They May Not Mean To, But They Do

55

In the weeks that followed, Duncan’s grandchildren and sons and daughters-in-law all returned home, but Pamela and Laurel stayed on. Their father lay unconscious in a hospital bed, and they sat every day, one on either side of him, discussing the disposition of his property. Freddie explained to them that he had no property to speak of, but they spoke of it anyway. There was the jewelry, their mother’s jewelry, which had never been distributed. It was costume jewelry, but you never knew. And there were Duncan’s watches, vintage watches that had become valuable. Not to mention his life insurance, which was all paid up years ago, and his car.

“He sold the car after his last accident,” Freddie said.

“Well, then, the proceeds…”

“For scrap. He sold it for scrap. Can we discuss this somewhere else? Or not at all?”

“Oh, he can’t hear a thing, can you, Dad?” said Pamela. “And if you could, you wouldn’t mind, would you? He certainly can’t take care of all these details himself, Freddie.”

“We’re being practical,” Laurel said. “Someone has to.”

Freddie went to the hospital every day, too, but one day slid seamlessly into the next, her father the same, his chest moving up with great effort and, then, with equal effort, down. His cheeks had sunk into his skull, he got no better, he got no worse. Her sisters had moved out of their hotel room into his room at Green Garden.

“I know they’re going through his things,” Freddie told Molly. “It’s ghoulish.”

Molly was kind and distracted, the distraction perhaps making her kinder than she would ordinarily be. The argument with her mother had shaken her.

“It was only a day, only a little quarrel, I know, but it was almost as if she had died. I don’t want her to die. I don’t want your father to die. It’s a very messed-up system, death. I don’t like it at all.”

She was gone a lot of the time, too, taking her summer field session students to Catalina Island to drag sensors behind kayaks, measuring the temperature, looking for fresh water feeding into the ocean. The first year she taught this class, one of the students had asked her which ocean it was. This year the group was smart and dedicated, although when she pointed out the bay where Natalie Wood drowned, they asked who Natalie Wood was.

“It made me feel so old,” she said.

But she and Freddie both knew that until their parents died, they would still be the children.