A Slight Thing
By Corley Longmire
People talk about research to develop a cure for Alzheimer’s and diseases like it, the various neurodegenerative disorders that eat a person away bit by bit, but you never thought it would be accomplished in your lifetime. You relax when your father stops fumbling for words and can remember your boyfriend’s name and no longer struggles to work the television remote, all his scans showing less brain tissue atrophy. Cancer is not something you expect after that. And while there are treatments to cure cancer, there is nothing to cure what those treatments leave behind: perpetual fatigue, a weakened heart, a stomach that can no longer tolerate spicy food. That hits your dad the hardest.
“No more salsa,” he says the next time you drop by the house. “Might as well die now.”
Neither of you comments on the fact that you’re crying when you tell him to shut up, but he wraps an arm around you, squeezes your shoulder.
You pray to God let it be quick, if he has to go, let it be quick.
It is not quick. Nor is it a lengthy affair, but you can no longer afford to fool yourself after your mom begins coming to clean the house, make sure he takes his medicines and doesn’t overexert himself. They’ve been divorced since you went to college but not because of infidelity, which might have broken you; they just outgrew each other, work better as friends.
There are more good days than bad at first. It’s on one of these good days toward the dragging end of summer that you three migrate to the backyard, music blasting through the boombox you found in your childhood bedroom. Dad doesn’t even struggle to get up when The Temptations come on: he pulls your mom into a swaying half dance as he sings along to the music and she laughs, both unbothered by how they might look. Once she’s back in the lawn chair beside you, she watches him go inside for one of the tomatoes you brought—they give him acid reflux but he still insists on eating them—and says, “Dammit, I love that man.”
And there it is, that look on her face, the one you’ve only glimpsed in flashes so far, quickly tucked away by the time your father appears.
You make a living off language, but you dig deep inside yourself and can’t find words to describe that expression.
“I feel like I never see you,” your boyfriend says one night when you’re in bed together, you recently back from an overnight stay at your dad’s. Most weekends are spent there now. Since your boyfriend only has Saturdays and Sundays off from his computer programing job, you’ve missed some things with him: his half-sister’s wedding, a trip to the coast, a friend’s stand-up gig. There’s no excuse—you work from home; you can go see your father whenever you want. A few times your boyfriend has tagged along but always seems uncomfortable, as if he knows cancer isn’t contagious but fears feebleness.
Telling him you’ll try and do better won’t accomplish anything, only lead to talking around the real issue more than you already do, so you pull him onto you and bury your face in his collar bone, smell the leftover deodorant in his underarms. It won’t be long before he decides it’s best if you two take a break, at least while your family needs you so much. Tell me I’m wrong, tell me you want to fight for this, he seems to be saying underneath it all. You pack a bag and say you’ll be out of the apartment within the month.
Both parents object when you move in with your father, of course they do, but Mom hugs you afterward and kisses your forehead, thanks you like you’re owed her gratitude. She’s already doing so much; you’ve got good shoulders. You don’t mind carrying the weight with her. Your dad has kept your room the same—periwinkle paneling, high school art projects fuzzed in dust where they sit on shelves, stars pasted to the ceiling with decades-old putty—and it’s such an unexpected comfort that you nearly cry that night. Bite down on any seedling of hope, hands pressed into eyes until your vision flowers over and the pressure in your throat lessens.
You try to allow your dad what independence he has left, rarely coddle him, but there are instances where you must get him in and out of bed or wipe up the drinks he spills. He refuses to let you help him shower until he nearly fractures a wrist against the tub’s edge. The impact of his fall travels through the floorboards and sends you running to the bathroom, where you find him dripping water everywhere as he tries to get upright. No blood, nothing broken, nothing to see except the bruises contouring his skin. He won’t look at you when you slide under his arm and sit him on the closed toilet with a towel over his lap. “What if you’d locked the door?” you ask him later. He says: “I’d have managed somehow.”
So, you salve his pride in whatever way you can: pretend you don’t see how he has to steady himself when he stands, overlook his quiet frustration because he can’t help you with the yard work. Focus on what’s good. The two of you make jelly and lick the remnants off the stovetop as it gels, hands blood-bright from mulberries. He slaps your wrist with a spatula when you won’t leave the jars alone. Toward the middle of November, you ease him into the passenger seat and drive to his parents’ graves, his eyes watery over the scarf you’ve forced him into as he tells you about the grandparents you never met. Soon you begin collecting stories. Of the nights he smoked secret cigarettes even though he hated the taste, all to be more like an older brother who died in Vietnam. How he learned to drive a school bus at thirteen. The first time he drank, tried weed, how he flew a crop duster and passed out as soon as he was on solid ground. You take all these memories and press them into the pages of a notebook you never finished using, because even though no more Alzheimer’s means you won’t forget them, you need to see his words. You wish your handwriting looked more like his.
Not quite a month before he dies, you’re watching Westerns together. The house is cold—fifteen-foot ceilings, poor insulation—and while you’re comfortable in a hoodie, your dad wears sweats and wool socks and the two afghans you’ve swaddled him in, eyes moon-bright against his jaundiced skin. He’s always been gray—gray eyes, gray hair and beard—but you’ve seen pictures from when he was your age with his hair curling black and down past his shoulders. He kept it clipped before the chemo and wore caps to hide his balding spot; now he refuses to go without one from sheer habit. Even after everything, he looks good mostly. Not my father who is dying, just my father.
He shifts in the recliner, pants leg crawling up to reveal the sock bunching around his ankle, the vulnerable expanse of one milk-pale leg. With a sigh that’s only partly discomfort, he points to the TV and says, “I had a horse looked like that once. Haven’t ridden in... God, since you were, what, six? Seven? Getting old. Wouldn’t mind riding again.”
This is where you would have teased him before, but you both know he won’t get any older, will never ride a horse, even as you tell him, “Sure, whatever you want.” Try not to think of everything he’ll miss because if you do, you will never be able to stop. Just hold his hand on your way past to get the next round of painkillers.
He’s dozed off when you return. And for a moment, it’s the last moment, the one where you step away from him and in the space between your leaving and returning, he leaves you. But then he sniffs. You see the movement of his chest, and it triggers your own lungs into working again, panic pushed aside for another time. You kneel beside him to measure his breathing, as if the days he has left are wrapped up in each deep breath he takes.
Back when you were a child and he was the biggest person in your world, the largest thing you had ever seen, you often crawled onto the couch or bed while he napped and lay down beside him. To laugh at his snoring or poke him until he startled awake, but not always. Sometimes, you’d listen to the rapid rush of your breathing and the way his came more slowly, and you counted his breaths: one for every three of yours. How many times have you found him like this—slack-mouthed, so still, so easily woken? Gently, gently because now you can’t stand the thought of waking him, you spread your hand across his chest and watch it rise. Against your pulse, such a slight thing, his stubborn heart continues beating.
Corley Longmire is a second-year master's student in fiction at the University of Southern Mississippi. Her fiction is forthcoming in Barely South Review.