Mack would love this couch. If he were here, as he should be, I could tuck his body up close to mine. I would tuck his body up close and rest my head on the fine triangle of his skull. He would sigh and be happy to be held. I press a hand against my chest, where I can feel my heart squeeze down on itself each time I realize that Mack could be anywhere and that I may never find him. Or nowhere and that there’s no point in searching for him. I can’t think that way. I just can’t.

I flip my phone open, hoping that by some quirk I have missed the call that will tell me where my dog is. No missed calls. No voice mails. No answers.

I hear the murmuring and the sound of a toilet flushing, then the click-roll of a walker being pushed down the short hallway. My father always prided himself on his height and his posture, but the glimpse I have of him now is that of a hunched-over old man who is gripping the handles of the walker and eking his way down the threadbare wall-to-wall carpet of the hall. This disease has reduced him to an old man even though I know he’s not more than seventy. Isn’t seventy the new fifty? It’s what I tell myself when I think of going over the crest of forty-five, the short descent to fifty. If Adele, five years older than my father, looks her age, my father looks like someone else’s idea of an old man.

There is a moment of suspension as the pair of them, father and stepmother, simultaneously look at me without smiling and then continue on their way down the narrow hall.

“Do you need my help?” I call out to them as I push off the couch.

“No.” Adele, as always, answers for both of them.

Did I mistake the desire for my presence with what was only a courtesy call? Fulfilling the social expectation that a daughter be notified of her father’s impending death? Was the truth of it that I risked everything on what amounted to manners? Or that Adele was calling my bluff?

The air in this living room is stifling, close. The windows are closed against the mild September day. Suddenly, I can’t breathe in here. I bolt out of the front door and stand on the chipped front step, sucking in breath after breath. I can’t make myself go back in there. I have come all this way, and sacrificed the being I love best next to my absent son—for what? To be revisited by every bad memory I’ve worked so hard to grow beyond? This is a haunted house, and I don’t have to be here.

19

I have no place to go, so I sit on the front steps and wish that I smoked, so that it would look at least like I’m outside for a purpose. I pick at the weeds that are growing at the base of the steps. Ugly, unwanted things, more green than the summer-burned grass. Hardy fools. Thinking that they are welcome.