of it. There was very little he enjoyed and he realized this the day there was an electrical storm that blew the power out and he could not watch the evening news. The evening news. That was what he looked forward to.
Ned’s older brother, Pete, had breezed through without a single problem; they see him on major holidays and Stanley gets presents along the way. Pete was easy, a no-nonsense unemotional boy, the opposite of Ned, who was the kind of tantrum-throwing child Stanley had no patience for. People always talked about how good Martha was, how sweet, and yeah, he could give her that, but what all those people didn’t know was also how passive and withdrawn she was. Yes, she was there for Ned, and yes, dinner was almost always on the table—sometimes microwave shit in later years but there nonetheless—and the clothes did get washed and she did almost always go to church and to bridge club, but even before Martha got sick there was a low-grade despondency, a depression that Stanley was probably responsible for, too. He tried to make it better in the early years. He bought flowers every now and then. He never forgot her birthday, but still something was always missing in their life together.
People didn’t go running into therapy every five minutes back then, but he suspects if they had, someone would have told him that he was a really shitty father—a really shitty man, in fact. He had done so much wrong and yet on the surface he looked like a man who had done a wonderful job with everything. When Martha complained of her weariness and fatigue, he made jokes. When someone at church had suggested that she might have Epstein-Barr, he told how he knew a fellow named Epstein in the service—Epstein’s Bar and Grill—food guaranteed to slow you down so you have to take to the bed or have a blinding migraine that lets you off the hook to do pretty much anything. Sex? What in the hell was that?
But then she got cancer and no one denied the reality of that.
Stanley wasn’t there enough. He knows that now. Truth is he knew it then but just didn’t have the guts to stand up and deal with it. He was so focused on his business. He did what was expected of him. It was like standing and reciting the Pledge of Allegiance. Every now and then, you actually feel patriotic and like you might give a goddamn, but usually it’s just a pain in the ass to have to stand when you’ve worked your ass off and feel tired. Just do what is expected in a way that numbs the world. And he stayed there, humming along, worked on a few church committees, advised the city council, did the Boy Scouts a couple of years, took a sack of toys to some poor family across the river at Christmas. When he looks back now he wishes he could recall some of the faces there waiting, but he can’t. He was thinking of things like how his muffler didn’t sound quite right or what in the hell was he going to buy for Martha when she didn’t need another goddamned thing cluttering the space. It already drove him crazy, that wall of knickknacks that rattled when you came through the living room. Things rattled all over the house. She loved little Limoges boxes—expensive-as-hell things commemorating this or that and to this day he regrets the way he cleared a shelf with the brush of a hand, leaving everyone silent for days. He remembers that with great clarity, the landing of every splintered shard of porcelain, but he can’t remember a single child receiving from his asshole hands the only Christmas gift of the year, something Martha or someone at the church had bought and wrapped. Boy: age 8. Wants a skateboard but really needs clothes. Girl: age 6. Wants a kitten but understands she might get a Polly Pocket doll instead. Really needs shoes and a coat and underwear. He found these slips of paper in her purse, right there with grocery lists and a coupon file—pieces carefully clipped but obviously never used.
He and Martha had not planned what they would do in their old age; like everything else, he had assumed they would deal with it when they got to it, muddle on through. There was plenty of money. He had made sure of that, but somehow he