Heart-shaped box Page 0,7

Lake Pontchartrain, if you wanted a high-speed connection with the rest of the world, you souped up a car and got the fuck out.

“Last few months I been spoonin’ him food. Soft stuff he don’t have to chew. He was likin’ them little stars. Pastina. And vanilla custard. I never met a dyin’ person yet didn’t want some custard on their way out the door.”

“I’m surprised. He never used to have a sweet tooth. Are you sure?”

“Who’s takin’ care of him?”

“You are.”

“Well, I guess I’m sure, then.”

“All right.”

“This is the reason I’m callin’. He won’t eat custard or little stars or anything else. He just chokes on whatever I put in his mouth. He can’t swallow. Dr. Newland was in to see him yesterday. He thinks your dad had another infarction.”

“A stroke.” It was not quite a question.

“Not a fall-down-and-kill-you kind of stroke. If he had another one of those, there wouldn’t be any question of it. He’d be dead. This was one of the little blow-outs. You don’t always know when he’s had one of the little ones. Especially when he gets like he is now, just starin’ at things. He hasn’t said a word to anyone in two months. He isn’t ever going to say a word to anyone again.”

“Is he at the hospital?”

“No. We can care for him just as well or better here. Me livin’ with him and Dr. Newland in every day. But we can send him to the hospital. It would be cheaper there, if that matters to you.”

“It doesn’t. Let ’em save the beds at the hospital for people who might actually get better in them.”

“I won’t argue you on that one. Too many people die in hospitals, and if you can’t be helped, you have to wonder why.”

“So what are you going to do about him not eating? What happens now?”

This was met by a moment of silence. He had an idea that the question had taken her by surprise. Her tone, when she spoke again, was both gently reasonable and apologetic, the tone of a woman explaining a harsh truth to a child.

“Well. That’s up to you, not me, Justin. Doc Newland can poke a feedin’ tube in him and he’ll go on a while longer, that’s what you want. Till he has another little blowout and he forgets how to breathe. Or we can just let him be. He isn’t ever goin’ to recover, not at eighty-five years old. It’s not like he’s bein’ robbed of his youth. He’s ready to let go. Are you?”

Jude thought, but did not say, that he’d been ready for more than forty years. He had occasionally imagined this moment—maybe it was fair to say he’d even daydreamed of it—but now it had come, and he was surprised to find that his stomach hurt.

When he replied, though, his voice was steady and his own. “Okay, Arlene. No tube. If you say it’s time, that’s good enough for me. Keep me updated, all right?”

But she wasn’t done with him yet. She made an impatient sound, a kind of stiff exhalation of breath, and said, “Are you comin’ down?”

He stood at Danny’s desk, frowning, confused. The conversation had taken a leap from one thing to another, without warning, like a needle skipping across a record from one track to the next. “Why would I do that?”

“Do you want to see him before he’s gone?”

No. He had not seen his father, stood in the same room with him, in three decades. Jude did not want to see the old man before he was gone, and he did not want to look at him after. He had no plans to so much as attend the funeral, although he would be the one to pay for it. Jude was afraid of what he might feel—or what he wouldn’t. He would pay whatever he had to pay not to have to share his father’s company again. It was the best thing the money could buy: distance.

But he could no more say this to Arlene Wade than he could tell her he’d been waiting on the old man to die since he was fourteen. Instead he replied, “Would he even know if I was there?”

“It’s hard to say what he knows and what he doesn’t. He’s aware of people in the room with him. He turns his eyes to watch folks come and watch folks go. He’s been less responsive lately, though. People get that way, once enough lights have burned out.”

“I