But Roger couldn’t: no phone, not even his cell, which was back at home, charging after he’d forgotten to plug it in the night before. Pandora had hers, but she was also back at home, technically alone if you didn’t count the entire internet, her father’s go-to babysitter since she could make her own PB&J sandwiches and promise not to set the house on fire.
Turning to the parent who wasn’t dying, Roger barked, “Grab your parkas.” He’d just have to drive them all to the hospital himself. Gladys handed over Herman’s jacket, gloves, boots. “Where’s yours?” her son demanded.
But Gladys just shook her head. “I can’t,” she said.
“Can’t what?” Roger demanded.
“Go.”
“Go?”
“To the hospital,” Gladys said.
“Why not?”
“I might go.”
“Go?”
“Poop,” she said. “My irritable bowel, I . . .”
“Shit,” Roger spat.
“Yes,” Gladys said, as if he understood—instead of swearing, because he had.
And so Herman’s son drove him to the hospital, minus his wife, minus the love of his life, for him to finish dying with just Roger’s dumb, stupid face to keep him company.
In the hospital, after being informed he’d had a heart attack that was bigger than the ER was equipped to treat, Herman turned to Roger and said, “Well, I guess that makes two.”
“Excuse me?”
“Yeah, my first heart attack was when I met your mother,” he said. The morphine they’d given him for the pain had made him chatty. And so he went over the old story again of how they’d met in this dingy frontier bar before Alaska was even a state, back when the lower forty-eight were basically the whole country, trimmed with some territories here and there with no votes or stars of their own.
It was after WWII, and the two had each fled to the ends of the earth after the world didn’t end. Herman Lynch had been sitting in the bar, drinking in the middle of the “day,” though it was actually dark out, it being winter, thus removing the usual stigma—or so he claimed—staring at the dusty mirror across the bar and gently tapping his high school graduation ring against the rail. He didn’t even know he was doing it, but the tapping came out in Morse code—SOS, for “save our souls” or “save our ship,” depending on where you stood re: the whole having-a-soul issue. Gladys noticed it and signaled back—SOS, SOS, SOS—with the top of an empty longneck against the rim of the glass she’d poured the beer into. Looking over, Roger’s future dad said, “Fancy,” indicating the bottle-and-glass redundancy.
“Practical,” Gladys said back, indicating her future husband’s far simpler drinking arrangement, a trail of suds still crawling down its neck of brown glass.
“You make decisions fast when you’re twenty-five and surprised to be alive,” Herman Lynch told his son, explaining why he and Gladys wound up married within the month. A floatplane-flying buddy of his officiated, based on the authority vested in him as the captain of something that could land on water and—he maintained—technically met the definition of a ship.
“It’s highly possible we’ve been living in sin all these years,” Herman confided with a nudge and a wink. “Kinda makes it more exciting that way.”
“Kinda makes me a bastard, though,” Roger pointed out.
“Nope,” his father insisted, “that choice is all on you.”
Roger did not announce his decision to cut his own mother out of his life; he and Pandora just kind of stopped going over there after Herman died. Because it involved not doing something, the more he didn’t do it, the easier it was to keep on not doing it. He felt the occasional pang of guilt but always turned it around, making it her fault. He’d tried getting his parents to get a phone when it might have made a difference, and now she couldn’t blame him for not calling. As a gesture to the memory of his dad, Roger had a case of Ensure delivered to their cabin once a week, considering his duty as a son done. But then he received notice that her address had changed to a PO Box care of Golden Heart of the North Senior Services. And so Roger canceled his standing order, figuring the place his mother had landed was probably billing the government enough to buy its own damn Ensure.
But then Pandora got in trouble and needed a punishment to fit the offense. And when it came to punishing experiences, Roger couldn’t come up with anything that amused him quite as much as sentencing his daughter to visit her grandmother in an old-folks’ home.
“You’re kidding me,” Pandora said upon learning her fate.
“I’m not,” Roger said. “She needs the company,” he added, fully aware of how hypocritical it sounded but finding himself fresh out of shits to give regarding either of the women in his life.
“So why don’t you visit her?” Pandora asked.
“Because I didn’t blow anybody up,” he said.
Roger knew Pandora could quibble with that characterization—technically speaking, she hadn’t “blown up” anybody—but she seemed to have deemed it wiser not to. Instead, she ground her more articulate objections against her back teeth until all that escaped was a grumbled mutter that trailed her as she stormed off. Reaching her room, she grabbed the edge of the shower curtain that still hadn’t been replaced by an actual door, and now likely never would be, in light of recent events. Yanking it open, she turned, glowered hyperexpressively, and then pulled the curtain closed hard enough to . . .
. . . feel just about as pathetic as it no doubt looked.
6
When it was finally time for Gladys Lynch to move out of the cabin she’d shared with her late husband for more years than she cared to count, her options were limited to 1) an ice floe or 2) a place the Fairbanks Yellow Pages listed as “Golden Heart of the North Senior Services.” Like an actual anatomical heart, GHNSS was composed of four sectors organized around the primary services they offered their residents, including assisted living, physical therapy, extended care, and hospice. It was the first of these that was most prominently featured in Golden Heart’s sales brochure, which described it as “reserved for residents who need a little help” and offered condos equipped with ramps and handrails, walk-in tubs, call buttons, smoke detectors, washer-dryer combo units, and kitchenettes consisting of cabinets, counter and sink, minifridge, microwave, toaster oven, and a fire extinguisher that was tested monthly by staff, along with the aforementioned smoke detectors.
Gladys’s decision was not prompted by the need for such elder-friendliness at the time she made it; she just didn’t like living alone with all her late husband’s firearms. Not that she had anything against Herman’s guns. She’d been happy to have them when she still had him and had counted on him to use them should the need arise. But for herself, Gladys wasn’t interested in killing someone in self-defense, especially if the stranger turned out to be somebody she knew. There’d been a close call or two already.
There’d also been a doctor who’d come to see her, court ordered after an “incident” while driving down a road where “some kids” had apparently turned all the signs around to face the wrong way. He’d given her a battery of tests, beginning with the Mini-Mental State Examination, which consisted of a series of questions about what day it was, what season, what state and city they were in, followed by repeating back a list of objects, then counting backward, then repeating the list of objects again. In one test, he had Gladys draw a clock with hands and numbers; she’d messed that one up a little, leaving out the six and nine, drawing the rest outside the circle, and then getting the hour and minute hands mixed up.