“Especially since she has no idea where she is most days,” he added, as if I hadn’t already obliged him.
“Right.”
“Have you heard her yelling out her daughter’s name?”
“Yep.”
“She sounds possessed. It’s such a shame.”
“It is.”
“She has no clue what’s about to happen to her either. Imagine what it would be like if she realized that she’s headed to—”
“Christ, Carl,” I said. “Would you shut the hell up?”
Silence followed, cold and injured.
For a second, I regretted being an ass, but the moment passed, like it does. And anyway, he’d made the mistake, not me. He knew better. He knew we never talked about what it meant to be put out to pasture. Not that or being put in a box.
Yes, Mrs. Zimmerman was on the tail end of her thirty-day notice, and, yes, she was fixing to be dumped at that infernal nursing home I refuse to name, and, yes, I felt bad for her. But I sure as hell didn’t want to make it part of my morning chin-wag. I preferred sleeping tonight in lieu of staring at the ceiling, imagining the wasteland beyond this place. Remembering the little peek my uncle had given me while rotting away in his piss-smelling bed. It would take me days to recover from the thought, to shove it back into its dark corner, where it would bide its time, waiting for the next opportunity to eat its way out and keep me wide-eyed and wrestling with my sheets in the middle of the goddamn night.
So, no, we would not discuss Mrs. Zimmerman’s fate. Living it would do.
Carl straightened up. Cleared his throat. “Shall we go eat?”
“As if you need to ask,” I said, relieved.
Together, we turned to the door and prepared to meet our constituents for breakfast. And this is not an overstatement. Carl and I, we were the benevolent rulers of Centennial, crowned because we were able-bodied for the most part, intellectually sound, and, as I point out to my Nora whenever I see her, movie-star handsome. Never mind that Carl’s face was back-end ugly when he didn’t have his dentures in; he always remembered them, and that’s what was important. And truthfully, between the two of us, Carl preferred to be the brains in the background while I served as the bullhorn. Which is how come I wanted him to get his ass into gear. Our people needed to hear from us, lest they think us dead.
I motioned impatiently for him to go in front of me, on account of him having a tendency to throw his walker into my heels if I didn’t keep pace. He motioned back, equally annoyed, then made his way by.
In between his walker squeaking on the linoleum and me saying, “Any day now,” there came a rapping on the outside of our bedroom window—an inquiring tap, tap, tap. Jorge, probably. The lawn care man. He and I had a long-standing relationship through that window—pounded hellos in either direction, exchanged waves between my newspaper and his weed whacker, and occasionally if I was bored, a handwritten Gracias, which I taped up for him to read. As for right now, I was closer to the door than not, so we’d have to catch up some other time.
But that knocking came again, and this time it was not Jorge-like at all. It was harder, sharper. It left the air quivering and stopped me in my slow tracks. I tugged on Carl’s shirttail and pointed to where the mini blinds were drawn.
As Carl fumbled his walker back around, the window’s sash squealed against the sill. Metal on metal. Carl cringed and cupped his hearing aids. I started toward the noise but froze when somebody’s shadow overtook the whisker-thin slices of sun wrapping our bedroom walls.
Carl slowly dropped his hands from his ears and looked at me, mouthing, Who’s that? I shook my head and put my pointer finger to my lips. We waited, listening. Everything went dead quiet, except for a sparrow calling through the open window.
And then, all at once, the dusty aluminum blinds went off like live wires. They clanked and rocked and flapped, and from