We both laugh a little—that humorless chuckle people give when the next sound might be a cry.

* * *

I clear off the lunch plates while Adele goes into my father’s room to check on him. They are the same Corelle plates that served as our everyday ware back when I was a kid. I am a little surprised that they have survived all these years. Why is it that a visit to a childhood home turns common objects into jarring memory? The sight of a white glass plate with a seventies orange pattern has the power to drag me into my childhood. Sitting here in Adele’s kitchen, I am thrust backward in time. I have been gone so long, it should have changed utterly, but instead I see the same plates, the familiar cookie jar with the very same chip out of the lid. The clock on the wall is a three-dimensional memory, bringing me back to the hours spent watching it as I struggled through homework or sat there, being forced to consume some hard green vegetable left on my plate. Or to the night that I waited while my father and Adele argued over the story that I was telling them; argued over whether or not to act. I waited for them to do something the night I came home from my date with Paul’s best friend. Waited for them to finally decide that I was being a big baby and order me to take a shower and go to bed. Nothing had happened that didn’t happen on a date with a college boy, a grown man. A man with a good upbringing. A man whose father was my father’s employer.

I pull myself out of this self-indulgent funk. The clock becomes just a clock. I wash and dry the plates and put them away, noting that they are the last two of the set. That’s all they need anyway. They have managed to grow old together, my father and our neighbor. They have more than doubled the number of years that my father was with my mother.

It was as if my mother vanished. One moment, we were sitting in our kitchen; the next, she was on the floor. I can’t remember anything more except the way the ambulance driver took me by the shoulder and made me sit on the kitchen chair, out of the way. We’d been baking cookies; it was almost Christmas and my mother was trying out a recipe for a new kind. I don’t know who called the ambulance. I don’t remember my father’s being there, but I guess he was. It is a seamless memory, going from hoping my mother would let me have the leftover cookie dough to standing in a line at the funeral home.

* * *

I flop onto that creamy white couch beside my grubby duffel bag and listen to the soft murmur of conversation coming from Paul’s old room. I’m here, but who cares? Adele demanded that I come, and now she acts like I’ve invaded her home. Again. For the first time, I wonder whose idea it was for me to be here. Who convinced Adele and my father that I should be a member of the club that will witness his slow slide into death when I haven’t been a meaningful part of their lives in years? I’m clearly an unwanted guest, and my father has nothing to say to me.