The Corrections

During his visit home in March he’d been appalled by how much his father had deteriorated in the few weeks since Christmas. Alfred seemed forever on the verge of derailing as he lurched down hallways or half slid down stairs or wolfed at a sandwich from which lettuce and meat loaf rained; checking his watch incessantly, his eyes wandering whenever a conversation didn’t engage him directly, the old iron horse was careering toward a crash, and Gary could hardly stand to look. Because who else, if not Gary, was going to take responsibility? Enid was hysterical and moralizing, Denise lived in a fantasyland, and Chip hadn’t been to St. Jude in three years. Who else but Gary was going to say: This train should not be running on these tracks?

The first order of business, as Gary saw it, was to sell the house. Get top dollar for it, move his parents into someplace smaller, newer, safer, cheaper, and invest the difference aggressively. The house was Enid and Alfred’s only large asset, and Gary took a morning to inspect the whole property slowly, inside and out. He found cracks in the grouting, rust lines in the bathroom sinks, and a softness in the master bedroom ceiling. He noticed rain stains on the inner wall of the back porch, a beard of dried suds on the chin of the old dishwasher, an alarming thump in the forced-air blower, pustules and ridges in the driveway’s asphalt, termites in the woodpile, a Damoclean oak limb dangling above a dormer, finger-wide cracks in the foundation, retaining walls that listed, whitecaps of peeling paint on window jambs, big emboldened spiders in the basement, fields of dried sow bug and cricket husks, unfamiliar fungal and enteric smells, everywhere he looked the sag of entropy. Even in a rising market, the house was beginning to lose value, and Gary thought: We’ve got to sell this fucker now, we can’t lose another day.

On the last morning of his visit, while Jonah helped Enid bake a birthday cake, Gary took Alfred to the hardware store. As soon as they were on the road, Gary said it was time to put the house on the market.

Alfred, in the passenger seat of the gerontic Olds, stared straight ahead. “Why?”

“If you miss the spring season,” Gary said, “you’ll have to wait another year. And you can’t afford another year. You can’t count on good health, and the house is losing value.”

Alfred shook his head. “I’ve agitated for a long time. One bedroom and a kitchen is all we need. Somewhere your mother can cook and we have a place to sit. But it’s no use. She doesn’t want to leave.”

“Dad, if you don’t put yourself someplace manageable, you’re going to hurt yourself. You’re going to wind up in a nursing home.”

“I have no intention of going to a nursing home. So.”

“Just because you don’t intend to doesn’t mean it won’t happen.”

Alfred looked, in passing, at Gary’s old elementary school. “Where are we going?”

“You fall down the stairs, you slip on the ice and break your hip, you’re going to end up in a nursing home. Caroline’s grandmother—”

“I didn’t hear where we were going.”

“We’re going to the hardware store,” Gary said. “Mom wants a dimmer switch for the kitchen.”

Alfred shook his head."“She and her romantic lighting.”

“She gets pleasure from it,” Gary said. “What do you get pleasure from?”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean you’ve just about worn her out.”

Alfred’s active hands, on his lap, were gathering nothing—raking in a poker pot that did not exist. “I’ll ask you again not to meddle,” he said.

The midmorning light of a late-winter thaw, the stillness of a weekday nonhour in St. Jude, Gary wondered how his parents stood it. The oak trees were the same oily black as the crows perching in them. The sky was the same color as the salt-white pavement on which elderly St. Judean drivers obeying barbiturate speed limits were crawling to their destinations: to malls with pools of meltwater on their papered roofs, to the arterial that overlooked puddled steel yards and the state mental hospital and transmission towers feeding soaps and game shows to the ether; to the beltways and, beyond them, to a million acres of thawing hinterland where pickups were axle-deep in clay and .22s were fired in the woods and only gospel and pedal steel guitars were on the radio; to residential blocks with the same pallid glare in every window, besquirreled yellow lawns with a random plastic toy or two embedded in the dirt, a mailman whistling something Celtic and slamming mailboxes harder than he had to, because the deadness of these streets, at such a nonhour, in such a nonseason, could honestly kill you.

“Are you happy with your life?” Gary said, waiting for a left-turn arrow. “Can you say you’re ever happy?”

“Gary, I have an affliction—”

“A lot of people have afflictions. If that’s your excuse, fine, if you want to feel sorry for yourself, fine, but why drag Mom down?”

“Well. You’ll be leaving tomorrow.”

“Meaning what,” Gary said. “That you’ll sit in your chair and Mom will cook and clean for you?”