Gemma had pushed seven candles into one side of the cake and eight into the other, because she said seventy-eight candles would set my dining room on fire. The whole thing leaned left anyway. Dad blew them out in two tries and called it the best cake of his life.
Bennett was under the table with his chin on Dad’s shoe, where he always is.
That was the last good minute.
My brother Anil had found his way down to the den during the roast. He’d seen the fold-out made up with Dad’s quilt, his reading glasses, and the dog bed shoved against the frame. Dad had slept there every night since April, about 210 nights. He always said Bennett couldn’t manage the stairs and shouldn’t be alone in the dark.
I believed him. Everybody did.
Anil came back to the table, had a third beer, and leaned back in his chair.
“I booked someone for Monday.”
A vet who comes to the house. A blanket. Two hundred eighty-five dollars, already on his card. Nine in the morning, two days away. His wife, Valentina, told Dad it was kinder for both of them.
I could have said that our vet told me in October the meds were working. That Bennett could take stairs slowly. I didn’t. If the dog could climb, then why was Dad still down there?
So I scraped plates while my brother dried them. At nine-thirty he went to the den to “talk to him like an adult.” I followed as far as the doorway. Dad was flat under the quilt and didn’t sit up. Anil crouched and patted Bennett like he was checking a cantaloupe.
Then the stairs creaked behind me. Gemma came down in socks and walked right past me to her uncle.
“Grandpa’s not down here for Bennett.”
She got as far as April before Dad’s hand came out from under the quilt.
“Gemma. You promised me.”
Fourteen steps
Gemma looked at him, and her face folded the way it did when she was four and dropped her ice cream cone.
“I know, Grandpa.”
“Then go up to bed, sweetheart.”
She didn’t move. Neither did I. I’m her mother and I’m supposed to say go up to bed too, and every bone I had wanted to tell her to keep talking.
So I said, “Let her finish, Dad.”
He turned his head on the pillow and gave me a look I last saw when I backed his Buick into the mailbox in 1995. It was the same look, only older and tireder, with the anger mostly worn out of it.
Anil folded his arms. “Finish what?”
Gemma wiped her nose on the shoulder of her soccer shirt. “In April. It was a Tuesday night. Mom had the late shift. I woke up and I could hear Bennett barking downstairs. He never barks. He’s like a library.”
That was true. The UPS man once walked into our kitchen to hand me a package, and Bennett didn’t get up.
“Grandpa was at the bottom of the stairs.” She pointed behind her without looking. “On the floor. His leg was all wrong, sort of bent under. And Bennett was lying across his legs. Like a blanket. Barking at the door.”
The den got so quiet I could hear the furnace kick on.
“Grandpa said he’d been there since before ten.”
I put my hand on the doorframe. It was that or sit down on the carpet.
Since before ten. She’d been asleep upstairs the whole time.
“He said the dog wouldn’t let him lie on the cold part,” Gemma said. “He kept moving so Grandpa stayed warm. And when Grandpa tried to crawl to the phone, Bennett barked at him, too. Like, don’t.”
Anil said, “Dad.”
Dad was looking at the ceiling.
“I helped him get to the couch in here,” Gemma said. “It took forever. He had to use me and the end table. Then he said if I told anybody, they’d put him in a home.” Her voice went high and thin. “He said Mom would have to. He said that’s what happens. So I promised.”
She turned around to me, and it came out in a rush. “I’m sorry, Mom. I’m so sorry. I wanted to tell you every day.”
I got to her in two steps and held on. She was shaking like a wet cat. Over her head I could see my father, and he was crying without making any sound, which I had seen him do exactly once before, at Mom’s funeral.
“Is that true?” Anil said.
“Pull up the quilt,” I said. Nobody did.
So I let go of Gemma, walked over, and pulled the quilt back off Dad’s legs myself.
There was a knee brace on his right leg, black, the kind you buy at Walgreens, with Velcro gone furry from seven months of use. The knee under it was the size of a grapefruit.
“Jesus Christ, Dad,” I said.
“Watch your mouth, there’s a child.”
“The child’s been your nurse since April!”
He closed his eyes. “I can’t do the stairs, Kerri. I tried in May. I got to the third one.”
Bennett lifted his head off the dog bed and put it on the mattress beside Dad’s hand. Dad’s fingers found the floppy ear without looking.
“And the dog?” Anil said. He had his hands on his hips like a man watching a plumber. “The dog can’t do them either, right? That part’s true.”
“He can,” I said. “Slowly. I told you, the vet said in October—”
“You didn’t tell me anything. You sat there.”
That one landed. He was right, and I hated him for being right.
“He sleeps down here because Grandpa does,” Gemma said. “He never once tried to go up. Not one time. He won’t leave him.”
Anil looked at the dog. The dog looked at Dad.
And my brother, God help him, said the worst thing he could possibly have said in that room.
“Okay. So that’s even more reason. Dad, you can’t live like this. You’re hiding a busted knee on a pull-out and a fourteen-year-old dog is your medical alert system. Monday stands. And then we talk about a place for you.”
Valentina was in the hall behind me. I hadn’t heard her come. “He’s right, Ernest. It’s for both of you.”
Dad opened his eyes and looked at Gemma.
“You see, sweetheart? That’s why I asked you.”
The second step
Nobody slept. I know because I didn’t, and at three in the morning I walked past the den and Dad’s lamp was still on. He was reading the same page of his paperback. I know it was the same page because the corner was folded and he never turned it.
“Go to bed, Kerri.”
“You go to bed.”
“I’m in bed. It’s the one thing I’ve got going for me.”
I sat on the end of the fold-out. The springs made a noise like a goose. Bennett thumped his tail twice against the frame.
“Why didn’t you tell me?”
“Because you’d have done exactly what your brother’s doing. Only nicer.”
“I would not.”
He looked at me over his glasses. I thought about the brochure from Sunnyview that I’d picked up at the pharmacy two years ago, which was still in my car door, under an ice scraper.
“I’d have been nicer,” I said.
“That’s what I said.”
By seven on Sunday the coffee was on and Anil was at my kitchen island with his phone face down and his jaw working. Valentina was making toast in my toaster like it was hers. Gemma was on the bottom stair, guarding it like a troll under a bridge.
Dad came down the hall at seven-twenty. He was using the wall and the back of a dining chair, and Bennett was walking beside him with his shoulder against Dad’s good leg. It took them two full minutes to cross a room I cross in six steps carrying laundry.
I’d watched that walk every morning for seven months. I’d thought the old man was letting the old dog set the pace.
It was the other way around, and it had been the whole time.
Anil watched it too. He had his coffee halfway up and didn’t drink it.
“I want you to see something,” I said to him.
“Kerri, I’m not doing a whole—”
“Sit down. You’re going to see it.”
I got a piece of cheese out of the fridge and walked to the stairs. Gemma scooted over. I went up six steps and sat, and I held the cheese out.
“Bennett. Come here, buddy.”
He looked at Dad first. Dad nodded.
Bennett came to the bottom step and put one front paw up. Then the other. Then his back end, the bad end, came up after them in a little hitch. He did it again. Second step. Third. The pills were working. The vet had said slowly and let him set the pace, and that’s what he was doing.
Valentina had stopped buttering. Anil had turned all the way around on the stool.
On the fourth step, Bennett stopped and looked back over his shoulder at Dad. Dad was standing at the end of the hall, holding the wall.
Bennett looked at the cheese. He looked at Dad again.
Then he turned around, which on a staircase is not a small thing for a dog with those hips, and came back down, one careful step at a time. He walked back across the kitchen, past my brother’s stool, and lay down on Dad’s foot.
He’d left the cheese, and he’s a dog who once ate a whole birthday candle.
“That’s what you booked for Monday,” I said. “That’s the dog who doesn’t know what day it is.”
Anil put his mug down. It hit the counter harder than he meant.
“I didn’t know any of that.”
“You knew he was ours. You knew Dad sleeps next to him. You found it embarrassing. You said so, to his face, at his birthday, with his granddaughter sitting there. You booked a stranger to kill his dog over his cake because the sleeping arrangements bothered you for one weekend a year.”
“That’s not—”
“It’s exactly what it was.”
“Kerri,” Valentina said, “he was trying to help.”
“Valentina, I love you,” I said, which wasn’t true, “but you said kinder to a man whose dog lay on his legs for hours on my hallway floor. So you can butter your toast.”
She put the knife down.
Anil stood up. I thought for a second he was leaving. He has always left. He left for college a week early, he left Mom’s wake to beat traffic, and he leaves every Christmas before the dishes.
He walked over to Dad instead. He had to step around Gemma, who didn’t move an inch to help him.
“Why didn’t you call me?” he said. His voice cracked in the middle. “You were on the floor for hours. Why didn’t you call me?”
“You’d have come down and done this,” Dad said.
That was when my brother broke. I hadn’t seen him cry since he was nine and fell off the Hendersons’ garage roof. He stood in my kitchen at fifty-one years old in his good quarter-zip and sobbed with his hands over his face, and nobody went to him. Not even his wife.
Dad finally said, “Sit down before you fall down. I can’t pick you up. Obviously.”
Gemma laughed, the wet kind. So did I.
Anil wiped his face on his sleeve, picked up his phone off the counter, and turned it over.
“What’s the number,” he said. “Valentina. The vet. What’s the number.”
Nine a.m. Monday
He called on speaker. He did it standing in the middle of my kitchen with all of us watching, and I believe he did that on purpose, which is the nicest thing I can say about my brother.
A woman answered. She was very gentle. Her job is being gentle.
“I need to cancel Monday,” Anil said. “The nine o’clock. Bennett.”
“Of course. I’m glad if he’s doing better.” A keyboard clicked. “I do have to tell you that within forty-eight hours of the appointment the fee isn’t refundable. That’s the two eighty-five.”
Anil looked at Dad.
“That’s fine,” he said. “Keep it.”
“Are you sure? Sometimes families want to reschedule rather than—”
“I’m sure. He’s going to die in his sleep on a dog bed next to my father in about five years. Thank you.”
He hung up. Two hundred eighty-five dollars, gone on a Sunday morning, and the dog had no idea he’d been bought and paid for.
Valentina left the room. I heard the guest-room door close, not slammed, but closed in a way that told you about it. Anil didn’t follow her. He pulled a chair out from my dining table, the same chair he’d tipped back in the night before, and set it down next to Dad’s.
“Get off your feet,” he said.
Dad lowered himself into it, slowly, holding Anil’s forearm the way he’d held Gemma’s in April. Bennett rearranged himself onto the other shoe.
Anil got down on one knee on my kitchen tile so he could see the brace.
“How bad is it?”
“It’s a knee.”
“Dad.”
“It’s bad.”
“Who’s seen it?”
Dad didn’t answer. Gemma did. “Nobody. He made me get the brace at Walgreens with my birthday money.”
I turned and looked at my father. “With her birthday money?”
“I paid her back.”
“In what?”
“Scratch tickets,” Gemma said. “I won four dollars.”
My father, ladies and gentlemen.
Anil had his phone out again. It was Sunday, so he was getting voicemails, but he’s a pharmaceutical sales rep, and if there is one thing that man owns it’s the cell numbers of orthopedists in eastern Iowa. By noon he’d reached one at home, out on a lake. By twelve-fifteen, the man had moved somebody.
“Monday,” Anil said, and put the phone down on the table. “Nine a.m. I’m driving.”
Nine a.m. Monday. Same hour he’d bought. He heard himself say it and looked at the floor.
Valentina took a ride back to Cedar Rapids with a friend Sunday afternoon and left Anil the car. Anil stayed. He slept in the guest room alone and was up before I was on Monday, standing in my driveway at seven-forty, scraping frost off his windshield with my ice scraper from my car door. He’d left the Sunnyview brochure on my passenger seat, folded in half, on top.
I picked it up, looked at him, and put it in my recycling bin. He watched me do it and nodded.
At eight-thirty Dad came down the hall on the wall and the chairs and the dog. Anil met him halfway and gave him his arm. They went out to the car like that, three of them, at the slowest pace I’ve ever seen anybody walk to a car.
“The dog’s coming?” Anil said.
“The dog’s coming,” Dad said.
“Dad, it’s a doctor’s office.”
“Then he’ll sit in a doctor’s office.”
Gemma got in the back without asking, because she’s twelve and was not about to miss this, and I’d already called the school. I took the passenger seat. Bennett went in last. Anil lifted his back end in for him, gently, the way you’d lift a sleeping kid out of a car seat. He didn’t test him like a cantaloupe this time.
At nine o’clock exactly we were in a waiting room in Dubuque with a fish tank and a television playing a home show on mute. Dad was in the chair by the door with his leg out. Bennett was on the floor in front of him, gray-faced, one ear up and one ear down, his chin on Dad’s shoe.
A nurse came out with a clipboard. “Ernest?”
Anil stood up first and held out his arm.
Dad looked at the arm. Then he looked across the room at Gemma, who was pretending to read a Golf Digest.
“You kept that promise a long time, sweetheart.”
“I broke it,” she said.
“You broke it at the right time.”
He took Anil’s arm and got up. Bennett got up with him.
“He can’t come back there, sir,” the nurse said.
“Then he’ll wait,” Dad said. “He’s good at it.”
At the hallway door, my brother turned around. His face was red and blotchy, and he looked about nine.
“Kerri. I’m sorry I said embarrassing.”
“I know,” I said. “Go hold his arm.”
Bennett lay back down across the doorway, where Dad would have to step over him on the way out, and put his chin on the floor.
Family loyalties can unravel in ways no one sees coming, whether it’s a husband taking money meant for his daughter, a fiancé’s mother facing the cost of her actions, or a promise of adoption falling apart at the altar.
