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Esau sold his future for a bowl of lentil stew, she thinks. I didn’t sell mine for anything. They stole it… or tried. That’s why I’m angry. And the two who did it are beyond my reach and reproach, although this one is still breathing. That’s why I’m hopeless. I think.
“How are you today, Uncle Henry?” she asks, pulling a chair up beside him. On TV, contestants are trying to guess humiliate and not having much luck. Holly could certainly help them there.
Henry turns his head to look at her and she can hear the tendons in his neck creak like rusty hinges. “Janey,” he says, and turns his gaze back to the TV.
“No, I’m Holly.”
“Will you bring in the dog? I hear her barking.”
“Have some of this.”
She lifts the protein shake, which is in a capped plastic cup that won’t shatter or spill if he knocks it on the floor. Without taking his eyes off the television, he closes his wrinkled lips around the straw and sucks. Holly has read up on Alzheimer’s and knows that some things stay. Men and women who can’t remember their own names can still ride a bike. Men and women who can’t find their way home can still sing Broadway show tunes. Men and women who have learned to suck liquid from a straw as children can still do it even in their dotage, when all else is gone. Certain facts stay, as well.
“Who was the fifth President of the United States, Uncle Henry? Do you remember?”
“James Monroe,” Henry says, without hesitation and without taking his eyes from the TV.
“And who is President now?”
“Nixon. Nixy-Babes.” He chuckles. Protein shake runs down his chin. Holly wipes it away before it can dapple his shirt.
“Why did you do it, Uncle Henry?” But that isn’t the right question—not that she expects an answer; the question is what you’d call rhetorical. “Let me put it another way. Why did you let her do it?”
“Won’t that dog ever shut up?”
She can’t shut up the dog—if there ever was one it was in the long-ago—but she can shut up the TV. She uses the controller to do it.
“She didn’t want me to succeed, did she? She didn’t want me to have a life of my own.”
Uncle Henry turns toward her, mouth agape. “Janey?”
“And you let her!”
Henry raises a hand to his face and wipes his mouth. “Let who? Do what? Janey, why are you shouting?”
“My mother!” Holly shouts. Sometimes you can get through to him if you shout, and right now she wants to. She needs to. “Fucking Charlotte Gibney!”
“Charlie?”
What’s the point? There is no point. A new millionaire walks into a bar and discovers there is no point. Holly wipes her eyes with her sleeve.
The door opens and the orderly who asked if Holly would help her uncle with his protein shake looks in disapprovingly. “Is everything all right in here?”
“Yes,” Holly says. “I was raising my voice so he’d hear me. He’s a little deaf, you know.”
The orderly closes the door. Uncle Henry is staring at Holly. No, gaping at her, his expression one of deep puzzlement. He is a brainless old man in a two-room suite and here he will stay, drinking protein shakes and watching old game shows until he dies. She will come because it’s her duty to come, and he will call her Janey—because Janey was his favorite—until he dies.
“She never even left a note,” Holly says, but not to him. He is out of reach. “Felt no need to explain herself, let alone apologize. That’s how she was. How she always was.”
“James Monroe,” says Uncle Henry, “served from 1817 to 1825. Died in 1831. On the Fourth of July. Where is that fucking drink? It tastes like shit but I’m dry as an old cowchip.”
Holly raises the cup and Uncle Henry battens on the straw. He sucks until it crackles. When she puts the cup down the straw stays in his mouth. It makes him look like a clown. She pulls it out and says she has to go. She’s ashamed of her pointless outburst. She raises the remote to turn the TV back on, but he puts his gnarled and liver-spotted hand over hers.
“Holly,” he says.
“Yes,” she says, surprised, and looks into his face. His eyes are clear. As clear as they ever get these days, anyway.
“Nobody could stand against Charlie. She always got her way.”
