By Brad Bailey
When I pulled up to the house and saw my father come out the front door, my first inclination was to turn and run. My second was to grab my bag out of the trunk and take my time doing it. Anything to delay facing him.
If there was anyone else to tell, anyone else who might be coming after, I would have told them, “I don’t care how prepared you think you are, no matter how much you think you might know, there is no way to be prepared for seeing him like that.”
Christmas was the last time I’d been there. My dad had lost almost forty pounds in the intervening six months. “But he’s gained back five,” Ginny, my dad’s wife, told me when I last called to check. Looking at him now, I could only see the loss.
Confusion flashed across his face, then morphed into a mask of recognition. I dropped my suitcase and put my arms around him. He felt so goddamned frail. Dad had always been solid, sturdy. Maybe not fit, but he always had presence. He was there.
“How are you doing, Bud?” he said. “Good drive up?”
“Kind of like going back in time two weeks, except when it felt like a month.” I’d driven through parts of four states to get there, and all of them, everywhere I had occasion to stop, had different rules for what was closed and what could stay open. On top of that, St. George was different from Moab, Grand Junction was different from Denver. And all of them kept a tighter grip on things than what I’d lived through back home. None of which I thought was bad or good, places all being different, it was just interesting to see what was what.
“Well, let’s get you situated.” Ginny had followed my dad to the door but didn’t come out. She led me to my room. Which, most of the time, was his room.
As I opened my suitcase, I heard him out in the hall. “He seems like a good guy,” my dad said. “How do we know him?”
#
Yesterday was their anniversary. Forty-two years. It took some convincing, and a shit ton of Job-level patience, but she got my dad to go out to dinner.
“Once we got there, he was okay.” Ginny passed me a bowl of potatoes while she forked a pork chop onto her own plate. She and Dad had brought back a cooler full of Iowa chops on their last trip out there. I hadn’t eaten since I left Grand Junction that morning, just drank more Monster Zero Ultras than one man should. My stomach lurched toward the dinner table.
“Are we eating again?” Dad’s whine was mixed with disgust and dread.
“The memory meds make him nauseous,” she said.
“Not again,” he said. “We just ate. And that was too much.”
“Dad, it’s after seven,” I said. Ginny told me that she’d taken to fixing supper late in hopes that he might somehow feel hungry again. “You last ate six hours ago.”
“Not again,” he said. “I can’t.”
I looked to Ginny, who stared down at her plate. “You need to eat something,” she said.
“I can’t. I can’t. I can’t. You’re going to make me sick.” Jesus, Dad.
“Ginny, this is all fantastic,” I said. “You guys always would talk about how great Iowa chops are. Like every chance you got. ‘Iowa chops are the best.’ And I would always have something else. Last couple of times I was out here, I finally had the Iowa chops.” I waited a moment before the next part. “And goddamn if you weren’t right. It pains me now to admit it, that my stepmom was right about something.” I was going for a laugh, something. I knew he hadn’t meant it but could see she had her feelings hurt.
“We’re almost out,” she said. “I don’t know when we’ll get back to…” She looked at Dad. “You don’t always know me, do you?”
“I do today,” he said. Just then, I saw a flash of the real Dad.
“If you’re done, and it’s not likely we’re going to get more of these any time soon, hand me your plate, Dad.” I thought about the diet I had just torpedoed as I scraped his pork chop and potatoes onto my own dish. Then I thought about how I had precisely zero cooking skills and how I had better eat while there was eating to be done, and set his empty plate back in front of him. The tension in the room settled just a bit, Dad relieved not to have to force down any more food, and Ginny happy that at least someone was having seconds after she went to the trouble to cook.
Seeing their empty plates, I pushed back from the table and cleared the dishes, leaving my own. I had to do something.
“I’ll get him ready for bed,” she said. “We don’t get up too early anymore. Not like before.” I watched her lead him across to their side of the house before I sat down and picked up my fork again.
#
It was on the second day that my dad asked me if I’d brought my gun.
“Colorado doesn’t have concealed carry reciprocity with Nevada,” I said. Some things I didn’t say: I didn’t say that that question is considered rude in some circles. I didn’t tell him that I try not to answer such questions directly if I can at all help it.
Because of course I brought my gun. I just wasn’t trying to admit to a felony to a former officer of the court as my hand rested on the Walther PPQ subcompact model that was in a pocket holster on my right thigh.
I also didn’t tell him that that question, from him, scared the shit out of me. Because of what he’d told my stepmom when they first got the diagnosis.
Ginny’s dad, my step-grandfather, had passed several years before and had left behind a few guns. Ones he’d used to go hunting back when he still was able. My step-uncle had taken the ones he wanted and brought the rest to my dad.
He didn’t want them.
Ginny suggested I take them, so last August, I drove up to see them. Dad took me out to the garage, fished a key out of his pocket, and unlocked his gigantic red toolbox. Four in total; two rifles and two revolvers.
“I’ve been afraid to have these,” he said. I’d never heard my dad admit to being afraid of anything. And it didn’t make sense. What was he afraid of? Maybe he wasn’t a hunter, but he used to go hunting. He’d been around firearms all his life.
They ended up, all four of them, being in weird calibers that didn’t match anything else I had. On top of that, the right ammunition was hard to find. So I sold them. I don’t get sentimental over things I can’t use, and no one else was going to miss them.
#
We had that conversation while looking out the window, watching the Fall River wind behind his back porch and then on through town. Further on, it meets with the Big Thompson River and runs alongside the 34 all the way down the canyon.
After he asked me, he went quiet. I still didn’t know how things really went during the day, so I just sat there next to him and watched him stare.
“What have you boys been doing this afternoon?” Ginny asked, coming in from checking the sprinkler units on all the planter boxes they had. The lady likes her flowers. Those planters drove me nuts. You can’t see the river and actual mountains, the whole reason you’re in Colorado, because the flowers blocked the view.
“Just this,” I said. Dad didn’t look up.
“Maybe you can take him for a walk.”
“Okay,” I said. “Where do we go?” The house shared a parking lot with a closed-down hotel and was pretty close to the main road through town.
She sighed. “Down to the end of the drive should be good. Maybe up and back a few times.”
“Let’s find you a jacket,” I said. Dad finally looked up when I spoke. Since we were right next to Rocky Mountain National Park, June meant every imaginable kind of weather on successive days. That day was pretty strong winds, at least compared to what I was used to. He’d picked up the habit of leaving his shoes on all day, so that was one thing I didn’t have to help him with.
“I don’t know if I can make it, Bud.”
I took his arm as we started to negotiate the front steps. “I got you, Dad.” He shuffled, barely moving his feet across the crumbling asphalt; I had to catch him several times. “You okay, Dad?”
“Do we have to keep going?”
“Ginny says we do.”
“We’d better do what she says, then.”
I really didn’t want to go back to the end a second time, but I wanted to hear an upset Ginny asking why we hadn’t been out very long even less. Cars drove slowly on the main road, well within the posted limits, but Dad shuddered every time one passed.
The man whose arm I held, I knew in my head he was my Dad. But as far as his personality, him being the guy I’d known, my dad was unrecognizable. This guy was scared of everything. My dad was confident. He swaggered through a room. My dad did not shuffle.
I’d promised my stepmom I would stay for a week. Without that, I toyed with the idea of inventing a reason to head back home. I couldn’t deal with him turning into—this.
#
I woke to voices. The clock said seven. “Not early,” my stepmom had said. I checked my gear, made sure all was well, and headed to the hall bathroom for a shower. The voices turned out to be the TV. Blaring. News. Something local at least. CNN always seemed to make them angry about everything.
Dressed, I went back to my room where Dad was flipping through clothes in my suitcase. I waited, watching him make his way from one side of the room to the other. About halfway, he stood up straight and turned to face me. “These aren’t mine,” he said. He walked past me toward the living room.
He hadn’t gotten as far as my backpack. Which I raced toward. I unzipped the bag and thrust my hand in. It was still there. Fuuck.
The room they’d set me up in, when they didn’t have visitors, was my dad’s. With me there, they both were in Ginny’s room.
I sat on my bed, staring out the window.
Dad came in, walking directly toward my suitcase. His hands felt through my clothes, working his way through my luggage.
“Dad?”
He turned. “These aren’t mine?”
“No, Dad. That’s my stuff.”
“Oh,” he said. “Usually, this is my room.” He headed out into the living room.
On the drive up, I took a detour through Moab, where Dad grew up, and where I hadn’t made time to visit in years. There’s a bookstore there, Back of Beyond, mentioned in Neil Peart’s Ghost Rider. I stopped in. I asked for a book connected to the area, and the lady set me up with Atlas of a Lost World. That was the book I picked up off the nightstand and laid back on the bed to read when my dad came back in the room not five minutes later and started poking through my stuff.
“This isn’t mine.”
I got up and walked him out into the living room, sitting him down on the couch to watch TV.
Which was not the best idea.
The new, afraid Dad was not handling the news well. Denver was having protests that dominated the coverage. Cops attacking protesters, fires, all of it added to the list of things Dad was scared of and fixated on.
As soon as I saw the effect it was having on him, I said, “It’s okay, Dad. That’s two hours away, right?”
“What are they doing?” he said. “What are they doing?”
“Can we at least turn the volume down?” Dad clutched the remote in his hand, unaware he held it. Looking down, he held it out to me. I’d already learned the lesson that I had no idea how their remotes worked. “Let’s go sit on the porch, Dad.”
“What are they doing?”
“Let’s go outside.”
I led him out and found us matching deck chairs. The river roared past us. Talking would have required yelling, so we just watched.
#
“Did you bring your gun?”
Jesus, Dad.
“Colorado doesn’t have concealed carry reciprocity with Nevada.”
“It doesn’t?”
“No,” I said. “Commies.”
Dad didn’t like that. “You call everyone Commies.”
The local news was broadcasting a debate between two Senate candidates. “Dad. That guy on the left side of the screen is a literal, actual Communist. He just said so.” This wasn’t exactly true.
“Not even on the drive up?”
“I wouldn’t leave it in the car.”
“Oh,” he said. “That’s probably a good idea.”
The room searches had changed my operating procedure. I kept my gun on my person at all times. Didn’t go to the bathroom or shower without it in arm’s reach.
The debate ended. The next thing on was a consumer advocate show hosted by, unbelievably, Amelia Earhart. “Is she related to—” I asked.
“No,” Dad said. “She is a pilot though. There was something…” He paused for a moment. “Her family told her she was related, but later it came out that there’s no connection. She’s actually circumnavigated the globe.”
Holy shit. Dad. He hadn’t been that lucid the entire time I’d been there.
He looked at me and held my gaze. “That was pretty together,” he said. “Could be I don’t even have Alzheimer’s. Maybe I’m just bullshitting everyone.” Dad smiled like he used to and laughed. So did I. That was my dad, like I remembered.
A phone rang in the kitchen.
“Oh God,” Dad said. “What is it now?” His body tensed.
“I’ll get it.” I picked up Dad’s phone off the counter. “It’s Uncle Jim.” Jim was Dad’s older brother, his only one left.
“What does he want?”
I swiped to answer. “Uncle Jim.”
“Is this Cade?”
“I’m up here visiting.”
“Ginny told us you were coming.”
I waited for a moment.
“Is he there?”
“Right next to me,” I said. Then to Dad, “Here,” and I handed him the phone.
He tried to not take it from me, but then stopped resisting. Holding it to his ear, he said, “Hey, Bud. How’s it going?” They talked, but I didn’t hear anything they said.
I was shook. “Hey, Bud.” Dad called me Bud when I showed up on his doorstep. He said, “Hey, Bud,” whenever I called him the last few months.
He never used to call me Bud. It was always “Cade Lawson, how’s it going?”
#
Sometimes he knew me. Knew my name, knew I was his son. Sometimes he knew my name but not who I was. Sometimes he knew who I was, but couldn’t get his tongue around the name. I think that was the worst for him. Because he could see that little glimmer of disappointment, no matter how I tried to clamp down on it.
He didn’t want me to come. He didn’t want me to see him not know me. It took me three months to convince him it would be okay.
The first time he forgot me, I understood. He was right.
He wasn’t my dad anymore.
#
That night, he was worse. Maybe the worst I’d seen so far. We’d had the nerve to prepare dinner again.
“If I was a real man, I’d jump off this deck and end it,” he said after not eating. He paced the porch, glaring at Ginny and me. We had been sitting in our deck chairs, trying to enjoy the sunset.
“That likely wouldn’t even kill you,” Ginny said. I looked over the rail. She was right. “At worst, you’d break your neck and be paralyzed and have a whole different set of problems on top of what you’ve already got.”
“I should do it,” he growled. “I can’t—”
“You promised,” she said. “I told you I’d keep you at home as long as I could, as long as you didn’t give up.”
My chest was tight. My gut churned.
“I—” Dad’s pacing slowed, and finally he stopped. He reached his hand out to my stepmom, and I’ve never seen him look so helpless.
#
“He up yet?” I was sitting on the porch when Ginny opened the sliding glass door and joined me.
“Not yet,” she said. She held her mug of coffee in both hands as she sat across from me.
“I told him I’d keep him home with me until it—”
“Do you think you want to wait that long?” I could barely believe I was saying it. “This is—I just want you to know that when you think it’s time, it’s okay. You don’t have to worry that I think—”
She waved me off and turned away.
We had never gotten along when I was little. Things didn’t improve much when I grew up. I don’t know, it always felt like she was jealous of me, because Dad loved me and she didn’t get all his attention. But seeing him like this, seeing her take care of him, it was a lot.
“I’ve got some errands to run,” she said. “Can you take him for a walk later? Maybe by Lake Estes.”
I sort of knew where that was. Figured I could find it, at least.
“Where’s she going?” She’d told Dad several times that morning, she was going to Sam’s for groceries. “Oh God,” he said. “The fridge won’t hold all that food.” Ginny headed to the store without telling him again on her way out the door.
“Dad. She’s been buying groceries for you guys at this house for almost twenty years. She cooked dinner last night. I think she can figure it out.” It was so easy to get frustrated with him. And it felt really shitty to feel that way.
“But who’s going to eat it?” He seemed to forget that people other than him had to eat, even when he didn’t feel up to it.
“It’ll be fine, Dad. I promise.”
“Where’d she go?”
“Hey, she wanted us to go for a walk. To the lake. How’s that sound?”
“We have to?”
“I’m not telling her I didn’t take you.”
“We’d better go, I guess.”
He couldn’t drive, but he certainly wasn’t happy that I was driving. “There’s a car pulling out up there.” Yeah. That’s what they do, Dad. “Don’t get in that lane too early.” I found the lake Ginny had mentioned. You had to pay to park, and Dad didn’t want to go anyway, so I kept driving.
“Want to go to the Stanley?” The Stanley Hotel was a local landmark, notable for inspiring The Shining.
“No.”
“Well, let’s go anyway.”
“Okay. Will she know where we are? Is it okay with her if we go there?”
“It’s fine. She said walk. We’ll get out and walk.”
Turns out the hotel itself was closed, but you could still walk around outside. The front drive let you look out over the whole valley. Maybe the most pathetic sight was the hedge maze, or what was left of it. The bushes had all died or been pruned back to look that way. The maze “walls” were outlined with rock, but the whole thing only came up to about knee height. We wouldn’t be getting lost in there.
“The Stanley Steamer guy built all this,” Dad said. If he saw me reading the sign with all the historical data, he didn’t give an indication. “Is it closed?”
“Can’t go in.”
“But we can walk around out here?”
“Yeah, Dad. It’s okay.”
“Does Ginny know we’re here?”
“No, but it’s okay, Dad.”
“She doesn’t know where we are?”
“What kind of trouble can we get into?”
“Well, sometimes bears get into the trash. We have to put locks on the trash bins.”
“You getting tired, Dad?”
“Always, Bud.”
#
Back in the car, I turned on some music. One of Buddy Guy’s albums, Damn Right, I’ve Got the Blues. It used to be our favorite. One time we were on a trip—Dad, Ginny, and me. The rule was, if the CD skipped or stopped early, we started it over again. Dad and I conspired to restart Mr. Guy’s comeback album three times before she caught us.
I waited, hoping for some kind of reaction.
“What’s this?”
“Buddy Guy.”
“Is this a new one?” Damn Right, I’ve Got the Blues came out in 1991. Between us, we’d worn out three copies. Fuck.
I followed the 34 out of town, heading down the canyon, looking for a place to pull off. Somewhere to sit. Dad stared out the window, worrying his seat belt.
“This’ll do,” I said.
“We getting out again? Can’t we go back home?”
“Just one more stop, Dad.”
“Should we call her?”
“We can’t. No cell service out here.”
“And she doesn’t know where we are?”
“No, Dad.”
The place I found was an overlook with a trail that led down to the river. You could see it from the road up above, but only if you really meant to look. We sat on a park bench and watched the river for a while.
“I can’t,” he said.
“I know, Dad.”
“I’m not—”
“I know.”
The river wasn’t quite as loud as it was by his house. A function of the closer-up houses, I guess. Down here, there was just river and rock. And us.
“Did you bring your gun?”
“Yeah, Dad. I did.” I brought it out of my pocket, holster and all, and set it down on the bench between us.
He looked down at it and back up at me. “I don’t think I can.”
I know, Dad.
I didn’t think I could, either.
Brad Bailey is a writer and musician. His stories have appeared in Moggie Noir, As You Were, and Revolt. His poem “Accusation” appears in Giant Robot Poems. He earned his MFA from the Mountainview program at Southern New Hampshire University. Brad lives in Las Vegas with his wife, their son, and the best cat ever.
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