Читать книгу Help Wanted: Wednesdays Only - Peggy Dymond Leavey - Страница 5

“Whoa, Mark! Isn’t that your grandfather?” A black and white police cruiser was parked at the curb outside my building. Jason bent down for a closer look.

At first, the glass in the window only reflected our two bewildered faces, pale and pinched from the bitter March wind. Then my heart sank. It was Grandpa. How could he do this to me? Again.

“Mark Rogers?” One of the officers got out of the car onto the sidewalk.

“Look, Mark,” gulped Jason, “I gotta go. Okay? I’ll call you later.” And he scurried away up the street.

It wasn’t that Jason was a chicken or anything like that. He just knew how to stay out of unpleasant situations. I was glad it had only been Jason with me. He already knew about my grandfather. I was glad it hadn’t been Nicole or someone else I was trying to impress. Not that Nicole Somers would be walking home with a shrimpy kid like me anyway. But I sure didn’t want any of the kids at school to see my grandfather getting out of a police car. In his pyjamas.

I could feel my face burning with shame as I led the officers up to our apartment.

“Must’ve walked all the way over here from his place,” one of them said, waiting while I unlocked the door. “Found him wandering around about three blocks away.”

“Have your mother call us,” the other officer directed, seeing us both safely inside.

I closed the door and stood leaning against it, looking at my grandfather. I had never used to feel pity for this man who sat here now on the couch, his thin, brown hands resting on his knees. Once he had been my hero.

I’ll look like that someday, I thought. Everyone said I took after Luigi Cecchini, except he had thick black hair and mine was red, like my father’s. Grandpa and I had the same wiry body, not very tall, but strong as an ox, they said. At least, he had been once. I’d seen him lift a crate of cabbages onto his shoulders as if they had been feathers.

Mom had given him those pyjamas for Christmas. There was a little blue snowflake design on the white flannelette. Like a little kid’s.

“How come you didn’t get dressed today, Grandpa?” I asked.

“I get dressed, Frankie. I always get dressed.”

“But where’s your coat? It’s freezing outside.”

Frankie was my mother’s brother. He’d been killed in a motorcycle accident before I was even born.

“Mom will be home at five,” I sighed. “You want to watch T.V.?”

On the screen, some talk show host was raving at his studio audience, and Grandpa, although he never moved back from the edge of the couch, looked as though he might watch it for a few minutes. You could never be sure. He was pretty restless these days.

I went into the kitchen to see what I could find to eat. I was 13 at the time, old enough to know what was happening to my grandfather, but I still didn’t really understand it.

That was Wednesday. On Thursday, Mrs. Fuller, the woman who looked after Grandpa during the day, (when he wasn’t escaping), dropped by to talk to Mom.

Jason and I were spread out on the floor of the living room, trying to think up something to do for our science project. So far, all we had was a big sheet of white poster board, as blank as our brains.

Jason Thomas and I were pretty close. The third one in our little group of friends who hung around together was Travis Devries. He had to do his science project with another partner this time. Only two could work together, the teacher had said.

Travis had gotten teamed up with Nicole and he didn’t mind a bit. He’d probably get straight ‘A’s’. I wouldn’t have minded working with Nicole either. Except I didn’t want her to find out that science was far from my best subject.

“I think it has reached a point where your father should not be alone at night anymore, Giovanna,” Mrs Fuller was saying. An island counter was all that divided the kitchen from the living room in our apartment, so no conversation was ever private.

Mom hacked at the hamburger in the frying pan. “I’m at my wits’ end about this,” she said. “I can’t afford to have anyone stay with him nights. And there’s no room for him here. You can see the size of this place.”

I picked up the felt marker and wrote, “Science Project. Jason Thomas and Mark Rogers,” along a line I’d drawn at the top of the poster.

“Now what?” asked Jason, pushing his glasses back up the ridge of his nose and squinting at me expectantly. “Everyone else will have the same old rock collection or models of the solar system. Can’t we come up with something different?”

“I’ve given it a lot of thought since we talked to the doctor the last time,” we heard Mom saying, “and I think the only solution is for us to move in with him.”

My mouth and Jason’s fell open at the same instant. Except mine was making a sound like choking. The marker dropped onto the paper, leaving a black splotch in the middle of the poster. I scrambled to my feet.

“I haven’t had a minute yet to discuss this with my son,” my mother admitted to Mrs. Fuller.

“Mark!” hissed Jason, yanking on the leg of my jeans. “Is it true?”

“No way,” I growled. Mom was holding the door open for her visitor and she put up her hand to warn me to back off.

“We’ll discuss it later, Mark. Okay?” she said. I could hardly believe what I’d heard. She had to be kidding!

“I’d better be going too,” said Jason, abandoning the project on the floor and coming around to the door. “I’ll see you later, Mark.”

“Chili, Jason. Remember?” said Mom.

“That’s okay, Mrs. Rogers.” Jason grabbed his jacket off the back of the chair. “I gotta check in at home. Besides,” he shot me a quick look, “you guys probably want to talk.”

“I can tell the idea upsets you, Mark,” said Mom, when the door had shut on the back of my fleeing friend.

“Well, good. Because I know I didn’t hear you right. You’re not really thinking of moving to Grandpa’s?”

She put the plates on the table, the silverware on top, waiting for me to set it all straight. We usually did this together while I told her about my day at school. Now I sat down and waited for her explanation. Mom sat down too and faced me.

“Do you have any other solution?” she asked. “I mean it. If you have any ideas, I’d really like to hear them.”

I had to come up with an alternate plan to this blockbuster idea of hers. After all, this was something that would affect my whole life. I hadn’t thought we were going to have to make any decisions about Grandpa so soon. He had been getting worse, more muddled and forgetful, but it had been happening gradually. Now here was Mom springing this plan on me right out of the blue.

“You were the one who told me something had to be done when your grandfather showed up here in his pyjamas again the other day,” Mom went on.

“I know. But not this. Not us having to go and live with him!”

“We’re the only family he has, Mark. If not us, who else?”

“How much would it cost anyway, to have someone stay with him at night? Someone like Mrs. Fuller.”

“Too much, let me tell you.” She scraped chili out onto my plate, but I just pushed the beans around on it, not feeling much like eating. Jason’s favourite meal. We ate it a lot at our place because it was fast and cheap.

“You can’t expect me to move away over there. This is where all my friends are.”

“You make friends easily, Mark.” Mom set the plastic bag with the bread in it on the table and sat down herself. “Your grandfather’s house is small, I know, but it’s big enough for three.”

“Make that two. Because I’m not going.”

Mom didn’t say anything for a while and we both kept our eyes on our plates. Somebody had to have a better idea than this. My mind was churning.

“Well, what about school?” I demanded. I knew how much my education meant to my mother. “I’d have to change schools. Again. That can’t be good.”

“I know, and it won’t be easy for you, either. I’d really like to be able to hang on until you graduate, but this disease of Grandpa’s won’t wait.”

Alzheimer’s. I knew all about it, and that there was no cure. I just hadn’t thought it was going to affect me.

Mom put her hand over mine; I drew back quickly to reach for a slice of bread that I really didn’t want.

“Try to see the bind I’m in, Mark,” she begged. “Please.”

“What about me? Is anyone thinking about me?”

“Of course I am. But you’re young, Mark. You’ll adjust.”

This wasn’t one bit fair. Just because I was young. In the past two years I’d done just about all the adjusting anyone should be expected to do. It had been bad enough moving here, leaving behind everything I’d grown up with. Even my dog.

Mom must have been reading my thoughts. “Maybe you could have another dog, Mark. Your grandfather’s got a little back yard.” I recognize bribery when I hear it.

In our other place, before Dad left, I’d had a dog. But there were no pets allowed in this apartment, so when Mom and I had moved here, I’d left Chelsea behind with my best friend, David.

Leaving Chelsea had been the worst part about moving two years ago. I knew, even though I was just a little kid, that Mom was hurting over the separation, and I was feeling mad at my dad. I’d have gone anywhere if I’d thought it could make my mom happy.

But things were different now. Mom liked her work, I had Jason and Travis to hang around with, and I had my own after-school job. I was even on better terms with Dad, ‘though I didn’t see much of him now that he’d moved away from the city.

I couldn’t ever have Chelsea back. She’d been hit by a car last summer, and when David called to tell me, I hadn’t even recognized my old friend’s voice.

I went to bed feeling mean inside about Grandpa. It didn’t feel good. Why did things have to be this way? My great-grandfather on my father’s side was 90 and still driving his own car. And my Grandma Joyce, my father’s mother, had started university after she was 65.

It didn’t seem so long ago that my Grandpa Luigi had been just as normal as everyone else. It had started with his being a little forgetful. Now he couldn’t remember if he’d already done something simple. Like getting dressed. We found him wearing two pairs of pants one day. He’d forgotten he’d put on the underneath pair.

It had been kind of funny at first. Mom stuck little reminders around his house for a while, so that Grandpa’d know to turn off the stove and put things back in the fridge. The worst part was when he’d cry. That’s what he did sometimes when he didn’t get things right. I think inside his head he knew what he wanted to say, but sometimes the words came out all wrong. That was my theory, anyway. I was glad my grandmother couldn’t see the way her Luigi was now.

Grandpa had run a fruit and vegetable business in this city until he retired. For years, he’d left his house before the sun was up. Every morning, he’d gone downtown to the big market to buy produce from the growers who trucked it in from outside the city.

Then he’d gone back to his store in time to open up. Every day the same thing, long hard hours of work, but he usedto say he could never do anything else. Back home in Italy, his ancestors had run the same type of business.

It seemed like hours that I tossed from one side to the other that night, the bed sheets underneath me getting twisted and digging tracks into my back. I knew that, although my grandfather didn’t act much like the person I used to love to visit when my grandmother was alive, he was the same person underneath. That was what Alzheimer’s disease did.

In the morning, I could tell by the worn look on her face that Mom hadn’t slept well either. The phone rang and she talked softly to someone on the other end. When she hung up she told me that a friend of hers had agreed to take over our apartment if we decided to go. “That would let us out of the lease, Mark.” As if that were the only problem.

But before she left for work, I gave in. What else could I do? “Look, Mom, if there’s no other way to look after Grandpa, then I guess we should move to his place.” There, I’d said it.

“Oh, Mark. Thank you.” She put her arms around me and gave me a tight hug. “I know it’s a sacrifice you’re making. I’m so proud of you.” She dabbed at her eyes and tucked the tissue into her purse.

I felt a little like a hypocrite. It wasn’t all sacrifice. I was sparing myself the humiliation of having my grandfather show up here again in his pyjamas. Or worse.

My friends were waiting for me outside the school when I got off the bus. Jason had already told Travis about what had been happening at our place last night.

“So? What did you decide?” they both wanted to know.

“We’re going, I guess.”

“Jeez, Mark. That’s a rip-off!” Travis declared.

“Naw. Not really. My grandfather’s too sick now to live alone.”

“So you guys have to move? Why don’t you just put him in a nursing home? My great-grandmother’s in one. It’s not so bad.”

“Mom thinks that’s what’ll happen when he gets too sick for us to look after,” I said.

Jason must have been remembering the times we’d visited my grandfather’s together. “That would be too bad,” he said. “Remember the time he took us to the carnival after we’d helped him close the store for the night? Remember all the stuff we won? Could he ever throw those darts!”

I swung my book bag over my shoulder, remembering too. “Well, Mom and I are going to see that he stays in his own house just as long as he can.”

“Too much!” said Travis, and the bell rang for us to go inside.

On Saturday, Mom and I went over to see what Grandpa thought about all this. She told me that change in routine sometimes upsets people with Alzheimer’s. So we were going to have to approach the subject slowly, just let him get used to the idea.

We found Grandpa puttering around in the tool shed at the back of his place.

“Are you busy, Dad?” Mom asked. He seemed surprised to see us, although we came over every weekend.

“I look for piece of chain,” he said. “To fasten that gate. Those chickens they going to get out if I don’t find it.” He was rummaging through a basket filled with bits of wire and pipe and stiffened paint brushes.

“Can you come in the house a minute, Dad? I’ll make us some lunch. Mark and I want to talk to you.”

“I ate already,” said Grandpa, but he followed us anyway, keeping a hand on my shoulder and letting Mom lead the way up the broken sidewalk to the kitchen door.

There weren’t any chickens around here for miles, except in my grandfather’s imagination. But then, you never knew in this neighbourhood. Mrs. Salud down the street kept a goat.

Grandpa lived in what everyone called “the East End.” In this part of the city, the houses were older and smaller and closer together than in other neighbourhoods, and everyone spoke with a different accent. In the summertime, the people here grew all sorts of weird stuff in their little yards, strange vegetables which crawled up and over the fences, squashes and melons the size of basketballs. And in the front of the houses, where you’d expect grass to be growing, tomato and potato plants often replaced green lawns.

Grandpa had no objections to Mom’s plans, but I’m not sure he understood what was happening.

“We’ll try not to make too many changes too quickly, Mark,” Mom decided, as we rocked together gently on the streetcar ride back home that night.

I told her even Grandpa was bound to notice he had two extra people living in the house. That made her laugh and we both felt better. But maybe we’d have to wait a bit before we introduced the idea of a dog in the family.