At first, I think Jake’s trying to hurt him, this man who can’t even walk from his bed to the bathroom in the middle of the night. But that’s not his style. That’s my style—subtle insults, comments with layers of meaning. Jake’s a much better person than I am, truly. He’s not reminding his father of his illness; he’s telling him that he’s doing enough with his strong legs for the both of them.
“That’s great, Jake. Really great,” his father says. When he smiles, the creases around his eyes deepen and the folds of skin below his lower eyelids arc upward. It looks like his eyes are smiling too. Jake got this from him.
“Jake has taken me on so many adventures,” I say. “I complain endlessly on those hikes, but he never does.”
Jake puts his arm around me, pulls me into his side. His father looks on at us with pride. When Jake brought up the idea of coming up here, I thought it was for this reason—to give his father some happiness. But Jake had said as we packed the car in the morning, “I don’t really want to go. I just want to be able to live with myself after he dies. Is that bad?” I’d said, “No,” because I want him to be able to sleep at night. I want him to feel like he did enough, tried enough, so he doesn’t get choked up with guilt when our child asks him about the father he hardly knew.
“How’s your mother doing?” his father asks. To this question, coming from friends and family, Jake used to say “She’s fine” or “As good as can be expected.” Now he’s tired of that, tired of anything less than the complete truth.
“She’s not great.”
I rub Jake’s back with my hand.
“You’re just getting it from all sides,” his father says, shaking his head.
Deb brings a bread basket to the dining room table and says, “Food’s on.” She is one of those people who considers entertaining a hobby. She has special dinnerware and takes time to fold cloth napkins and arrange forks and knives just so.
Jake’s father zooms over to the table, to the spot that doesn’t have a chair. Deb sits next to him, and we sit across from the two of them. Bruno lies at Jake’s father’s feet. He must slip him food regularly.
“So, how did you guys meet?” Deb asks, dishing out chicken and pasta onto Marco’s plate.
“Last year, we both went out to Joshua Tree for this rock climbing course. Alone,” Jake says.
“I can’t even tell you what compelled me to try rock climbing. I was just looking for something new, I guess,” I say. We love this story—remembering it, telling it.
“On the first day of the course, I saw her and thought she was beautiful. She partnered up with a woman in the class, and I didn’t get the nerve to even talk to her until the end of the day.”
“He overheard me saying I lived in Manhattan Beach and said he lived there too, so we should join the climbing gym. I mean, you need a partner for rock climbing, so it made sense.”
“I met up with her at the climbing gym, and we started going twice a week, just getting to know each other.”
It’s true—we were just getting to know each other. I hadn’t even thought of Jake that way at first, because of the height issue. I’d always said I wanted someone taller than me, someone to make me feel small. Then one day, at the gym, I got teary-eyed about my grandma passing away and Jake hugged me. I’d never felt so small, so contained, before.
“I would have thought he’d move faster to snag you. His dad sure did back in 1987,” Deb says, with her laugh.
I watch Jake do the calculation in his head—1987. Jake was eight. His parents were still married. Perhaps his father’s final months are for confessions, requests for forgiveness.
Jake clears his throat, says, “I didn’t realize you two knew each other then.”
Deb doesn’t seem bothered by the math that verifies an affair. She just goes on:
“We worked in the same office. You know how those things go. We didn’t end up together then because you and your sister were just kids. I wasn’t interested in being a mom.”
I put my hand on Jake’s arm. I resent this woman, suddenly, on his behalf. She wanted Jake’s father all to herself. She wanted fancy dinners and nights at the theater and spontaneous sex, not boxed mac and cheese and homework assignments and story time before bed. His father doesn’t seem offended by this revelation, which makes me resent him too.
“We found our way back to each other though,” his father says, smiling at her. Maybe he was never there for Jake because he spent years chasing Deb.
A noodle drops from his father’s mouth to his shirt. Deb dips her napkin in a glass of water and starts dabbing at the marinara stain. I’m more judgmental than Jake, more callous. Perhaps it’s not my place to say what a proper love story is. Deb bathes Marco, helps him in and out of bed, cooks him chicken cacciatore, cleans his ears with Q-tips. She pulled on the jeans he’s wearing and buttoned his collared shirt and tied the laces of his shoes. It would be hard to argue that isn’t love. When all is said and done, she got exactly what she wanted—Marco, all to herself.
We eat in silence, except for the sounds of forks against plates and Bruno licking his paw.
“Everything taste okay?” Deb says.
“Great,” I say. “Thank you.” Jake doesn’t say anything.
“Jake, I wanted to talk to you about something. And your sister too. I wanted to tell her in person, but she can’t seem to find the time to meet up,” his father says.
“What is it?” Jake says.
“Well, it’s about my disease.”
I think he’s going to tell us it’s progressing faster than normal, that time is running out.
“As you may know, most cases of ALS are of undetermined cause, but some are genetic.”
“Familial,” Deb says, a piece of chicken on the end of her fork.
This is news to me, and I assume it’s news to Jake too. We’ve always talked about ALS as “just one of those awful diseases,” something random, not fated.
“We had some testing done to find out the source of mine. My mother died of ALS. I think I’ve told you that,” he says.
“No, you hadn’t,” Jake says. I can see the muscles in his jaw tighten. I move my hand to his thigh.
“She died when she was fifty-six,” Deb says, like she’s the keeper of the Mancini family history.
“Not surprisingly, it turns out I have the genetic kind. The familial kind.”
“What does that mean?” Jake asks.
“It means you and your sister have a fifty percent chance of having the gene,” his father says.
“And if you have the gene, you will develop ALS at some point in your life,” Deb says. She’s matter-of-fact—too matter-of-fact. My face gets hot.
“So, what? I might inherit this from you?” Jake says.
There is the difference between Jake and me—I would say this with undisguised spite; he says it with perfect calm. I squeeze his thigh.
“There’s a chance,” his father says.
“A fifty percent chance,” Deb says.
You already said that, I want to scream. I want them to shut up. I want to stick my thumbs in my ears like a child. I’ve always imagined Jake and I growing old together. After years spent raising our child—our children—and then sending them off to college, to their own happy and healthy lives, we would enjoy the quiet again, on the couch, under the blanket my mom knitted and gave us when we moved in together. We’d be grateful for this life, these simple moments we created together. It will have all seemed to have gone by so fast. And, if one of us were to get sick—with one of the many things people get when they live too long—it would be me. He’d take care of me. Because he always does. He buys me soup when I have a cold and checks to ensure it’s made with vegetable broth, not chicken. He washes and folds my laundry without me even knowing about it; clean clothes just show up in the drawers. On cold nights, when I’ve kicked off the quilt in the fit of a dream, he pulls it up and wraps it around me. I pretend to sleep through this, but I know.