An Irreconcilable Difference Read online

  I backed into the studio. Sam was crossing to the door and Jeff, fortunately, was nowhere to be seen. “Two gentlemen to see you, Sam.”

  “Mr. Klee,” Sam said with a smile that could almost pass for sincere. “Good of you to come by. What do you have for us today?”

  With his eyes still on me, brown hair stepped forward and held out his hand, which Sam shook. “Sam,” he said, nodding, “I want you to meet my attorney.”

  On that note, I took off out the front door. If they were going to start tossing legalities at each other, I wanted to be nowhere in the vicinity.

  As I reached the car, two kids on skateboards came zooming down the sidewalk, waving as they struggled to hold their balance. I smiled and waved back.

  The air today felt mild for February, crisp and still fairly clean here because of the distance from downtown. I loved this neighborhood almost as much as my own. Decatur was once a city in its own right, old and charming; but, like so many, it had been gobbled up by the ever-expanding Atlanta metro area.

  The house that was our office was easily eighty years old, red brick, with a columned porch that spanned the front. Tara it was not, but it still exuded a certain southern charm. The neighborhood surrounding the office was going quietly commercial, but it still boasted a number of residential holdouts. The narrow streets were lined with red brick homes placidly nestled under oak trees twice their age. Both the stubborn residents and the oaks had long roots, and if the latter cracked the sidewalks and were responsible for a number of strange bumps in the asphalt street, the former was the glue that held it all together.

  I found myself gritting my teeth as the kids flew over the uneven cement walk, certain one or the other was going to hit a root and end up airborne. Automatic mother worry. I had experienced plenty of it when my own kids were that age, what?—I stopped with my hand on the car door. Twenty years ago? The realization stunned me. Was it possible? Twenty years?

  I opened the car door and climbed inside.

  Aging was such a strange experience, I thought as I backed the car carefully out of the drive. Some days I felt like I did when I was a girl. On those days, it was a shock to look in the mirror and see my aging face looking back at me. On others, I felt as old as the planet earth and just as at-risk. Time had gotten away from me somehow, and what did I have to show for it? A failed marriage and two children who were going to hate me.

  I brought both my thoughts and the car to a stop at the traffic light leading out to Scott Boulevard. That kind of negative thinking wasn’t going to help. In fact, there wasn’t a thing in the world that I could summon to mind that would help me face what I faced now.

  In that decidedly bleak frame of mind, I arrived at the retirement center in Stone Mountain. Bradford Manor wasn’t a dump like so many of the assisted living facilities. It was a tidy, single-level building with a wrap-around porch and nicely tended grounds. Still, I felt hideously guilty every time I pulled into the parking lot. Not because we had put my father here. His doctor at the time had insisted on custodial care after my father pulled a knife on one of the neighborhood kids who was using his yard as a cut-through. The kid easily outran him, and my father had no memory of the episode; but there were enough horrified witnesses that his staying at home was deemed impossible, even by my mother.

  No, my guilt stemmed from my reluctance to visit him. I could try to justify it by saying he didn’t recognize me when I came, but the truth was that with the divorce looming, I couldn’t bear seeing my father, once my personal tower of strength, reduced to a faded shadow of the man he used to be. I desperately and selfishly wished he could be there for me to lean on. Whereas Mother would order me to snap out of it and get on with my life, my father—at least the father he once was—would have encouraged me by gently enumerating all the good qualities in me that I seemed to have lost track of.

  There was a uniformed nurse sitting at a desk near the front entrance, a heavy-set woman of forty or so with red hair and a look about her that let me know that no resident would ever make it past her out that front door. She smiled when she saw me, and her face creased into a vision of kindness. “May I help you?” she asked, looking at me expectantly. It shamed me that I hadn’t been there often enough for her to recognize me.

  I put on what I hoped looked like a smile and said, “I’m Lou Graham. Donald Halloran’s daughter.”

  Her smile widened. “I remember now. I should have known anyway. You have the look of your mother about you,” she said in a lovely soft brogue. “Your dad’s doing well, Mrs. Graham. He’s in the dayroom with some of the others.” She lowered her voice. “They told me they’re watching a game show, but it’s really the soaps they have on. They’re real fond of the soaps, those fellas.”

  I couldn’t help smiling back, although I couldn’t come close to matching her wattage. “Do you think it would be all right if I went in?”

  “I think it would be lovely. He might not recognize you, though. It’s not one of his best days, though not a bad one, all things considered.”

  I knew next to nothing about Alzheimer disease, but I knew enough to realize that this was one of the worst aspects of this disease. There were days that my father was—well, absent. On others, you wouldn’t think he was ill at all unless you knew him. You never knew which Donald Halloran would show up.

  The recreation room stood the end of a long hallway toward the back of the building. A wall of windows opening onto a broad courtyard provided illumination. A ping pong table took up one end of the room. The rest was given over to game tables and chairs and cozy furniture groupings where the residents and visitors could sit and talk. One grouping, larger than the rest, faced a big color television.

  I spotted my father the moment I entered the room. He was sitting at the end of the sofa with a group of men staring intently at the television, their faces mirroring the facial expressions of the actors on the screen. An attendant started over to me, but then nodded and stepped back when I motioned toward my father. Dad looked nearly the same as when I last saw him. Thinner maybe, or perhaps that was my imagination. His hair was neatly brushed, his face clean-shaven. He was dressed in baggy slacks that might once have fit him and a red plaid shirt, over which he wore a hideous orange cardigan he had pulled askew. On his feet were house slippers with no socks. I don’t know why that seemed sad to me.

  He glanced up when I pulled a chair from one of the card tables and sat down next to him, but his face showed no glimmer of recognition. He was the same man who had been my father, but he wasn’t. I felt hollow and a little sick inside.

  “Hi, dad,” I said softly, leaning toward him.

  He looked from me to the other men with him. None of them were paying either of us a grain of attention. His brow furrowed, and I thought maybe calling him dad had broken through the fog that filled his brain, but then he held his finger up to his lips. “Shhhhh.”

  I sat back in my chair, wondering what the hell I was doing there. Why had I let my mother guilt-trip me into coming? He didn’t know me, and he didn’t care that I was there. Misery swamped me. I wanted to leave, but I wasn’t sure I had the energy to make it back to the car.

  I was getting to my feet to leave when I saw a man heading for me at full steam, lab coat flapping. His face made typical Atlanta summer storm clouds look mild. I hoped he would keep going, but he stopped directly in front of me as if to prevent me leaving. “Mrs. Graham?” the stranger said, “I’m Jules Proctor.”

  I stared at him blankly for a moment. Then the memory surfaced—Dr. Proctor—and I almost came unglued. Such was my mental state. “Hello—doctor,” I said, choking my laugh down to a smile

  He didn’t smile back. “Leaving already? I think you may get the prize for the shortest family visit on record.” The words were bullets aimed at me.

  “Shhhh.” my father hissed angrily, waving his hand at us. Five equally hostile faces joined his in glaring at us.

  Remembering the knife incident, I started to back
away.

  “Sorry, Don,” the doctor said, unperturbed. He put his hand under my elbow and led me over to a group of chairs across the room.

  When I looked back, the six faces were still turned our way.

  “We’re interrupting them.”

  “Are any of the others…violent?”

  He frowned. “They’re not freaks at a side show, Mrs. Graham. They’re ill, and they wouldn’t be allowed in the dayroom if they were violent.”

  I felt like a naughty five-year-old.

  “Won’t you sit down for a moment?”

  I hesitated.

  “Unless you’re too busy to take the time,” he added.

  I sat.

  He took a chair across from me and spent a moment silently observing me. I did my own observing. Dr. Proctor, name notwithstanding, was not a figure that inspired humor. He was a big man. Not fat. More athletic big. Unlike a lot of big men, he looked comfortable in his clothes, which were nondescript except for the white coat that gave him an extra air of authority he didn’t require. His hair was the color of south Georgia loam, dark with flecks of lighter colors. Deep creases at the corners of his eyes, not necessarily, I surmised, from laughing. If he didn’t look so mean, he might have been handsome.

  “Your mother said you might come by,” he said. “Of course, that was quite some time ago. I had pretty much given you up.”

  I was torn between feeling insulted by his tone and guilty because of the truth of his words. I mumbled something like, “I’ve been busy.”

  “Right.” He waved it away. “With your divorce and your job and all. Your mother told me all about it.”

  I hoped to God Mother hadn’t told him all about it.

  Before I could think of a pithy comeback, he was speaking again. “Since you’re here, why don’t you tell me what you know about Alzheimer’s disease?”

  “Only that it scares the hell out of me.” It was a moment before I realized I’d spoken the thought aloud. I felt my face burn and looked away.

  “Well, at least you’re honest,” he said, not sounding particularly impressed. “I guess the first thing I should point out is that it isn’t contagious.”

  I felt my face burn hotter. “I know that.”

  “Nor is old age contagious, although you might think it was by the way people dump their relatives in here and never come back.”

  “I―I―” was flabbergasted by his rudeness, but I couldn’t seem to put words together.

  “We’re not babysitters, Mrs. Graham. These people are ill. There are treatments for the illness, but we need their families involved, even when it is inconvenient to them. And your mother can’t do it all. She could use a little support. I wish you would keep that in mind and schedule a bit more time for your next visit. I need to take some history from you. That will take approximately half an hour. If you want to visit with your father, you should probably plan on forty-five minutes, total. What day would be convenient for you?” he finished, fishing a Blackberry out of the pocket of his lab coat.

  I knew my face was red. It’s one of the things I hate about myself. When I get mad, my face goes scarlet, and I was so mad right then that I could have cheerfully slapped his high-tech toy out of his hand. How dare he talk to me that way? At least he had managed to put to rest any lingering guilt I might have felt since my arrival. I got to my feet and stood as straight and tall as my five-feet three would allow.

  He stood as if in answer to a challenge, towering over me.

  I refused to be intimidated. “I’ll call you after I check my schedule,” I informed him in my haughtiest voice. Then I spun on my heel and started away.

  “You do that,” I heard him say to my back.

  Chapter Four

  My car pulled into the Publix lot, and I wasn’t entirely sure how I’d ended up there.

  It was a wonder smoke didn’t billow out my ears as I zoomed up and down the aisles. I doubt that grocery shopping has been conducted in such a haphazard manner in the history of supermarkets. I tossed things in my buggy, hoping my subconscious shopping mind had kicked in, because I certainly had no idea what I was buying.

  As I steamed from soups to dressings, I replayed our conversation in my mind, or his monologue, rather, as I’d been given little opportunity to answer any of his accusations. And that’s what they were. Every blessed word out of his mouth had been an accusation, a condemnation, of me.

  “How dare he talk to me that way?” I didn’t realize I’d uttered the words aloud until a stock boy turned from a shelf he was replenishing and said, “What was that, ma’am?”

  I shook my head and pressed my lips together. They weren’t babysitters. What kind of hideously insulting thing was that to say? The one that rankled the worst, though, was the accusation that we’d dumped my father in a home to get rid of him.

  My father, in fact, had insisted on that while he was still in a condition to insist on anything.

  Don Halloran’s first reaction to the doctor’s diagnosis of Alzheimer’s was disbelief. After that brief stage, he conducted an exhaustive study of the disease and had made some tough and firm decisions. He would not, he asserted, be a burden on his family when he became “unstable.” He was an insurance agent, and the various layers of insurance he built up over the years would easily pay for his care and still provide nicely for Mother when he was gone.

  It devastated me to hear him talk about it during the early stages of the disease. After all, he didn’t look or, for the most part, act any different than before the diagnosis. He had always been a little forgetful and disorganized, so those tendencies only changed in frequency and intensity, not in fact; but, he knew what was coming, and he wanted the arrangements made while he could still be involved in the process.

  It must have taken tremendous courage for him to visit different facilities with my mother and see first-hand from the residents where he was headed. You would have thought seeing those poor people in the last stages of the disease would have put him off, but it had the opposite effect. The more he witnessed, the more determined he became that he would be in custodial care when he reached their level of helplessness.

  Still, Mother might have ignored his wishes if he hadn’t given his doctor a signed statement of his intentions, complete with the name of the facility and the papers he signed in advance, which was why when he pulled a knife on Billy Bixtel for crossing his yard, it was all over but the weeping.

  Babysitters, indeed.

  It was dark by the time I arrived home. I had forgotten to turn on the floods, and the street lights cast no glow on my front yard.

  I knew I’d have to sell the house. It had been a wonderful home, but I wouldn’t be able to afford it much longer. I didn’t expect Darren to continue the mortgage payment after the divorce, and I certainly couldn’t afford it on my pitiful salary, or the repairs and insurance and lawn care. The thought made me sad. These days, everything made me sad.

  I grabbed one bag of groceries and hung it on my arm brandishing the house key, thus leaving a hand free to ward off any muggers who happened by. At one bag a load, it would take me fourteen trips into the house.

  As I walked into the front foyer, I flipped on the floodlights, determined to average at least four bags a load and damn the muggers. And I froze.

  In the light coming from the floods, I could make out a dim form on the floor in the hallway. A lump, about the length of a small man. Heart in my throat, I flipped on the inside light with my free hand, and felt all the blood leave my head. A suitcase. Across it rested a garment bag. I didn’t need the luggage tags to know whose it was, but I didn’t know what the hell he was doing home two days early.

  “Hey, there, cutie pie,” my six-foot-two son called out, bursting into the foyer and sweeping me off my feet, groceries and all, to swing me around in circles. “How’s my best girl?” He hugged me tightly and planted a kiss on my cheek.

  I felt that lightning-flash melt that always came over me when I saw my grownup bab
y boy after an extended absence. I laughed breathlessly as I fought back tears.

  “I hope there are more of those in the car,” he said, depositing me back on my feet and gesturing at the grocery bag, “because I checked out the kitchen and our cupboards are seriously bare.”

  “Lots more,” I said, still fighting to get myself under control. “How long have you been here? You’re two days early. Why was the house dark?”

  “Whoa,” Greg said, giving me a dimpled grin so like his father’s. “One thing at a time, and let’s start with the food. I hope there’s ice cream melting out there.”

  So did I, because I couldn’t remember whether I’d bought any or not. In fact, I had no idea what I bought. I smiled instead of answering.

  “Great,” he said, charging out the front door.

  When the weakness in my knees was almost under control, I took a tentative step toward the kitchen. My legs held me. Okay, I breathed out. I had met the first hurdle.

  I made my way down the hall and into the bright kitchen. Dear God, I prayed as I dumped my purse and the grocery bag on the table, please let me get through this night without screwing up royally. If you’ll be with me this one night, and I’ll never ask you for anything again. It wasn’t only men in foxholes who suddenly found religion.

  Greg burst back into the kitchen with four grocery bags hanging off each arm like moss off a live oak. There was a bag of charcoal pinned under his arm. I had bought charcoal in February?

  “Hey, too cool, mom. Four kinds of ice cream. And three kinds of cookies. You’re really going to spoil me.”

  I wondered if there was any nutritious food at all in the bags. I’d have to shop again tomorrow when I was in my right mind. “Nothing’s too good for my son,” I said, peeling the bags off one arm. “So answer my question.”

  “Which one?” He searched the bags until he found a six pack of beer. Popping one, he took a long drink.