Heart Valve
Every evening at 5:00 pm, the third wife would raise a bottle of liquor
above her head and yell Ding-dong! It was five o’clock somewhere
and somewhere was here. She was the kind of person who had
heavy, brown ceramic mugs shaped like Moai on hand at her
homemade makeshift outdoor bar; the kind of person who garnished
drinks with fruit chunks and paper umbrellas; the kind that stocked
the cabinet with pineapple juice, grenadine, and apricot schnapps.
And now she was dead. The woman who put tiny, decorative, shell-
shaped soaps in the bathrooms when company came over was
dead, and she had left us alone with our father. She had been pulling
the tubes out of her arms for several days, screaming I’m no longer
beautiful let me die. They put the tubes back in each time, of course,
but soon enough she went under and was gone. Without her, our
father was difficult to wrangle. He was a complicated man. The rules
were different. He had a bad heart valve, which made it difficult for
his heart to pump, but he also had anemia, which thinned his blood
and kept him alive. Cancer was keeping my father alive. He still said,
You’re an abomination, but I could deflect him more easily now. I
know, dad, but would you like half a sandwich? It was enough to
change the subject. He wanted to keep living in the house, so he did.
And since I was living in the guesthouse and helping out, he
reinherited me. Everything was fine until the night I came home and
found him in the living room, stuck in an Eames chair. He had been
stuck for hours. The next day we started visiting assisted living
facilities. My brother left New York to help. He moved into the house
with me. I had already claimed the master bedroom with the Jacuzzi
and walk-in closet, the glassed-in gym, and the side patio; he took
the office, maid’s room, dining room, and library. He turned the office
into his studio. I made a studio in the garage, under the guest house.
We shared the kitchen and the pool. Our father had a single room at
assisted living, but it was large. We brought over furnishings from the
house. It was a strange edit, a condensed personality. Now he had
comrades. He charmed the ladies in the dining room. He met a
woman who had also been a lawyer and they started sneaking into
each other’s rooms at night. They held hands at lunch. They took
naps together and listened to books on tape. I think it was the first
time he had actually fallen in love. She managed to stay alive for
seven months. After she died, he moved to hospice. He was angry
and extraordinarily sad, and it had done him in. I did not visit him, he
wanted to spent the time with the other son. It was the right
decision. He wanted to be buried and not cremated. My brother
bought him a new suit and new shoes, selected a casket. The
executor said the suit was a waste of money. The rest of the
formalities had already been decided. We carried out his wishes as
instructed. His lawyer made sure we did.
