ignore me. They say how sorry they are about Raymond. “Awful shame to go that-a way,” they say.

“Thanks,” Lee says.

And then he can’t help himself.

“I want you boys to meet Matthew Batt, my son-in-law here. He’s the new defensive coordinator’s brother.”

Lee claps his hand on my shoulder and stands next to me as though we’re waiting for our photo to be taken after defeating the last Democrat in the valley.

“By golly,” they say. A couple take their hats off. Another couple turn all the way around to regard me.

“That’s right,” Lee says. He guides Jenae and me past the old boys to a table in the back where we can eat in peace.

“Well, I’ll be,” they say. “He don’t look it, do he?”

Then, in February, my mom calls “with some news,” she says. I am getting used to such calls, but also tired of them.

“I’m sorry to bother you, Matt,” she says. Her voice is urgent, but significantly not sorrowful. “I know how busy you are,” she says. “I just thought you should know that I’m at the hospital with Grandpa. Don’t worry, he’s all right, he’s just, well, in the hospital.”

I tell her to slow down, to tell me what happened. I have been reading Dante’s
Inferno
and wish there were a tour guide like Virgil for the similarly strange descent we’re making.

“We were supposed to have dinner together and I waited and waited for his call and I thought the sonofabitch went to Vegas again without telling me, but then I realized I couldn’t be so sure. He had been having some trouble with his balance lately, no doubt due to the fact that he’s smoking again and out all hours of the day and night for that matter with that slut and drinking vodka like it’s going out of business—or what do they say, style?—that’s it—like it’s going out of style—because he supposedly can’t sleep without it even though I told him to try milk and just warm it up in the microwave and he’ll fall right to sleep like a baby and then I’m thinking maybe that’s what happened, maybe he finally got a good night’s sleep and is still sleeping and maybe it doesn’t have anything at all to do with Tonya and so I decide I’m going to drive over there quick and make sure and his car is still there and the house is still locked up and I’m furious because it’s exactly like before when he went to Vegas—the first time—can you believe we even have to keep track of
which
trip to Vegas?”

I quietly pour myself a drink.

“But,” she continues, “it didn’t feel like it did before when I let myself in with the key and I look around and check the bathroom and I hear him doing something but he’s not in there and I hear him crying and my God is that something I never have to hear again, the sound of my own father crying, lying on his face beside his bed and I’m thinking that he was robbed or beat up or finally Tonya’s ex-husband or one of her Mexican friends decided to teach him a lesson or beat some money out of him and I just didn’t know what to do so I called 911 and tried to help him up because he was conscious but not responding like he should and then I realize, Jesus Christ, he had another stroke.”

“Mom,” I say. “Breathe.”

“I know,” she says. “The good news is I left his cell phone at his house and told the head nurse not to tell
anybody
except you and me where he is—that he is not to be disturbed under any circumstances, especially by anyone named Tonya.”

She exhales, and it sounds as if someone has cut a hole in an inflatable mattress, letting the air slough out.

“I’m sorry I’m not with you right now, Mom,” I say. It is not true. I do not want to be there. I am so, so tired of all the trauma. I don’t know how people with big families do it. But, of course, they don’t have to do it. They can just not answer the phone, because their big sister or little brother or great-aunt or second cousin will surely be there to pick up the slack. In my family, it is me, my mom, my grandpa. Thank God Jenae and Bob have stuck around as long as they have. We’d be practically nothing without them.

“Well,” my mom says, “hopefully this will knock some sense into him.”

I arrive in Milwaukee a few days later, after I tidy up my classes and prepare for what I hope will be a short and uneventful visit. The stroke was not a catastrophic one—it appears there will be no loss of speech, cognition, or musculature—but the doctors guess that he must have been lying on the floor in a contorted position for long enough to have done some temporary damage. They release him after a couple of days to a nursing home only a mile from my mom’s flower shop for round-the-clock care, should he need it, and daily doses of physical therapy. Predictably, he is furious and my mom is thrilled. This means, for the first time in almost a year—since Gram died—there is somebody else to care for him.