Peace at Last, fiction by Richard Cass

The night my father finally died, my mother and Janice and I were eating Greek food at one of the round Formica tables in the function room of the care facility, which was little used. People who came to the skilled nursing section didn’t stay long. They either healed or died. And either way, they were not in a mood to socialize.

My mother was struggling with her pita pocket sandwich. The dressing and the moisture from the vegetables had softened the bread until it split and spilled the contents onto the waxed paper wrapping. She threw the mess down on the table and held her yogurt-smeared hands up in the air.

“Won’t someone help me?”

I grabbed a handful of napkins and knelt next to her wheelchair.

“I’m sorry, Tommy. I can’t seem to hold it together.”

I wiped her gnarled hands clean, the cheap paper napkins shredding and shedding bits on the floor like snow.

“We never wanted to be a burden to you, you know,” she said.

Which was why, I supposed, they left the family in New York and moved to Key West, the southernmost city in the United States, and as far from us in Seattle as you could be in North America. I believed my parents had been surprised by parenthood, how it infringed on the life they’d imagined for themselves at Woodstock, at Altamont, in Golden Gate Park.

What I could not say to them, to her now, was that separating themselves became a different kind of burden, a sad routine of weekly phone calls reporting trivial news, the occasional strenuous expedition down from Seattle that made us all wish, a day later, we were home. And, as now, the occasional oh-shit visit for a health scare. Or worse.

“We’re family. Mother. We’re supposed to be a burden to each other.”

She pushed what she liked to call her glory, her long silver hair, back behind her ears. The silver half-moon earrings shimmered.

“You always were the clever one,” she said.

Felipe, the evening orderly, stepped into the room and nodded at me.

“Mr. Thomas. Please.”

Janice ran a cup of water from the sink, took more napkins, and continued to clean my mother’s hands.

I rose from my knees and registering Felipe’s solemn expression, followed him down a long cool dim hallway to my father’s room.

Where my father no longer lived. The hard thump in my chest staggered me and I sat in the black vinyl visitor’s chair before my knees gave way.

My father’s body sprawled on the half-inclined bed, a thin waffle-weave blanket twisted around his swollen ankles like a snare. The generic flowered hospital johnny barely covered his sapling-thin thighs. His eyes were closed, his thin white hair awry, and the skin on his arms was clouded with purple bruise, as if he’d been fighting. The tube to the catheter he’d worn for months was clear, trailing out to an empty plastic bag hung on the bed rail. His expression said, or I wanted it to say, peace at last.

Felipe stood in the doorway, his hands folded in front of his crotch, as if blocking the view of death from anyone passing by, denying the inevitable.

“He passed in his sleep.” Felipe intended it as a comfort.

“He died.”

I hated that expression “passing,” the word leaching power from the truth of what happened. My father had not passed out, passed gas, passed by, or anything else. He’d died and left the earth.

“They both have an arrangement,” I said. “With the crematorium people? They paid in advance.”

“Of course.” Felipe was solemn as a priest. “The facility will take care of everything.”

And being Janice’s husband, I remembered stories of valuables going missing in the aftermath of a nursing home death.

I stood up, pulled open the drawer of the side table next to the bed and collected my father’s watch, the wallet he insisted on keeping though he hadn’t worn trousers for months. And I stiffened when I saw what was not there, checked my father’s hand.

Felipe regarded me with flat brown eyes. The air in the room thickened. I stepped away, out the door, away from my father forever.

* * *

“It’s not that it’s so valuable,” I said to Janice.

She’d finished cleaning Mother up and was sitting by a window looking out at the magenta bougainvillea. I’d whispered to her that my father had died and she’d nodded. An odd sense of elevation crept into me, as if I’d been promoted to a position beyond my skills and experience, into a job I hadn’t sought.

My father acquired the ring, a single silver heart mounted on a thin band, the summer the family camped in Mexico. I was thirteen, aching to be anywhere but with my parents and sister in a musty Army surplus tent in the dusty Oaxacan heat. I remembered thinking how feminine it looked on his hand, how bright against the tanned skin. Out of character, as were the angry words I overheard my mother say: “What else did she give you, you bastard?”

“You’ll have to decide how important it is to you,” Janice said. “We’re more than our things. It’s more important to tell her he’s dead.”

Mother’s chin was down on her chest, as if she were sleeping.

“We should wake her. It won’t be easier to wait.”

“Do you want me to tell her?”

I flushed with love. I was tempted.

“My responsibility. To be honest, I’m not sure how well she’s tracking things. But she shouldn’t be surprised.”

* * *

“Oh, his corporeal self has long since passed,” Mother said. “But you don’t really die as long as someone remembers you.”

I felt Janice not rolling her eyes.

“We’ve taken care of him,” I said.

I couldn’t think of a gentle way to say it. His body? His corpse? His remains?’

“I don’t want the ashes,” she said. “What would I do with them?”

She lifted her head, the fine skin on her neck like crumpled tissue paper.

“But I will say his name out loud every day. I will not forget him.”

“I know, Mother.” My tears prickled. “Neither will we.”

“Why aren’t your children here?”

“They’re in school, Mother. We couldn’t pull them out.”

We wouldn’t for grandparents so uninterested in them. Neither my mother nor my father had shown any of the grandparents’ delight I saw in the faces of my friends’ parents.

“They ought to be here. Absorb some of your father’s essence while it’s still in the air.”

Behind my mother’s back, Janice did roll her eyes.

“You know what I’d die for?” my mother said. “A cortado from Tio Pepe. Would you bring me one?”

* * *

Janice lost her father to pancreatic cancer when she was ten, her mother at fourteen. But she must have forgotten how raw a time this was, the years scarring over those losses.

“She’s the center of attention now.” She folded our clean clothes in the guest apartment the care center rented to visiting families. “Her husband of forty-five years dies and she wants you to bring her coffee? She doesn’t need us to worry about her.”

She shook out the wrinkles from a polo shirt.

“She’s trying to grieve,” I said. “I don’t think either one of them ever believed the fun would end: the music, the beaches, the freaky friends. Boat drinks, for god’s sake. It’s a little pathetic.”

“Like a tramp stamp on an eighty-year old.”

She flapped down in an armchair.

“And she won’t talk about the financial situation? Does she realize his Social Security stops now? That’s half her income. Does she expect us to support her?”

Janice was as practical as you’d expect an accountant to be. But this was not the time for this conversation.

“Love. My father’s gone. I can’t add more weight to her shoulders right now.”

Janice stood up, zipped the suitcase closed, and stored it in the closet.

“If your mother’s feeling anything more than the need for coffee, she’s hiding it well.”

I let it go. Arguing with Janice was never a win.

* * *

The care facility conducted a small service of remembrance. Because patients did not stay in the skilled nursing section long, the nurses hadn’t known my father well. The doctors didn’t show at all, but some of my parents’ acquaintances from the residential side attended.

One of them, a self-anointed lay minister, maundered in a generic ramble about life and death and memory. When he trotted out the “ashes to ashes” quote, I left the room to keep from laughing, thinking of the cremation to come. Everyone, Janice included, would assume grief had overtaken me.

My mother sat in the front row, staring a blown-up photo of my father in his forties, riding a surfboard out on the North Shore of Oahu. His long black hair streamed out behind him in the wind and the silver ring winked, a bright dot of light in the monochrome print.

An old man with a thinning gray pony tail played Hallelujah on a vintage Martin, and we were done. Several of the acquaintances stopped to touch her shoulder or murmur a few words. Her focus never wavered, even when the faux preacher sketched a cross over her.

* * *

We were saying goodbye to my mother when Felipe brought in her breakfast tray. I stared at him, sure he had stolen my father’s ring. Janice wanted me to drop it. We’d talked to a gerontologist who told us Mother might have twenty more good years and we’d argued about what to do.

“You know we could find you a nice place closer to us,” I said.

Janice made a small noise in her throat. My mother looked up from her wheelchair, her eyes clear as water.

“Oh, Tommy. All my friends are here.”

Janice relaxed. The guitar player from the service walked into the room as if he’d been there before. He wore a pastel green bowling shirt.

“Oh, I’m sorry.”

“No, Eddie. Stay. They’re just leaving.”

“We’ll try and get down to see you more often. The kids are so busy.”

Eddie walked around behind my mother’s chairs and placed his hands on the handles. Silver flashed on his left pinkie finger, my father’s heart-shaped ring. My mother reached up and took his hand, lacing her fingers in Eddie’s.

Rage rose in my throat, the first rage of grief. Janice laid a cool hand on my arm.

“Your father was a generous man, Tommy.” She turned Eddie’s hand this way and that so the ring caught the light. “But Eddie will take good care of me. Won’t you, darling?”

Richard Cass is the author of the Elder Darrow jazz mystery series, which has won the Maine Literary Award for Crime Fictionand the Nancy Pearl Librarians’ Prize for Genre Fiction. The seventh and final book in the series, Closing Time, was published in October, 2024. Dick has also published a thriller called The Last Altruist. His short fiction has appeared in Tough, Shotgun Honey and Best Short Stories of the American West.