“You did your best, though, right?” she asked. When I couldn’t even nod, she asked me again. “Tell me. Did you do your best?”
I thought back to the suddenness of his diagnosis—the reason he had been mixing up day and night was because of a tumor that had sprung up seemingly overnight in his brain like a big spongy mushroom—and surgery; the rush to get him placed in a good rehab hospital and then into a good assisted living facility that would agree to take such a short-term resident—they’d said he had a year at most, but it was exactly half that. As the dogs played in the tall grass along the path—Charlotte was still on a leash then—I thought of all the paperwork, all the trips back and forth to visit him during the day and in the evenings, sometimes taking the dog with me, or Teddy; how Gary would sometimes meet us there and we would have dinner with my father in the resident dining room, pretending that we were like all the other families at the surrounding tables, enjoying time with a healthy senior who had merely downsized from a big house to independent communal living. I thought about all the trips with him downtown for chemo, all the MRIs and phone calls to doctors, and to the insurance company, running, always running, from home to Teddy’s school, to my father, back to Teddy, then home again. Those days and months were a blur, as opaque as the white sky that March day at the reservoir. I couldn’t see past it.
“Then I will answer for you,” Glenn said. “You did your best.” When I didn’t respond, she dug her fingers into my arm. “Say it. It’s important that you say it. Because it’s true.”
“I did my best.” The words came out with my breath and hung in the air.
“And?”
“I did my best and I was a brave bear.”
“A very brave bear.”
Today, with Phoebe, I nod. “That’s exactly right. All you can do is do your best.”
“Well!” Phoebe says, half-laughing half-crying, wiping tears from her eyes. “Now I’m the Debbie Downer! Let’s get back to Nick! What else did you assume?”
I shift my weight, move my back away from whatever was sticking into it. “That he’s probably about as big of a pothead as Gary is.”
“Gary’s a pothead?”
“He’s supposed to be quitting. Again. Really soon.” In my dreams.
“Well, you’re certainly right about that,” Phoebe says.
“I am?” I feel like I should win a prize, but she just grins at me benignly. I guess this is what a normal conversation is like: one measured, appropriate sentence after another. “How long have you guys been together?”
“A year this past August.”
“A year!” I want to tell her a year is nothing, that everyone’s happy after the first year, that it’s the years that come later that will crush you if you’re not careful, but she’s staring past my head suddenly, then poking excitedly at something on one of the shelves with her unwieldy hooves.
“Frosted Flakes!” she squeals, turning to look at me, and when she does I can picture her at five, or six, or seven, her face wide open and full of joy, the way Teddy’s used to be at that age. “I love Frosted Flakes! My moms never let me have them.”
I reach for the box and beckon her out of the fake pantry into the fading autumn light of the kitchen. “I’ll let you have some.”
* * *
What starts as one bowl of cereal for Phoebe turns into two (hers looked really good and I didn’t want her to eat alone), and then four, after Nick and Gary come upstairs. We finish the first box, and then Gary comes back with a second one, secreted from a high cabinet over the stove that I can’t reach and always forget is even there. God knows what else he hides up there.
“A spare,” he says, ripping open the blue cardboard top instead of slipping his thumb under the tab the way the directions say. “You never know when the munchies will strike.”
“Oh Gary,” I say. “Munchies is such an eighties word.”
“Well, I’m an eighties guy.”
“Besides, we had an agreement.” I point at Gary from across the cereal box. “No. Smoking. When. Teddy’s. Home.”
“We didn’t smoke!”
I stop, sniff, and realize he might be telling the truth.
“Edi-pulls,” Nick whispers then, giggling, takes a tiny packet out of his pants pocket, under his billowing costume, and shows it to me. “Oedipal’s Edibles.”
I take that as my cue to start the conversation about logistics; the when and how of their stay—three weeks, starting Friday; going through the week or so after the end of Inhabitancy, which would put us into mid-November; how they’ll stay in the snoring room in the basement and use the bathroom and shower on the second floor.
“You’ll share Teddy’s bathroom.”
“I’m sure he’ll love that,” Nick says.
“It’s good for him,” Gary says. “He’s an only child. He needs to learn to share.”
* * *
After the cereal and after the tour, after we’ve forced Teddy to come out of his room to say “goodbye and see you soon” to the People Puppets, Gary and I walk Nick and Phoebe to their car, parked at the end of our driveway, right behind the Volvo—a People Puppet Theater minivan—the kind I’d refused to buy when Teddy was small—with nylon animal hooves on the roof that inflate when the van is in motion. Nick presses his key, and when the side door slides open, he climbs in and stands, almost upright, in the middle of all the seats and cup holders and boxes of theater gear. Then he bends down and reaches into one of their costume cases—a big trunk with a fake padlock on it just for show.
“Now, here’s something I think Gary would love,” he says, pulling out a huge white sheet with a hooded beak attached. He gathers it up, hops down out of the minivan, and holds it up against himself, striking a pose. “‘Free Bird.’”
Gary stares at him. “No way.”
“Way!”
Gary looks at me, then at Nick. “I love Lynyrd Skynyrd!” he laugh-cries. “How did you know?”
“I just had a feeling!”
“He’s very intuitive,” Phoebe says.
“Try it on!” Nick says, pushing the fabric on him.
“No. I couldn’t.”
“He really shouldn’t,” I add, remembering the massive Chuck E. Cheese panic attack.
“It’s just fabric!” Phoebe says, reassuringly. “No one ever got hurt by a little fabric.”
“You have no idea,” I say under my breath, but she ignores me, moves over toward Nick, and helps him put the costume over Gary’s head. What I assume is a panicked struggle to resist—arms jutting out, then up, hands pawing frantically at the claustrophobic hooded beak—to keep the costume off—turns out to be an excited effort to get the costume on. I know this is happening because Gary is high, but even so, I can’t help but cheer him on. “Go, Gary, go!” I mutter under my breath so as not to put too much pressure on him to be successful. “You can do it!”
Draped in white, and looking remarkably like a giant bird, Gary is triumphant on the sidewalk, taking a few steps forward, then back; his wings flapping, billowing in the chilly late-afternoon wind. Dying for a glimpse of himself, he races over to the minivan windows and strikes a pose, then turns to us. Phoebe snaps a few photos with her phone, which she shows to Gary. He has a little trouble focusing his eyes under the big head, but once he does, he erupts.