Stiltsville: A Novel - By Susanna Daniel Page 0,132
birthday, he had no more use for the dry-erase board; it was too difficult for him to write. By June he was eating almost exclusively from the tube, and staying almost exclusively in the living room, because it was too difficult to move him back and forth. Marse bought him some expensive ergonomic footrest pillows, and I bought soft flannel sheets for the living room sofa. People still came by all day, every day, flowing into and out of the house, but instead of congregating on the back deck or in the kitchen, we hung around in the living room, mostly, and once or twice a day someone helped Dennis into his wheelchair, fitted a blanket over his legs, and took him for a walk around the block. We played a lot of board games—Dennis was still good at them, though they tired him out. For Scrabble, I sat next to him and he pushed the tiles he wanted to use toward me, then gestured to the spot on the board where he wanted the word to go. I kept the windows open all the time, and changed the sofa sheets every time Lola or Stuart took Dennis for a bath. I bought him several pairs of pajamas—he was usually chilly, even in the heat of the day.
In July, Paul and Marse picked us up and we went in Paul’s truck to a drive-in movie in Fort Lauderdale. We sat in camp chairs and ate marshmallows—a treat that had become one of Dennis’s favorites—and drank very cold beers. Paul had become a deacon at his church. He explained what this entailed, but I wasn’t listening. I was watching a foursome about our age at the site next to ours, sitting in camp chairs and eating sandwiches out of plastic baggies. They laughed a lot, loudly, and I felt that I truly hated them. I was relieved when the movie was over and we could get back into the cool car and drive silently back down the crowded expressway. Paul and Dennis continued to go fishing almost every weekend, but they returned early, usually without fish, and Dennis slept for hours afterward.
In August, Paul and Marse sold their condos and bought a house on the Biltmore golf course, a mile north of ours. After they moved in, I dressed Dennis in a sport coat and put on a dress and invited Margo and Stuart to come with us to the new house for dinner. He wore a tie and she wore a black dress and red heels. Stuart helped Dennis into the passenger seat of our car, then folded the wheelchair and lifted it into the trunk—this was something I could not do on my own—then put out his hand. “Do you mind if I drive?” he said.
His blue eyes flashed with something I couldn’t quite define—anger, possibly, or frustration. We hadn’t exchanged two words since they’d arrived at the house, fifteen minutes late, so I surmised that whatever it was, it had nothing to do with me. “I’d rather drive,” I said.
“Suit yourself.” He stepped into the backseat, forcing Margo to shift over.
In the rearview mirror, I tried to catch my daughter’s eye. It had been months since I’d stopped hunting for clues about Stuart and Margo’s relationship—were they happy?—or, for that matter, about Stuart’s relationship to Lola, who was still an almost daily presence in my home. Nothing had been revealed to me since the day when I’d seen them in the pool, and Margo and Stuart were the same as ever: affectionate in bursts, independent of each other. But as I drove, I found myself wishing they would fight. A fight, in my presence, would at least shed some light on what transpired in the private space between them.
Margo kept her hands in her lap as we drove. We came to the bridge where she’d crashed Dennis’s car when she was sixteen, and as we passed, Dennis raised one hand and made a grunting sound. “My bridge,” said Margo in response, and she reached into the front seat and put an arm on her father’s shoulder. “I think I see the Buick’s fender in that bush over there,” she said. “There’s one of the headlights in the gutter.”
Marse and Paul came outside while Stuart was still helping Dennis into his chair. Paul’s aftershave hit me before he reached the driveway. Marse was stunning in a pink halter dress. It was a crisp, warm early summer evening, and the