Read More: A brief Q&A with Jeff Bond
Jane Grimble does not like the nursing home she is not in.
“Do they have cake,” she asks hopefully, meekly. Her voice is as thin as her hair. “Or bread?” She nods toward the room where she knows soups and berry-flavored milkshakes come from, also ice cream now and then. Never cake.
Jane is connected by plastic tubes to an oxygen tank. She has a home health aide who gets her out of bed and into her living room for three hours a day. This allows Jane to look at something besides her bedroom ceiling. She has a hospice volunteer, Bryce, who visits every Thursday afternoon.
“Cake?” Jane pleads with a skeletal smile.
They are in Jane’s three-bedroom apartment on the 12th floor of a high rise. This is where Jane raised her children, two of whom are still alive and even visit now and then. Bryce notes that from the living room window you can see the highway and the river and a shuttered pencil factory.
Jane nevertheless thinks she’s in a nursing home, one she does not like.
“What kind of cake?” Bryce asks. Jane looks confused. “What kind of cake do you like, Jane?”
“I don’t want to be here,” she says, now agitated. “I don’t like it here!” She fiddles with the tube that goes up her nose. “I never put my mother in a nursing home.”
If Greta were in the room, she would correct her. You’re not in a nursing home, Jane, you’re in your apartment. You live here. Greta is Jane’s home health aide. Greta is with Jane nearly all the time. Bryce supposes this is why she has less patience for drawn-out exchanges about the nursing home she is not in.
“My mother was a seamstress,” she says.
“Oh?” Bryce sits up. Jane has never mentioned any details about her mother before. “What was her name?”
Jane’s expression clouds.
“What was your mother’s name, Jane?” She’s put lipstick on today, he notices. Haphazardly. She hasn’t applied it solely to her lips.
Greta appears from the kitchen in a pale-blue uniform, shuffling in slippers so small she might have pilfered them from Jane. She holds a glass of tap water.
“Cake,” says Jane, staying on the vowel as if it had taste.
“Drink your water, Jane,” Greta says, dropping the glass on her tray table. “Then maybe there’s cake.”
This is cruel. There is never any cake.
Jane makes a childlike face of defiance. Bryce clears his throat. “Jane, where were you born?” A fresh topic might be more successful.
Jane brightens. She knows the answer to this one.
“Cleveland!” She beams like she’s said something clever.
“Cleveland,” he says back to her.
Bryce has been a hospice volunteer for three years. He visits the dying because he needs an outlet for his compassion for the weak. His therapist is less generous. No, Bryce. You do it because you’re trying to relive the past, hoping to change the outcome. It’s not compassion, it’s a way to avoid dealing with what happened.
Bryce has yet to come up with a satisfactory response to this.
What “happened” is that Bryce had cared for his dying lover in their home.
His name was Devon. Devon had been healthy and HIV+ for ten years before meeting Bryce. Then, five years into their relationship, Devon was diagnosed with cancer. Treatment bought him two years. Then it returned, more aggressively, and treatment would buy him nothing. Devon agreed to hospice care—on the condition that he could stay in their apartment. An adjustable bed was brought in. Doctors and nurses and social workers came and went constantly.
The sisters visited twice. That first visit, they brought their mother, Diana. Bryce had met the mother once, at a birthday party for one of Devon’s cousins. It had been a large party, and Diana had managed to avoid both her son and his lover almost entirely.
She exhaled audibly through her nose as she sat. Diana had covered nearly everything that wasn’t Devon’s bed with shopping bags, spilling scarves and shirts with the price tags still attached. Her bags took up as much room as the people did. Candace cracked the knuckle of a thumb. Candace had brought her needlepoint. It was an enormous design: Santa’s sleigh and all eight reindeer. It would take her months to finish, she’d said.
Margery asked if she could smoke.
Bryce looked at her, dubious.
“Anything in danger of blowing up?” she asked mordantly.
“My god, he’s not on oxygen, is he?” Candace looked at Bryce over the tops of her sewing glasses. Ask him yourself, he wanted to say, though Devon wouldn’t know if he were on oxygen or not. Devon wouldn’t know if he were on Mars. He was on too many drugs. Bryce’s and Devon’s living room—also the kitchen—was big enough for a loveseat and three folding chairs. There was a square table where they could drop their mail and keys; it doubled as the place for food prep. Devon had overseen all the cooking for the two of them, before he got confined to the bed that took up most of what had been the “living” part of their living room. Before Bryce, Devon had shared this apartment with a professional dancer. Bryce found it interesting when dancers and other artists added tags like professional when explaining what they do. Professional dancer. Working actor. He wasn’t judgmental about it. He appreciated their pride, recognizing the clarity ushered in by an apt adjective.
Aggressive cancer.
“Can I smoke in the bathroom?” Margery said. “I can open a window. Please? I don’t want to go outside. It’s hot.”
“You have a window in your bathroom?” Candace said, perhaps meaning this apartment suggested no such luxury.
Bryce wasn’t really listening to them. He was listening to Devon, in the bed, breathing slowly and quietly. Devon’s breath got quieter every day. He’d had what looked like an athlete’s body, once, even though he was never an athlete. He was handsome and tall, taller than Bryce. There was still evidence of handsomeness, Bryce thought, in the shape of Devon’s face. A fluttering eyelid revealed a dark russet eye. Devon looked most like his old self when you could see his eyes.
“So it’s okay?” Margery reached into her handbag.
Candace made a face. “You’re really gonna light up in the bathroom?” Margery’s body language suggested that she wasn’t opposed to an escalation of hostilities.
“Girls! Enough!” Diana gestured at the children with thin, manicured fingers. Margery withdrew her hand from her bag. Bryce knew she couldn’t smoke in her own house, not with the new baby, which was home with her husband, an accountant named Claude, pronounced to rhyme with the word slowed. Bryce always wanted to pronounce it like clod. Right before the baby was born, Diana had somewhat preposterously decorated her kitchen with pictures of cute, wide-eyed animals saying things like, Grandma’s kitchen! Samplers welcome! and Grandmothers have time when the rest of the world is too busy. Nevertheless, Margery said Diana had yet to buy a gift for the baby and even waited two weeks before driving to Margery’s house to see it.
Margery had shrugged when Devon asked her if any of this bothered her. We’re not an affectionate family, she’d said.
“Do you have anything to drink?” Candace’s face was partially hidden behind her needlepoint. “Like a beer? I don’t care.” Diana fussed with the bow on her blue and yellow blouse. “I can look for myself, but I don’t want to get up if all I’m gonna find is Diet Sprite.”
“We don’t have any beer,” Bryce said. “Sorry.” He studied Diana, perched among her bags, her back straight and her face blank. Her dark brown hair was swept into a bulbous up-do. She wore a fitted jacket and sky-blue eyeshadow. She had yet to rest her eyes on the dying man in the middle of the room.
Devon murmured something unintelligible. It may have had something to do with being an onion. I’m an onion was the closest Bryce could make out from the sounds. It went something like, “Ammanunnyun.” The sisters were startled into silence. They watched Devon, waiting for him to elaborate.
Diana adjusted the direction of her legs. Her acid blue pumps matched the floral brooch pinned to her jacket. Her mouth was a thin pink line. She looked poised to leap off that couch and out of the apartment.
“I call this ‘Devon TV,’” Bryce said with forced cheer. “He’s like the yule log. You know, at Christmas.”
Greta uses her thumb and index finger to mime a gun. “She has three children,” she says. “One of them is…” Her fingers pretend to put a bullet in her brain.
“Yes, I know,” Bryce says. Jane is hazy on her personal history, but Greta enjoys filling in the details. Greta is eating from a box of crackers, making a crumbly mess on her shirt front.
“Did you talk to Michael?” Jane asks. Michael is Jane’s dead son. Jane wants Bryce to call her dead son on the phone. It’s absurd.
“Not yet.” Bryce makes his voice upbeat. “But I’m looking forward to it.” He tries to imagine what kind of phone Michael would have had. Michael killed himself forty-odd years ago. He would have had a rotary phone, with a heavy-jacketed spiral cord.
Bryce shifts his weight on Jane’s cream couch. If she weren’t so far gone, he thinks, Jane and he could talk frankly about Michael, and Devon. They each have things they aren’t done with yet. Jane, however, is past curiosity about any life that doesn’t immediately touch her own.
The sisters visited once more while Devon was alive. It was a brief stop, twenty minutes or so, and they came not with Diana, but with Margery’s husband Claude.
The sisters had been drinking, and were giddy.
“We brought liquids!” Margery waved a half-empty bottle of a sparkling rosé in the air. The sisters wore tank tops and flip-flops. Candace had a tennis visor on. Both were wearing yellow shorts. Candace’s shorts were yellower than Margery’s. Claude was wearing a lime-green polo shirt and khakis.
“Please tell me you have orange juice? Anything but the kind with pits.”
The pitiless kind, Bryce mused to himself as he fetched them some juice from the fridge. They drank their rosé and juice from slim jars that once held capers. Bryce was behind on washing the dishes and the jars were the best he could find that was clean—he’d spent the morning on the phone working out Devon’s next delivery of Phenobarbital and he’d had no time for cleaning up.
“To my brother Devon!” said Candace, a slaphappy toast. Bryce watched to see if she’d noticed how different Devon looked from the last time she was here. His unshaven face made him look almost professorial—curious, as Devon was a dropout. The rest of his body was the color of a severed finger.
“How is he?” Claude asked, in a low tone. The sisters were sitting side by side on the loveseat. Margery was chattering about a television show. She was unable to decide if it was funny for the right reasons.
Claude brought a small digital camera to his eye and pointed it at the wall clock behind the stove. It was a large clock, in a stainless-steel frame. It didn’t weigh much but Bryce always thought it looked as if it did.
Margery made some crack, and laughed. Claude pointed his camera at a commemorative plate on the wall by the clock. It commemorated the Nixon presidency. It had been a gift—a joke gift.
Candace took a sip from the caper jar. “Do we have more juice?” she said. “Or is this it?”
That plate is dusty was all Bryce could think, feeling idiotic as Claude opened a drawer and aimed his camera at mismatched flatware.
“What about the apartment?” Claude said.
Bryce didn’t understand the question.
Claude looked at him. “Is he going to have to sell it?” he said.
“She’s such a bitch,” Margery said to Candace. She put a hand to her face, like she thought she might laugh so hard something would come out of her nose.
Bryce looked over at the near-lifeless Devon. There’d been a couple of weeks when Devon had kept trying to get out of bed. He’d always been strong-willed, and Bryce hadn’t always been successful in restraining him. A few times Devon had managed to lift himself up, only to collapse in a skinny heap when his feet hit the floor.
Claude aimed his camera at a framed lithograph on the wall opposite the bathroom. He stopped to lean closer to it, squinting at the signature. “This guy famous?” he said. He touched the silver metal frame of the lithograph, letting his fingers run gently down one side. “This worth anything?”
“Margery,” Bryce said, as Claude’s questions took shape, “what is Claude doing?”
Claude moved his camera to a ceramic figurine on a bookshelf: Betty Boop as Snow White.
“This a collectible?” he asked.
“Claude,” Bryce said. “What are you doing?”
Margery rolled her eyes. “He’s just being goofy. Claude,” she said, “don’t be goofy.”
Claude snapped a picture of the figurine.
“Claude,” Bryce demanded, “what’s going on?” Claude looked closer at decorative ceramic box. He opened it, assessing the workmanship. Margery rolled her eyes.
“Nothing in here is worth anything, Claude,” said Bryce. “And this apartment is a rental.”
Candace made a raspberry with her mouth as she put her feet up and kicked off her flip flops. Claude crouched down and turned his camera on the LP collection in a milk crate by the loveseat. He started flipping through the stack, snapping each cover individually. Bryce snatched the camera away just before Claude could make a permanent account of anyone in the apartment owning a copy of Bryan Ferry’s Let’s Stick Together.
“Hey!” said Margery, jumping up at this sudden violence.
Claude looked at him coolly. “May I have my camera back, please?” he said.
Bryce looked over at Devon. He was due for his next dose of morphine.
“Jesus, Bryce,” said Candace. “What the fuck? You’re not even family.” […]
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Jeff Bond’s stories have been published in the Carolina Quarterly, Fatal Flaw, McSweeney’s Internet Tendency, and Bridge Eight. He lives in New York City, where he was for many years a staple of Manhattan daylife as a Happy Hour bartender. He also creates and edits video, which can be found on his website, jeffbond.nyc. He serves as a reader for the Masters Review.