“Life’s a bit busy at the moment,” I tell her, sidestepping the bigger, harder conversation.
“Well, I’m sure you will get married, at some point. If you know that, it would be nice to do it sooner rather than later.”
“I don’t think it’s up to me,” I say, relieved that it truly isn’t. If Jake’s even thought about proposing, I don’t know about it.
“Does it scare you? To know that Jake may get ALS?”
She’s still not facing me. She’s crouched down, yanking at the ground. She has her own pile of weeds and it’s larger than mine, which makes me irrationally mad.
“I guess I don’t know that yet,” I say.
Now she turns around. “It’s a fact, though. There’s a fifty percent chance.”
“I understand.”
I leave it at that. I’m not prepared to think about this, let alone talk about it with her.
“If I had to give you one bit of advice,” she says, mistaking my silence as a request for that, “get a handicap-ready house when you buy a home. You know, support bars in the shower, by the toilet—the whole nine yards.”
I have a brief fantasy of troweling her in the head.
“And you might want to consider not having kids since the gene could get passed on. Or, even if it didn’t, you might end up a single parent,” she says, her thoughts a runaway train of tragedy. “You could always adopt.”
I feel something lurch in my stomach, like a baby kick, though it’s far too soon for that. Jake’s always said I feel everything in my stomach. Whenever I’m nervous or upset, I tell him I’m queasy or have no appetite. It’s like my code language.
I push myself up and dust off my jeans.
“I think I’m going to see what the boys are up to,” I say.
I gather my pile of weeds and add it to her pile. When I start walking away, to the front of the cabin where the garage is, Deb doesn’t follow. She continues pulling weeds, wrenching them out of the ground forcefully.
When I come around front, Jake and his father are staring at a lawn mower in the driveway. His father is looking on from his wheelchair, his throne, pointing and directing Jake.
“What’s going on here?” I say, sidling up to Jake.
“It’s broken,” Jake says. “The pull string snapped.”
“Damn pull string!” his father says, with a startling amount of anger. This may be how he gets through each day—getting mad at inanimate objects because he can.
“We’ll go to the hardware store, get another one,” Jake says, ever calm. “You can show me how to replace it.” It’s an offering he’s making, this opportunity for a father-son lesson.
“Damn pull string,” his father says again, quieter this time.
“We’ll leave after this, after I fix the lawn mower,” Jake says when we pull into the parking lot of the hardware store.
We are supposed to stay another night.
“They’re just going to busy us with weeds and lawn mowers. And besides, they have friends coming in,” he says. A moment later: “I thought this would happen.”
“What?”
“We’d come and then wonder why we did.”
“It’s fine, really.”
I don’t even know what I mean is “fine.” That we came? That we’re leaving? That I may worry every morning when I wake up, for the next however-many years, that Jake will get a weird feeling in his legs? That he may have a disease that atrophies his body and requires me to care for him before losing him completely? That our child may not have his father? I think we’re having a boy. I haven’t told Jake that yet, but I do.
“I won’t be the father he was—or wasn’t, or whatever,” Jake says.
“Don’t you think I already know what kind of father you’ll be?”
He shrugs. “Let’s get this stupid pull string.”
The hardware store smells musty, like an antique store. A couple of the overhead lights flicker. We’re the only customers, and it seems like they haven’t had any before us for the last twenty years. An older man with gray stubble on his chin smacks gum at the register. He’s listening to the radio, an oldies station, at an absurdly loud volume. He doesn’t look up at us. If it were me, I’d ask him where to find a lawn mower pull string, but Jake walks right by and starts exploring the aisles himself. It’s this stubbornness that gets us lost on road trips.
I follow him up and down the aisles. I watch him scan the shelves.
“Aha!” he says, grabbing a plastic box containing one lawn mower pull string.
He pays for it at the register, the old man taking his twenty-dollar bill and giving him change without making eye contact.
“Are you sure you want to leave early?” I ask when we’re in the car, heading back to the cabin.
“I’m sure. Unless you want to stay. And pull weeds.” He smiles. One of his top center teeth is just a bit crooked, attempting to slide in front of the other. Some people would call this a flaw, but I don’t. It just reminds me that he refused to wear his retainer as a teenager because, like I said, he’s stubborn.
“I’m ready if you are.”
We make the last turn, up the road to the cabin.
“He told me he’s close to hospice,” he says, slowing the car a bit. “They do these tests. A score of one hundred is normal. He was at eighty for a while. He just found out he’s around sixty now. And forty is hospice.”
“God, Jake,” I say.
We pull up to the house. His father is where we left him, his wheelchair parked on the driveway. He looks lonely just sitting there.
“I think I know what to say at the funeral now,” Jake says, staring out the front window.
“What?”
“That he would have been a good grandfather,” he says. “Because he would.”
To make things up to you, I think. Like a do-over.
I don’t know if someone who was not a good father can be a good grandfather, but I know Jake needs to believe in the possibility of this redemption. So I say, “That’s perfect.”
I try to envision the funeral, Jake in a black suit at the podium. It’s possible I’ll still be pregnant when Marco dies. Deb will be pleased if the baby comes before Marco goes. She will say the baby looks just like him, even if it’s not true at all.
Jake jumps out of the front seat and jogs to his father.
“You found it?” his father says, that Mancini smile spreading across his face.
Jake tosses the pull string into his father’s lap. His father looks so grateful. Or maybe it’s pride. He’s going to cry, I think.
“Alright, Dad,” Jake says. “Let’s get this thing going.”
what we cannot know
THREE WEEKS AFTER her father died, Deb found out that the very foundation of who she’d been for forty years was a lie.
Her father had died in his sleep at the age of eighty-five—a storybook ending if there ever was one. Deb’s mother had passed away the year before. It was sweet, really, the way her father seemed incapable of surviving without his wife.