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Angry.
Like she said he could be.
Irrationally so. Every muscle was tensed, his body looking like it might bolt off the bed at any moment.
“Daddy,” Jenny’s voice called. Calm. Patient. Soothing. A voice she had likely perfected over the years. Through trial and error.
I wondered a bit fleetingly as she tried to bring some recognition to her father if maybe she had been on the receiving end of the curled fists of her father too. If yet another man in her life put angry hands on her.
Since she was fucking eighteen.
She couldn’t catch a single break in life.
She’d known nothing but hard, but cold, but aching.
I didn’t know if she would give me a shot. A real one. Not the fantasy, shuffled away from the outside world who wouldn’t – couldn’t – judge us. But a real one. Where we could be seen together some day. Where we could say fuck it to expectations.
But I knew one thing – if she gave me that chance, she wouldn’t know any of that shit again. Hard. Cold. Aching. Except for when she insisted on wearing those ridiculous pencil thin, sky-high heels of hers. There was only so much a man could protect a woman from. Sometimes her vanity had to win the fight. Even if she had sore feet after.
I sat there letting her visit her father, catching up with the nurses who she seemed to know better than the people in her social circle – asking them about their kids, about some little chronic back or wrist ache, asking if they had tried the pain controlling regimen she had suggested.
This was Jenny, the woman, here in this hospital. Not Jenny, Teddy’s wife. Not Jenny, Senator Ericsson’s daughter-in-law. Not even Jenny, the socialite.
She was just herself. Sweet, caring, soft, warm.
She helped the nurse wash her father’s hair. It was a bad day, she told me in a hushed tone. And I guessed it meant that he didn’t recognize her, was pissed when he came near her, claiming she was going to stab him with something, confusing her for just another nurse intent on jabbing needles into him.
But it didn’t matter that it was a bad day. It didn’t matter that he swiped at her when she tried to move the food tray toward him at lunchtime. It didn’t matter that he called her a vicious cunt when she suggested he at least try to get up and do his physical therapy when the guy came in to take him down the hall to do just that.
It didn’t matter how miserable, how thankless the task was. She was there. She was all in. She wanted a hand in his care. She needed it. For her sanity. To ease her unfounded guilt.
It wasn’t until around four in the afternoon when her father went back to sleep as she claimed he always did for an hour or so before dinner, that she turned to me with tired eyes, shrugging. “We can head out now. No reason to sit here watching him sleeping. You must be starving.”
I was more in need of coffee than food, since we rushed out too fast to even grab a cup, but she pressed a hand to her empty stomach like she had been ignoring the growling for too long.
“Where do you want to eat?” I asked, watching as she averted her gaze, avoided eye-contact as we moved out the front doors, hearing them close with an airtight gasp. “Jenny?” I asked, putting a finger under her chin, tilting it up, seeing her nibbling that lip again. “Where?” I asked, having a feeling I knew the answer, but wanting to hear it anyway.
“Your house,” she told me in that small voice she got when she was feeling unsure of herself. Which, unfortunately, was all too often.
“Mind if we stop off at the market first?” I asked. “I mean… I could make you a canned beans and frozen peas meal, but I think we’d fare better if I stocked up.”
“Do you mind if I stay in the car? My feet hurt,” she admitted, curling her lip. “I don’t usually wear heels when I go visit my dad. It’s usually a lot of running around.”
“you’re good with him. Patient. It can’t be easy.”
“I think caring for him has made me understand the true meaning of the phrase ‘labor of love.’ Because it is labor. Nurses are criminally underpaid. Aides too. I couldn’t do what they do day in and day out.”
“I think you could,” I countered. “Nothing he said or did broke your stride.”
“He doesn’t know what he is saying. Or, if he does, he doesn’t know who he is saying it to. Or why he is saying it. It’s like being mad at an Alzheimer’s patient when they can’t help the fact that they don’t remember. I volunteered at a nursing home in the Alzheimer’s ward for a summer in high school,” she went on, comfortable sharing with me, something that made a good, warm feeling settle inside. “And their children would come in to visit, angry or just… battering them with questions. Do you remember me? Don’t you remember when we all went to the museum and saw that exhibit on cavemen? Badgering them when all it does is confuse them further or upset them. I guess maybe working there for a few summers helped me understand that sometimes the brain is fragile. It cracks. It stops working right. And you can’t be angry. You just have to try to make it as good as you possibly can. So that’s what I try to do with my dad. And sometimes he has good days. He remembers me. He tells me stories about when I was a little girl, tells me things we used to do that I forgot. Asks me about my life. The bad days are more common than the good, but the good make all the bad worth it.”
