Tea With Dad Page 2

  It was: “I’ve decided. You’re moving in with me. I’m selling that house.”

  I felt, then processed, as much as my brain was capable of handling through layers of depression-related numbness. I started to formulate an argument against my father’s plan. But for the first time in years—I tried to count how many, but it took too long—my heart recognized and embraced the blessed absence of anxiety and fear. This time I had no desire to prepare a defense or to plead one.

  I’d hit bottom. Dad knew it, and now I accepted it, though we had not discussed how bad things were for me then. Any rational being observing me and my life at that time would have seen that it was not just about the taxes. It was about everything, so my response to my father’s stepping in this time was different than it had been in the past.

  I did not rail against crossed boundaries or parental interference as I had in the past. I did not feel judged. I didn’t have the sense of giving up before I did everything I could to remedy the situation. Instead, I felt rescued and trusted that all would be well. I found it uncharacteristically easy to finally loosen my grip from the edge of the roof atop the flaming house of cards I’d been clinging to, trust, and then free-fall into the net he held. I felt only relief. I was grateful someone had intervened. I was glad it was him. I let go and responded without hesitation, albeit weakly: “Okay.”

  And to myself, I said, “I surrender.”

  PART I

  Coming back is the thing that enables you to see how all the dots in your life are connected, how one decision leads you to another, how one twist of fate, good or bad, brings you to a door that later takes you to another door, which aided by several detours—long hallways and unforeseen stairwells—eventually puts you in the place you are now.

  —ANN PATCHETT, What Now?

  CHAPTER 1

  Permanent Change of Station

  THE MOVE to Dad’s house made sense given my situation, but I hated that it was unfolding this way. I had always planned to move closer to him as he aged, but now, rather than a neat segue from living nearby to moving in with him once he could not take care of himself, history was repeating. I had again “gotten myself into so much trouble” that I needed his help. Based on this history, I feared the loss of the ability to make choices for myself. I knew that moving in with Dad was not going to be easy for either of us. If it didn’t go well, there was no going back. How do you say, “This isn’t working, I’m leaving,” to an aging parent who rescued you, especially if you believed you had nowhere else to go?

  When I packed up and moved closer to Dad in the summer of 2008, two years after my mother’s death, I seemed, on most fronts, to be a highly functioning adult. No longer married and an empty nester—one daughter had a family of her own and the other two were away at college—I could run my business as a writer and consultant for online media companies anywhere I could find an internet connection. It made sense to live near him. He was in his late seventies then and in good health, short of slightly high blood pressure. He still worked out daily to remain fit and trim and played eighteen holes of golf every day weather permitting.

  But I worried that my father’s strength and stamina had been drained after caring for Mom during her last six months of life as they battled her cancer together. I’d wanted to help him if he’d let me should the need arise. Also, I felt even more disconnected from him since Mom’s death.

  In the beginning I blamed grief, but I began to realize that though grief might be part of it, the long drive from Washington, DC, to his place was not the only distance I had to travel. We didn’t really know one another very well anymore, and I sensed a wall between us, built brick by brick, without much notice by either of us, over the course of my life. Mom, I realized then, had moved easily from one side of the wall to the other, sometimes through it, delivering messages, updates, explanations, and translations.

  I hoped that living closer to Dad as he aged would facilitate his becoming more comfortable with relying on me. I hoped he’d accept me as a constant part of his life more easily if the move were gradual, rather than if I suddenly descended when he became ill or could not take care of himself. I felt I needed to find a place in his life.

  I did not disclose the other reason. I wanted to avoid the mistake I’d made with Mom. I had not spent enough time with her before her death. And the time I had spent had not been saying the things I had needed to say or hearing those things she might have wanted to say to me. Since my mother died, my sense of loss had grown to encompass the fear of even more disconnection from my father and, I was afraid, from my two younger brothers. My family. I wanted as much time as there was left to spend with Dad. I wanted it to be good time, too.

  After Mom died, we returned to our old habits of weekly phone calls, though unlike the one- and two-hour calls my mother and I had had, Dad’s and mine were short.

  “Hi, Dad. How are you?”

  “Oh, it’s you, Nancie. Just sitting here watching the television. How are you? How are the girls?”

  I’d fill him in on the kids’ activities and tell him stories I knew would amuse him. He’d listen and then say, “Well, I don’t want to keep you. You get back to those girls. Talk to you soon. Love you now. Bye.”

  I’d stare at the receiver. Our phone calls were more like military briefings.

  “All things good? Excellent. Carry on.”

  I decided that Dad should never spend a major holiday alone. On Thanksgiving, Christmas, Easter, and his birthday, I drove out with at least one or two of the girls in tow (whichever ones were not visiting their fathers), bringing a turkey, potatoes, vegetables, rolls, stuffing, and all the fixings. I’d cook at his house. And since Dad lived so near the beach, we’d spend as many weekends there during the summer that our schedule (and he) would allow.

  With the kids’ differing and often-competing schedules, let alone Dad’s own schedule, I feared it would become harder just to get together, let alone maintain a relationship. I worried that he was aging and lived alone in such an isolated area.

  A medical emergency tipped the scale in the direction of my decision to live near him on a permanent basis.

  Dad called one Sunday afternoon. No hello, of course. “Guess where I am,” he commanded cheerfully.

  “I have no idea, Dad. Where are you?” I played along.

  “In the emergency room,” he answered, as though he were calling to tell me he’d been playing golf and got a hole-in-one.

  “Oh my God! What happened? I’ll be right out,” I told him while my eyes scanned all surfaces in the room for my purse and keys.

  “Oh, don’t worry, I’m headed home now. I had a nosebleed because of the medicine I’ve been taking. They cauterized the bleeder. I’ll call the doctor tomorrow. I thought you’d want to know,” he told me.

  “I do want to know,” I said, “but before you’re released! Preferably before you go to the hospital in the first place!”

  “You get too worked up,” he laughed. “I’m fine.”

  “Dad, I can be to you in two hours. Two-and-a-half at the most. Please call me when you’re ill.”

  “Yeah, yeah. Have a great night. Just wanted you to know I’m okay.”

  Later that afternoon, Dad called again.

  “Can I take you up on your offer to come out here?” he asked. He sounded weak.

  “I’m on my way. What’s happening?” My purse and keys were ready since I gathered them right after his last call. I headed to the door.

  “My nose is still bleeding, and it’s been more than an hour. I can’t get it to stop.”

  “Dad, do you think you need to call an ambulance? I’m on my way, but if you become weak or think you need help, call 911. I’ll find you.”

  “I’m fine. I don’t need an ambulance, but I can’t drive myself there. Oh, while you’re on your way, can you pick me up some chicken nuggets from McDonalds? I haven’t eaten all day.”

  I headed out the door, calling him every fifteen minutes to make sure
he was still conscious as well as to gather enough information if I needed to call 911 myself. Except for being hungry and annoyed with me for calling so often, he said he was fine. As I drove east on Route 50, I looked for fast-food drive-thru lines that were short so I could pick up his chicken nuggets.

  I found him, lying back in his recliner, his shirt and Bermuda shorts covered with blood. That I was the only one close enough to call is ironic to say the least, since one of the myths in my family is “Nancie’s terrified of blood. That’s why she didn’t become a nurse.”

  A singular bloody episode perpetuated the myth of my alleged fear of blood. It happened at Fort Carson, Colorado, after I returned home from college the summer after my freshman year. My mother and I were in the kitchen making sandwiches when I reached across the clutter on the kitchen counter to grab something. I did not see the empty aluminum can, which was open, its sharp-edged lid standing upright. I didn’t feel the slice across my wrist, but I said, “Oh no!” loud enough that my mother turned to see what I described as a “geyser of blood” shooting into the air from my wrist. My mother claimed to have seen only “a little blood” dripping from my wrist onto the floor. The truth lying somewhere in between, there was enough blood that she ran to me and grabbed a dish towel to stem the crimson tide of flowing liquid from my dainty wrist while calling for my father, who ran into the kitchen. At least that’s how I remember things before I fainted from all the attention.

  As my mother waved smelling salts under my nose, which she always seemed to have handy, I heard my father say, “No guts, no glory, Nancie.”

  I want to clarify that I am not afraid of other people’s blood, just my own, though when my second husband told me that he couldn’t handle someone vomiting, I was happy to negotiate the division of responsibilities related to the handling of our children’s bodily fluids. I’d take care of wet and dirty diapers as well as their vomit if he would manage bloody injuries. For years, my children would scream as though they were dying when bloody from some fall or encounter with a sharp object, but as we ran to them, they would say, “It’s okay, Mom, this one’s for Daddy.”

  As for my having dropped my major in nursing, it had nothing to do with blood. Some other bright and shiny major just caught my attention. That’s all.

  Dad watched me warily from his recliner, seeking any sign that I might faint. “Should I change my clothes first?” he asked.

  “No, we can’t take the time. Here are your nuggets, Dad. You can eat them as we drive in the car. We’re going straight there.”

  I was angry as I helped Dad to the car—him in his blood-soaked shirt and shorts, with soaked cotton hanging out of his nose, clutching his greasy, scrunched up bag of chicken nuggets. I wanted staff in the emergency room to see the blood on his clothes. I wanted them to reflect on having released my father before they’d fixed the problem and what it had done to him. Also, I knew the sight of that much blood would get us through ER triage faster.

  As I suspected, they took us right in to the treatment area after they asked us what the problem was, and I pointed to his bloody clothes.

  “He was just here earlier today,” I said with rather testy countenance. “His records are probably still up on the screen in there.”

  Dad and I spent the next few hours behind a curtain waiting for a doctor or nurse to tell us what the problem would be or to give us a sense of how long we’d have to wait. I knew better than to complain. It would have upset Dad. He is a patient man by nature, but his life in the military reinforced this as well as the age-old principle of ‘hurry up and wait.’ And I knew the nature of emergency rooms, having spent many hours in them given my past experiences as a nursing student and a crisis counselor attending hallucinating, drugged up, or suicidal clients, and my time accompanying rural rescue squads in my earlier lives.

  I knew that the nurses, physician assistants, and orderlies weren’t sitting around playing cards. They were all occupied with the intake and care of patients or entering the required and necessary information into the computers to assure continuity of quality care. I also knew that we’d arrived during a change of shift, which complicated things a bit more. So when he queried me on what was happening, I just smiled at Dad and shrugged my shoulders with a “what can you do?” attitude, trying to be as calm and as cheerful as I could.

  Though Dad’s nose still bled, I could tell from reading the machines he was attached to that his oxygen level, pulse, and blood pressure were fine given the situation. Periodically, he would gag as though to vomit. I would put my arm behind him to help him sit up. At first, I was surprised that he accepted my assistance so easily. At one point he vomited a clot that looked like a serving of raw liver. I grabbed a nearby kidney dish, caught it, and discretely moved it to the side cabinet placing a paper towel over it. I laughed to myself as I remembered my famous fainting scene years before. All guts, no glory in this situation, I thought.

  When the doctor finally pulled open the curtain and walked in, I asked him to look at the clot in the kidney pan that I’d placed on the counter. He lifted the paper towel and asked, “Who left this here?”

  “She did,” said my father pointing at me. I wasn’t sure if it was an accusation or a moment of pride.

  By the time Dad was treated and released and I had driven him home, I’d made the decision to move from northern Virginia to be near him. I was determined that he would never be alone in an ER or hospital again. I said nothing of my plans to him because he would have tried to discourage me.

  Once home, I began to look at real estate ads right away and planned my move. Then one day, Dad mentioned his intention to sell the rental property that he owned in a resort community near Ocean City, Maryland. Before he and Mom had moved from Delaware, this had been the place my brothers and I would visit (with our families) during the summers.

  I pounced.

  “Dad,” I said, “don’t sell the house. Rent it to me. You can continue to build equity. I’ll restore and update things. It will keep me busy.”

  He didn’t object. I wanted to pay the going rental rate, but Dad insisted on charging only the mortgage payment plus utilities. “I’m not out to make money on this. You’re my daughter for God’s sake.”

  It was a good deal. He didn’t have to sell an asset. I had a place I could afford to plant myself and putter. We would live close enough to check in on one another with a half-hour distance to maintain our privacy, independence, and emotional space. My father and I share a healthy respect for boundaries.

  We called it “the beach house” due to its location in a resort community about six miles from the beach. It rested near a bay separated from the ocean by the main coastal highway. Though our house was not on the bay, it was close to channels that led out to the bay. There were amenities such as a golf course, a yacht club—though I saw many good-sized boats, I never saw a yacht—swimming pools, some shopping and restaurants nearby, and our family favorite, the beach club, which had its own pool, restrooms, and showers, and a cute restaurant to boot. I envisioned many summer reunions with my daughters and their children. It would be easier to nurture family relationships.

  It was everything I needed and wanted then. A single-story house with no stair climbing—a relief after the townhouse I’d lived in with my daughters after my ex-husband and I sold the house we’d lived in for the last thirteen years of our marriage. No need to worry about toting heavy laundry baskets, boxes of books, or vacuums up and down flights of stairs. The kitchen was large enough, and with my ex-husband’s help, I turned the small breakfast nook across the hall from the kitchen into my office. It was perfect. The window provided a nice view as well as light. The room’s size allowed for my two wingback chairs, a lamp table, a bookcase, and a desk with shelves. I would spend about 65 percent of my time in that room.

  The great room with cathedral ceilings had enough space for both family and dining areas. The screened-in sun porch promised a place for chairs, game table, and daybed for those who
wanted to take advantage of the breezes on the large wooded lot. With three bedrooms, I imagined I’d be turning away visitors.

  It was also two-and-a-half hours away from my old life. As I had during each change of station the whole time I grew up as a military brat, I viewed the move as a new start. A new me. No looking back, no past sins traveling with me. I could start fresh. Rest. Have time to think. Get my bearings. This time I knew no one, except my father, and I liked it that way. I worked remotely, traveling only if necessary. Outside of my remote work, I maintained contact with friends and family via phone and social media.

  For the next five years that I lived in the little “beach house,” I maintained my public persona easily. No one local knew me. Business trips and friends’ visits were infrequent. I worked hard to present the image of a busy and successful businesswoman with a full-time, work-at-home career not far from the ocean.

  I left the house if necessary and then only as proof of life (though selfies worked, too) to shop for food and wine or to visit Dad. Amazon is an enabler for agoraphobes. If they’d delivered groceries back then and I had joined an online wine club, you might be reading a different story.

  In the beginning, I enjoyed exploring and getting to know the area. I’d drive to Assateague and walk the beach, hoping to see the horses. I’d stumble upon little ecosystems among the brush and encounter herons or ducks. But after a few visits from some girlfriends and my daughters during the summer, things quieted down. My youngest didn’t come out on college breaks. Both transportation and work were easier to find in the DC area where her sisters and father lived. I soon settled into a quiet and solitary routine. My only real contact was Dad a few times a month.