Her desk phone trilled. She looked at the digital readout and sighed, then scooped up the receiver.
“Hey, Tim, what’s—” She paused. Tyler watched her body fold in on itself, slowly going tight like a steel spring. “No, Ritchie is in the Brooklyn lockup because he tried to buy heroin from an undercover cop. No, I didn’t bail him out and I’m not going to. There’s no—Tim, will you listen to me? For a second, maybe? He violated the terms of his probation. He’s going back inside, probably for at least a year this time.”
Tyler turned to his screen, trying not to make the situation any more awkward than it felt. He watched her in the corner of his eye, her legs curling up under her chair, her arms close against her sides.
“—and I’m going to hire him a lawyer with what money? We don’t all work in Silicon Valley. Besides, he’s not going to get any better of a deal than he will with a public defender. Maybe if people would stop making excuses for him and force him to face the consequences of his actions for just fucking once in his life—” Nell fell silent. Tyler could hear the voice on the other end, words muffled but the tone heated. “No, I know that means nobody’s been to visit—yes. Yes, Tim, I know you can’t come because you’re taking care of Mom. I’m fully aware of that because you never fail to—fine. Fine. I will. Yes. Today. I will. Goodbye.”
She slapped the phone down on its cradle.
“You okay?” Tyler asked. He already knew the answer. He just wanted her to know that he cared. Her chair rolled back on its stiff casters, rumbling against the linoleum.
“Grabbing an early lunch,” she said. “I have to go take care of something.”
21.
The Sunflower Home looked like a hotel on the outside. The kind of clean pastel-colored place you might stop at in the middle of a road trip, with coffee and a tray of stale glazed Danishes in the lobby and a television perpetually set to a local news channel. A rack of brochures inside the door dropped helpful-sounding phrases like Assisted Living and Advanced Memory Care. The chemical pine odor of industrial antiseptic drenched the halls.
A few residents sat in the common room, watching television or looking out a window with a view of a parking lot and the freeway beyond. They wore thin cotton bathrobes or clothes a couple of decades out of date and they were all very quiet. Waiting, Nell thought. Their days had been spent, wrung dry, the last lines of their stories written before their hearts stopped beating, and now they waited for their bodies to catch up.
None of them, she was certain, ever once thought they’d end up here. They had loved, lost, fought, triumphed, failed, laughed, cried. Some had been to war, some had seen history with their own eyes, the decades unfolding.
And it ended at the Sunflower Home, in a cotton bathrobe, and a stiff-backed chair in front of a quiet window.
Nell stood in the open doorway of room 205. The sole occupant had a chair and a window of his own, next to the neatly made hospital bed. The morning light from the east-facing glass fell on his faded beer-brown eyes and his long bristly cheeks.
“Hey, Dad.”
The man in the blue bathrobe barely moved. He shifted a little, giving her an uncertain glance. She held up an open hand.
“It’s Nell. Your daughter.”
“Oh.” He blinked. Something stirred behind his eyes, a tiny spark as synapses fired. “Nell. It’s…been a while. I think?”
“Yeah.” She took a step into the room. Just one. “How are you? They treating you all right?”
“Can’t complain.” He smiled, sly now, and lowered his voice. “I think Sally in 206 is sweet on me.”
Room 206 stood empty, no sheets on the untouched bed, but she didn’t tell him. “Is the food okay?”
“Butterscotch pudding. Never had so much goddamn butterscotch pudding.” He looked past her, to the hall at her back. “Is Ritchie here? Usually Ritchie comes.”
Her kid brother visited like clockwork, when he wasn’t in jail. Nell couldn’t prove it, but she was pretty sure his burst of filial piety came from realizing how many stray drugs were floating around your average nursing home.
“He’s busy this week,” she said.
His smile got bigger. “Ah, off chasing a big story, just like his old man. He’s a go-getter, always was.”
Nell’s fingernails dug into the meat of her palms.