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“No wonder you’re a health nut.”
“Honey, if I were a real ‘health nut,’ we’d be vegan up in this bitch.”
“When’s the last time we had red meat, and it wasn’t a hamburger at the restaurant? Even when we grill, it’s mostly vegetables with a side of turkey.”
“I’m just saying, we could still go harder.”
Rhea shook her head. “What’s gonna happen now? I mean, I’m grateful that he’s not dead, but this could change things around here.”
Paige put her hand on her wife’s. “We’ll cross the bridges as they come to us. He’s alive. He should be able to recover. That’s enough to get us through this.”
“Us?”
“Do you not think I give a crap about my father-in-law? I know he barely talks to me, but that man has been a part of my life for fifteen years. I’d be sad if he died. Sad for you, sad for the loss of a life. Not to mention everything that happens when someone dies… funerals, going through their things, selling the house…”
Rhea froze up before finishing her dinner.
“Oh, my God. I’m sorry! I didn’t mean to bring that up! It… came out.”
They sat together in silence, Rhea’s spoon occasionally clinking against her soup bowl while Paige berated herself for going “there” with her frightened wife. In reality, she had said that to cover up the things that she thought might be even more sensitive.How will we afford the extra care? Does he have to move in with us? How will that change things? Can our marriage survive that?Neither of them had lived with a man since moving out of their parents’ homes nearly twenty years ago. Let alone a man so… different from them.
A sick man.
A man who could hardly take care of himself right now.
Paige got up before she embarrassed herself. The reason she was crying wasn’t because she truly worried for Danny, whom she would eventually grieve but probably move on from so,somuch faster than her wife, the man’s actual daughter. She cried because she already couldn’t handle how this might cause a rift between her and Rhea, the woman she only recently reconnected with after years of coasting.
It was always something, wasn’t it?
Chapter 27
IfRheawasgratefulfor one thing, it was that she had the kind of job that allowed her to take a step back whenever she needed. And since there was still some time before her edits came back from her publisher, Rhea felt zero guilt when she emailed Parvati to announce she was going on a short hiatus to take care of her father’s health and she would not be able to mail those erotica samples for the foreseeable future.
It was a good thing because she did not have the wherewithal to do anything but fret over her father.
For his first week in the hospital, she spent every waking moment she could spare with him. Although she didn’t have the chance to speak with Danny for two days, Rhea couldn’t bear the thought of being anywhere but within easy reach should he open his eyes and ask to see her.
Of course, that was never his style. After his first heart attack, he insisted that Rhea stay home and take care of her matters. Didn’t she have enough to worry about without him making her life harder?“This is the natural order of things,”he had asserted before being discharged.“Your parents get old, get sick, and die. Haven’t you been through this before?”
Yes, Rhea had. Both with her motherandher father!
This is the same hospital where my mother died.She had always known they should move the hell away. Every time she came to this cursed place, she was reminded that the people she loveddied.Even Paige had ended up here when her appendix burst shortly after marriage. She had claimed Rhea’s behavior was so hilarious that even the nurses laughed about it when she wasn’t in the room. Yet how could Rhea help herself?This was where it ended.
Nevertheless, her father gradually stayed awake and was willing to speak with her for more than five minutes. It didn’t stop him from chastising her for “wasting her time” at the hospital. Rhea knew he was on the mend when Danny quipped that she should be at Barnes & Noble signing books and taking pictures with her adoring fans. When she reminded him that such an event never happened, he told her it was because she spent too much time at hospitals.
His doctor was confident that he should be able to recover again, although there was buzz that “recovery” might look very different this time. A secondary heart attack brought with it a dozen conditions that spoke to underlying issues that couldn’t simply be overcome with a healthy diet and exercise. Danny had long stopped smoking – since before Rhea was born – and he swore up and down that he had been “eating decently” since the first heart attack. Genetics might have been a source. So was stress, although Danny claimed he had little to be stressed out about now that he was bored to death every single day.
That was how Rhea knew that he couldn’t just go back to his house in Malibu, where all he had to do was watch TV and talk to her and the nurses who came by every day. He needed to be more mentally stimulated. He needed a reason to take care of himself and be alive.
Except this was a man who had few friends left in an ever-changing world. He had retired from his blue-collar job the year before, right when he felt the effects of being in his mid-60s. Rhea wanted to believe that her father still had at least ten good years left in him. Yet no matter what she suggested – traveling, dating, taking up new hobbies – he rebuffed her as if she had no idea what she was talking about. He was from a “different time.” He had “his own thoughts” that were “none of her business.”
Are they my business yet?She sat in the chair in the corner of his hospital room, watching him have a small coughing fit in his sleep. Beside her, Rhea’s phone was opened to her notes app, where she jotted down ideas to get her father feeling alive again.
She was keenly aware that she was the only one in his life. Never before had she felt such a crushing weight that she was his only family left in this world.
Sometimes, Paige came with her wife to say hello and bring by things both Rhea and Danny needed to make the stay at the hospital more bearable. There were days when Paige dropped off her wife on the way to work and picked her up on the way back. To avoid her father’s criticisms, Rhea sometimes went to the cafeteria or a restaurant across the street from the hospital, where she forced herself to read or come up with her next Great American Novel.
Danny had suggested she focus more on her own life – that included in her writing.
