First published in TMR 47.2 (Summer 2024), Jennifer Anderson’s “Rockdale” follows a young couple faced with the harsh realities of renovating an old Wisconsin farmhouse. Anderson reflects on the strain and retrospective joy of making a house a home for her family.

Rockdale

Jennifer Anderson

 

Recently I dreamed I was living at the Rockdale house. I woke with a mix of nostalgia and relief. I told my neighbor, who knows the current owners, has eaten meals on a table in their backyard. She said it’s no wonder I’d been dreaming; they’d just begun to remodel the kitchen.

Sixteen years ago the agile, eighty-something owner led us around the house and its 2.7 acres. I knew within thirty seconds this 1840s brick box with the bar up the road would not be our first home, stranded in a tiny township miles away from all our friends. I didn’t care how historical it was. This would not be the place we’d start a family, where babies would learn to crawl on plywood sheet floor, stained and stamped with sponge-painted flowers. We would not make meals in this ramshackle kitchen with walls that didn’t reach the ceiling, an industrial sink that was longer than my car. I feigned interest. The place reeked of convalescence and death.

The three of us stood by the row of towering pines on the property’s west end. My husband stiffened against the wind and buried his hands deep inside his cargo pockets. Question by question, he summoned the building’s history and ascertained the soundness of its structure. I was irritated, then alarmed. My husband’s attention span rarely accommodated idle chatter, and never for this long. The owner told us to take a minute, adding that she had an accepted offer on the house, then turned to go back inside. I looked at my husband and I knew. Dreams danced in his eyes.

Tears rolled out of mine.

I’d agreed to partner with him once before in what had seemed an insurmountable feat (twice before if you counted marriage). During my senior year in college, after we’d been dating two years, he’d suggested we start a mobile food cart. We had to form an LLC, secure a small business loan, create a menu, source ingredients, design graphics, apply for half-a-dozen licenses, and build a food cart—from the ground up—to present to a panel of reviewers who would either grant or deny us a site. In twenty-one days. Our Saturday-market brunch, made from the seasonal produce sold at the vendors’ stands, grew a cult-like following. I’d married a visionary, an adventure-loving entrepreneur, though I hadn’t fully understood then how that would disrupt my dream of a safe and tidy life.

My husband said there was blond brick under the piss-yellow plaster and wooden beams under the stained drop-ceiling office tiles. He assured me we could transform this building into something like the urban lofts I loved, like the pump house on Milwaukee’s lakefront that sold coffee and scones and Moleskine journals. All I saw was work—days, months, years of endless projects. A financial black hole.

I was right.

(And so was he.)

 

The closing was scheduled for the first of February. Unlike the first offer, we had no contingencies on ours. We left the country for the better part of January, traveling around Argentina, Bolivia, and Peru with four friends before we began the renovation. I don’t remember if, while we were thousands of miles from the property, I’d tried to persuade my husband to reconsider our purchase while we still could or if I’d embraced the vision for the space or just resigned myself to the work. I was younger and more eager to please than I am now. He was adventurous and afraid of nothing—the opposite of me. Maybe I figured we’d find a way.

Koshkonong Creek divides in half the incorporated village of Rockdale. Our property line crossed the highway that separated the house from the water. We were a few blocks past where the sidewalk ends, the last stop on the way out of town, and too close to the busy road for my liking. A circle of one-hundred-year-old silver maples towered over the house’s north end, and old pines bordered the west; the south faced the gravel parking lot, streetlight, and large plot of grass. The original owner had abandoned the bricklaying to go fight in the Civil War, then returned to finish constructing the three stories. Fifty years ago, the house one hundred years old, someone removed the third story for reasons unknown. All the decorative brickwork that bordered the roofline was lost; the structure was essentially a brick box.

On our first evening in the space, we made a vat of chili and hosted family and friends on folding chairs and stained linoleum. His family was pessimistic about the endeavor; mine said we were ambitious; our friends were along for the ride. We were part of an artist community of twenty-something musicians, painters, poets, and potters. Few had steady, paying jobs. Later that week, a thirty-yard dumpster arrived—the first of thirteen. We armed a crew of four volunteers with crowbars and sledgehammers: Everything goes!

Decades of dirt and cobwebs—and one desiccated squirrel—cascaded from the layers of ceiling before the original was unearthed. I’d never seen so much dust, never had it invade such orifices or fill so many pores. It would be a ubiquitous presence for years. Dust when we chipped off all the plaster and sandblasted every beam, dust when we pulled up the rotten floorboards that spanned the first floor, dust when we dismantled the harrowing stairwell before building a new one, dust when we ground out the joints between each brick, then dust when we mixed up mortar to tuckpoint every one, dust when every wall came down, then more when the new walls went up, dust when the masonry saw cut through sixteen inches of brick as we reconfigured windows and eliminated doors.

During the renovation, we were living five miles away in an empty farmhouse my family had purchased near their land. We had my sister’s college futon in the bedroom, a wicker couch in the living room, a hot pot in the kitchen, and a rowdy horde of mice in the basement. It was like camping with a roof. Our combined belongings—we’d been married just over a year—were in a storage unit five miles away. We anticipated living at the farmhouse for two to three months until our property had windows, heat, and light. The house was uninhabitable for more than a year.

Sometimes when we’d drive away after working for hours, I’d stare at the hulking edifice, all the window openings vacant and black like missing teeth, and wonder if it’d ever feel like home. After bouncing around thirteen of them as a child, I desperately wanted to make one. I’d ask my husband what he thought married people did when they left work for the evening. I imagined them sitting in restaurants, with clean clothes and sweet-smelling hair, eating a hot meal that had been cooked in pots and pans on working appliances before they returned to their homes with throw pillows and framed photos and a blissful absence of dirt. I’d stare up at billboards on my way to work, feeling the lusty pull of cookie-cutter homes that a team of professionals would design, build, and clean before handing over a shiny key. “I saved you from suburbia,” my husband loved to say, but many were the days I’d rather have memorized each aisle in IKEA than know my way around every brickyard in town.

 

We started with a loan that was $40,000 above the purchase price of the house. Over the next three and a half years, we’d sell off a pickup truck and the mobile food-cart business we no longer had the time or energy to run. We both had part-time jobs: he was a cook and I was a nurse. There were years we had only $12,000 to work with—I refused to go into debt—and we’d barter when we could. My husband catered one wedding for flooring installation, another for a wall of custom cabinetry. I washed all the dishes.

During demolition we discovered that the subfloor on the first level was rotten. Most of the sixteen hundred square feet needed new joists to be fitted into the masonry pockets of the foundation’s stone walls. We pursued several bids from contractors who looked relieved when we told them we’d do it ourselves. The project dragged on for weeks, and the house looked worse than before, as if a team of bulldozers had ravaged the place, then left. I complained. My husband did not. We hired a friend as much for moral support as for help. My husband barreled forward, working twelve-to-fifteen-hour days. I picked up extra shifts at work—there were weeks I rotated between all three—commuting the forty minutes in the quiet of my dirty car. My mom was in town during this part of the project. She discovered a rhubarb patch in the backyard buried beneath a pile of shingles encrusted in tar. She returned hours later from my sister’s kitchen with a warm pan of rhubarb crisp and a stack of paper plates. I cried. I was hungry and cold, and it tasted like home. We had no running water, no plumbing, no sink. I ate with my dirty hands.

Once the demolition was done, the house was a shell: brick walls with two support posts on each of the two floors and several in the basement. Nothing else. No electrical, no plumbing, no HVAC, no windows, no walls. The structural engineer we’d consulted had recommended we have the house jacked up to remove and replace three of the six posts—the floor of the house slanted inward on both sides. We had three steel I-beams installed, two in the basement and one on the first floor. For a few minutes the house rested on jacks before it was lowered onto its new supports. A part of me wished the entire structure would fall, but it settled into place with a thunderclap.

Was it days or weeks later that the rains came? Our basement flooded, the water swirling around our knees. We borrowed a sump pump from a neighbor we’d never met. Throughout the night, my husband drove to Rockdale to check the water level. Soon there was mold growing on the new joists; the humidity had climbed above 80 percent. We bought a scratch-and-dent commercial dehumidifier for the price of two plane tickets to Rome. The previous owner’s words echoed in my head—they’d felt irrelevant at the time—the building was originally a creamery, built near a spring and designed to flood to cool the cream. The basement needed a sump pump, drain tile, and a concrete floor.

I seldom went to the basement and never went alone. It felt like a punishment to descend into the cool cavern of mold and fungi and fear, to duck my head below the stone lintel before the floor turned to brick and dirt. It looked like somewhere Gollum would dwell, where an ancestor would squat, a stick between her teeth, and birth a son. I didn’t know yet that the snakes would come from there.

 

On a cold gray day in November we rented a conveyor belt. By then we were on a first-name basis with the owners of a local supply rental company. Before we could dig out the bricks from the basement floor, we needed to haul out the detritus the previous owner had left. We hired a few friends and passed out work gloves and bottles of beer. They wore flannel shirts and waterproof boots. After we cleared out the paint cans, rotten wood, and medieval-looking tools, the original water softener remained. Made of metal and full of salt, the army-green canister must’ve weighed a thousand pounds.

We borrowed a Bobcat from my family, rigged together a harness and strap, and rolled the canister onto a makeshift ramp. After many attempts to manipulate torque and increase speed, we’d finally positioned the canister and the Bobcat so that when my husband gunned it, the water softener shot out of the basement like a rocket, sailing past the Bobcat—and us, as our mouths gaped. “It could’ve killed someone,” my husband would say years later. Like he’d say about the time he climbed up a tree carrying a chainsaw when the largest branch split from the trunk and filleted his calf on the way down. Or when he dislodged the old cast-iron vent pipe in the attic and then it slipped through his gloved hands, crashing through two stories—and slicing perfect holes—before it landed on the basement floor. Or when he stood on scaffolding four stories tall, wielding an aluminum stove pipe high above his head before willing it down a brick chimney on the coldest day in January, the wind so fierce it could’ve knocked him to his death.

I don’t remember feeling much fear back then. Maybe it was because he was always bulldozing forward, deaf to the doubts most others would heed, or perhaps it was because we were still in our twenties, our brains bathed in the belief that anything was possible and nothing bad would happen.

 

We soon became something of a roadside attraction. People would often pull over, get out of their cars, and help themselves to a tour. They’d cite anecdotes of when the building was a general store, a restaurant, the basement a sanitarium for respiratory ailments. Many would ask when we were going to cover the wooden rafters or drywall over the brick. Because brick was a terrible insulator (its R-value is next to nothing), and we’d already blown through two thousand pounds of propane in a matter of weeks, we’d need more insulation in the attic at the very least. These were the sorts of things my husband and I discussed on our way to Home Depot. Not whom we’d invite over for dinner or if we’d vacation in the spring or when we’d start a family.

On the day we blew insulation into the attic, I was dressed as if ready to board a space shuttle. I climbed two stories, dragging one hundred feet of tubing connected to a hopper, outside and two stories below, into which my husband dumped block after block of cellulose insulation. I’m not sure who decided to do this at dusk. I wielded the hose as if fighting a fire and distracted myself from freezing fingers and toes by singing and laughing until the dust stung my eyes and burned my throat and I could no longer see through my hooded mask or yell above the whine of the machine. It was after a day like this that my husband and I drove to the next town over to rent a movie because that’s what married couples did. Still dressed in dusty work clothes, we handed the 1980s comedy The Money Pit to the man at the register. He told us he lived just across the creek, and I apologized for his view. He didn’t so much as grin.

 

For more hours than I care to count, we’d taken turns wielding a small tool to strip away the plaster from ceiling to floor. Finally, after decades in hiding, the Cream City brick was exposed. Moisture, dust, and cold emanated from the damaged walls. It was as if we’d pried open a tomb.

We contacted the mason who lived up the road. He surveyed the brick, explained we’d need to tuckpoint everything, and then taught us how to grind out the old mortar between each brick and apply fresh mortar to every rise and run. He didn’t wear gloves, seemed proud that his hands could withstand the lime. Mine couldn’t. He showed us the tools we’d need to buy and where to find the least expensive diamond blades—we’d burn through a dozen of them—and created the ratios for our specific mortar mix. The masonry dust would get everywhere, no matter how new and tight the mask, goggles, and gloves. If we’d had the tens of thousands of dollars it would’ve cost us, we’d have paid him to tuckpoint the entire house.

We disagreed about whether to repair the sections of brick high up between the joists. My husband said they were fine the way they were. I said if we were going to do it, we should do it right; this was a conversation we’d have many times. He made a case not to disturb anything structural, and in the end, we left those sections alone. I wasn’t disappointed not to have to climb the fourteen feet to reach them, though my eyes would always find their flaws.

The project dragged on—we were approaching eighteen months—and the romance was gone. The tuckpointing alone had taken hundreds of hours, and we hadn’t begun work on the second floor. Even if I could convince my husband to cut our losses and move on, no one would buy the house in its current state. I’d taken up swearing, a cheap and convenient vice. It took weeks before my husband wasn’t surprised by my exclamations when I tripped on a tool or jammed my hand or took a swig of a warm and forgotten beer, impregnated with the ash of someone’s discarded cigar. I’d daydream about a windfall of cash and exchanged correspondence with HGTV’s Generation Renovation producers (our application was eventually denied). When I was capsized by the details—I saw each and every one—my husband would send me for sub sandwiches or two-by-fours or a box of ten-inch screws. There were times, my husband tells me now, he’d pull up to the house in his 1970s Land Cruiser and sit awhile to rouse the want and will to work. It was worse on the days he labored alone.

Our friends sustained us. We were a scenic drive from the city, something to do on a Saturday, a side job with flexible hours that paid in cash. Once we had a working kitchen, almost two years after purchasing the house, we were somewhere to go for a hot meal and home brew on tap. My husband would mix a batch of mortar during the morning and pizza dough in the afternoon, declaring himself a Renaissance man, his hands and clothes coated in the dust of flour and lime. We have dozens of photos of our twenty-something selves surrounded by friends, seated in camping chairs with books and guitars and drinks, a few with cigarettes or cigars. We held big bonfires that sent sparks into a sky full of stars, work parties with potluck spreads on makeshift tables on our sprawling lawn. The first round of babies napped in playpens while their parents pulled electrical wire, hung drywall, or swept. My husband would host band practice—he played electric guitar—the extension cords snaking around ladders and brooms and oversized garbage bins, red rosin paper covering the new floors. We hosted Friendsgiving for twenty-one, cooking for days before feasting like kings.

 

It surprises me now that I cannot recall when we finally moved in—neither the moment nor the month. Not even the season comes to mind. My husband has no memory of it either. Maybe it’s because the work and the dust were endless, because even after I could take a hot shower and make meals on a stove, after we’d finished the laundry room (we’d rescued most of the flooring when the sewer backed up) and could clean our clothes, there loomed numerous projects, many of which would again coat everything in dust. Because we hadn’t started working on the second floor, we slept in what would later be a large playroom with an attached full bathroom and a three-season porch that, on the coldest nights, dropped the temperature of the room into the fifties and made our sheets feel like ice. I’d burrow beneath goose-down blankets, taking shelter in my husband’s heat.

Most evenings my husband cooked and I did the dishes. Finishing the kitchen made it feel like perhaps the project was slowly becoming a home—though perpetually under construction. He’d call me on my drive from work to foreshadow that he hadn’t yet cleaned up the latest project (I doubted they’d ever end), and I knew I’d return to find screws and coffee grounds, socks and extension cords, sawdust and eggshells scattered across countertops and strewn across the floors. My love and need for order, his predisposition for chaos, was—and is—our matrimonial bane.

 

That first summer we moved the front entrance from the east side to the south, knocking out the last of the old windows and removing some of the brick. The eight-by-twelve-foot hole in the front of our house gaped like a bomb crater. Piles of bricks and rubble covered the grass out front. We spent hours stacking the bricks onto pallets, a Badger football game blaring from the mortar-crusted Bosch work radio, a growler of Lake Louie beer balanced on a pile of bricks. At night the openings were covered in blue plastic tarps. I found it hard not to think of mice.

I once told the pest-control guy that he was what kept me from selling my house, not that any sane person would want it. I just wished I’d found him sooner, before the months I’d wake to sweep up the pellets and disinfect the counters while my French press brewed, washing every utensil and drawer the rodents had ransacked. The exterminator set several traps—I said no to the glue; I’d witnessed that horror before—and placed bait stations indoors and out. Within weeks the mice had been banished to the basement. They could have it for all I cared, as long as they didn’t crap on my spoons or dart across my floors.

If only there had been a solution for snakes; I feared them more than mice. One day I bent down to pick up what I thought was the shop vacuum hose coiled in a heap on the sunny floor, only to have it move as I reached out to touch it. Once I stooped to lift the ficus tree and a snake slithered away from the base of the pot. Neither one was caught. For weeks I’d scan the floor, mindful of where I’d tread. Any sudden movement flooded me with fear.

 

Autumn came. We were approaching our third year when we started work on the second floor. It had been vacant for decades—nothing but two hand-hewn posts and four brick walls. More grinding out old mortar joints, more tuckpointing, more dust. After we’d cut six new windows into the brick walls and hired a friend to frame out the new ones, we held an art show for our friends. For two days there was food and live music on the main floor. The clean house smelled of hot cider and burning wood. Upstairs, candles and lamps illuminated the remortared brick, our friends’ paintings hung on the two-by-fours, tables displaying jewelry and pottery wares. Textiles and reupholstered furnishings added color and texture and warmth. My nesting instincts were ramping up.

With a baby on the way, the drive to finish the upstairs felt urgent. I figured I’d be two weeks late—we needed every one of those days to drywall and paint, install the flooring and trim, tile the bathroom, and hang the sliding doors my husband was certain he could build in time. He took a job that pulled him to Chicago, two hours away, one to two days a week. Just when it felt like we were gaining momentum, it seemed we’d hit a wall.

 

When my water broke four weeks before my due date, before my baby shower, before we’d bought a crib or car seat or clothes, I told my husband to go back to sleep. It was midnight. This wasn’t happening. My mind raced with worries about the preterm baby and the unfinished house. Eventually I called the midwife and my mom, who began her sixteen-hour drive east. When we left the hospital two days later, we settled into a family’s guest room instead of returning to our house. My husband divided his time between work, Rockdale, and perfecting swaddling techniques on our five-and-one-half-pound son. The baby and I stayed away from the drywall dust and noise until he was three weeks old. While he slept in a bassinet atop a card table, I’d paint, sweep up sawdust, organize the tools. I wanted to get settled in upstairs before I returned to work at the hospital.

 

A new pest emerged that sweltering August. I woke daily to find a fresh pile of guano on the northeast corner of the new floor. Almost every night one or two bats evaded the tennis racket in my husband’s hand while our four-month-old and I hid in the bathroom, the only room upstairs with a door. I hired a bat specialist. This lunacy had gone on for weeks. He arrived in a late-model minivan affixed with bat decals and crooked letters that spelled out Bat Man. He told me more about the winged mice than I cared to hear. We paid him the equivalent of a brand-new living room set to eradicate the transient, male juvenile brown-bat population that had made our attic their home.

After the dust and bats were gone, we hauled up our hand-me-down couches, our mattresses and crib. We set up the nursery and bought new bath towels. We hung a Swedish swing from the rafters and stocked up on blankets and toys. When our son was old enough, we’d snuggle up on the couch, share bowlfuls of popcorn, and watch Gilmore Girls, the only show he cared to watch, on our prehistoric TV.

 

Our son was sixteen months old when his brother arrived a month early. My husband and I shared childcare, so the boys were always with one of us. I worked every weekend and two evenings a month; my chef husband was gone for two to three days at a time, working in Chicago, Milwaukee, Lake Geneva. A few work trips took him to Napa and Vegas. I spent most days and evenings alone with the boys. I longed for sidewalks that led to libraries and coffee shops and parks, for conversations with adults, for uninterrupted sleep. I’d invite over family and friends, all of them busy with their own small kids. We were a forty-minute drive people didn’t always want to make. Sometimes I’d brave an outing to the YMCA or strategize a trip to the store with a well-stocked diaper bag and a backup plan, returning home to a cold and empty house.

In the recession of 2008, my husband lost his job. I was momentarily relieved—I’d have more help with the boys. He returned to his employer in Madison and worked part-time. Maybe now he’d have time to hang that last closet door or trim the big window or source next year’s firewood. Maybe I’d be able to fold all the laundry or paint the playroom walls or take a long, hot shower alone. Maybe we could go out for sushi, leave the boys with a sitter.

 

When our youngest was nine months old, I was pregnant with our third. My nurse practitioner sister still uses me as a cautionary tale for IUDs more than a decade later. I had no idea how we’d manage; I was wildly overwhelmed. Again. My husband didn’t seem too worried, maybe because he knew we’d just keep plowing through whatever terrain lay ahead.

Three kids in three years—all of them in diapers—brought with it a new kind of exhaustion. It may have rivaled the renovation. I remember the day I was ushering my three-year-old out to the cold minivan. Our parking lot of a driveway was a sheet of pure ice. I had my toddler on my hip and an infant carrier hanging from my other arm when I slipped and fell, taking everyone down with me. I asked for a remote starter for my birthday and stocked up on salt.

We hired the energetic, artistic daughter of a friend to watch one or two of the kids for eight hours a week while I took the baby to a checkup or the three-year-old to preschool or brought the middle one along to get groceries. She probably saved my sanity. Nearly every Saturday while I was at work, my husband would take the kids to the farmers market, wearing the baby and pulling the toddlers around the square in our wooden wagon, stopping for honey sticks and spicy cheese bread and crêpes at our friends’ coffee shop, where they’d give him hot water to make the baby a bottle.

Our kitchen was still the epicenter of our home, though swarming with toddlers instead of twenty-somethings. We’d spend the day on the first floor and not too far from the fire, toys strewn across the house from the playroom to the front door. Our children had inhabited the kitchen since they were old enough to climb up on a chair, cutting apples with plastic knives, working their way up to peeling carrots or rolling pizza dough. My husband’s first cooking demonstrations—he’s done thousands by now—were to a diapered audience standing on chairs. They’d watch him strip the seeds from a vanilla bean, eager for the mixer to stop so they could drag their fingers through the frosting. We’d go upstairs when the sun set, resuming the tag-team ritual of bathtime and stories and bed. We found a sort of equilibrium. I’d gotten better about overlooking the imperfections of our work and ignoring the details that remained, not that I had any energy left to spare; it was easier at night when the lighting was low.

 

The offer to buy our unlisted house came, unbidden, in the six-month stretch of real estate’s deepest depression. We’d owned it for seven and a half years. I’d always told my husband that it would be for romance that someone would buy our house. No pragmatic person would. Our Realtor friend, who’d wielded a crowbar during our demolition days, called to tell us he might have a buyer. He knew we’d be emotional sellers who wouldn’t relinquish the house to just anyone. We had mixed feelings but said the interested party could stop by if they’d like. There would always be more to do, and we hadn’t begun on the exterior, much less the landscaping. It was almost surreal to imagine living in a space that wasn’t such a struggle to make warm, find rest in, keep clean. “We were just done,” my husband said of our decision years later.

I immediately loved the couple who walked through our front door, a baby girl on her hip, the small hand of a young boy in his. They took in the fire and the smell of wood, the way the chandelier cast its warm light on the brick at dusk while my husband cooked them steak tacos and poured them each a pint. I’m sure our ambivalence about selling made them want it more. He was an unassuming writer who wanted to keep bees on the property; she’d majored in art history, worked in the fashion industry, and loved to cook. We signed papers on their third visit. I didn’t know what to feel; I didn’t want to leave without the bricks.

Weeks later, after days of rain, our three children, ages one, two, and four, were asleep in their beds when a branch from a one-hundred-year-old maple crashed into the roof and shook the house. My husband out of town, I froze in my bed, willing myself to get up and go look. I fully expected to see a sky full of stars through the ceiling. Had I climbed into the attic, I would have. I went downstairs and opened the playroom door. Branches and leaves filled the porch; the pine planks we’d installed on the ceiling dangled by their last nail, insulation draped over the ceiling fan blades. I carried each of the kids into our king-size bed and shut the door, trying not to think of bats.

Had the contract not been extended—the buyers would sell their house within the month—it would’ve been their first night in the house. As it was, the $30,000 insurance claim and its whopping deductible were ours. We’d be the ones to manage the collapsed porch roof and the flooring and furniture it destroyed, the rafters that snapped in the attic—exactly one away from the gas line—and the water that ruined all the insulation we’d blown in that cold, dark night. We’d lived with tarps and dust before. We moved out shortly after the house was repaired, photographed, and cleaned. We left them with gifts, flowers, historic photos, and all the keys.

 

An architect once told us that building a home often put considerable stress on a marriage, that more than 50 percent of clients had separated or divorced by the time their project was finished. We looked at each other and laughed. I told him that getting to design a house built by a team of skilled, experienced professionals, a house we’d move in to only after it’d been fully constructed and cleaned—in under a year—didn’t sound the least bit distressing. It sounded like a miracle.

While our new house was being built, we lived in a one-story ranch with an attached garage. It was luxuriously warm. I filled notebooks with paint samples and tile mock-ups, researched fixtures and lighting, sketched kitchen plans to scale, detailed timelines and to-do lists. While our oldest was in kindergarten class, I brought the younger two along to gather tile samples or swatches of cork flooring.

We spent our ten-year anniversary seated on buckets in the dirt that would become our front lawn, scrubbing the moss off the Cream City bricks that we’d unearthed from Rockdale’s basement floor. We dipped them in muriatic acid, then rinsed them off so that the mason could lay them on our living room walls. He told us bleach was cheaper and just as effective and sold us on a newer mortar that looked like the old batches we’d made with the recipe he’d created for the Rockdale house. It came premixed and was more expensive, but we had a bigger budget this time. He showed up early every day for weeks and always left the work site clean. Some days he’d bring his daughter along, and she’d draw or play while he worked. His mortar joints were flawless, the bricks perfectly set. Two years later, at his funeral, I took one last look at his hands.

 

Our house stands on a hill just down the road from my sister, close enough to walk over and raid her pantry for paprika or coconut milk when dinner is simmering on the stove. She drags me along on her runs, laughing when I curse while trudging up the hills. Our kids run and play in our yards and build forts in the woods. My husband and I sit together on the deck that overlooks the willows and tamaracks that turn gold in the fall. We sip gin and tonics in the springtime when the frogs sing songs from the marsh. We talk about building an outdoor kitchen with a wood-fired oven and a bonfire pit. We both love coming home. When our friends visit, we open a bottle of wine before dinner and talk of parenting or dreams of travel until the mosquitoes drive us indoors. We can fit ten around our dining table. Most of the seats are filled on Friday nights when we make homemade pizza and salad. I spend hours writing on the screened-in porch. We have no bats or snakes or mice. We have geothermal heat and a small wood-burning stove because I’ll always love the smell of fire. My husband has proposed other ideas over the years: let’s move to another country, let’s start a donut cart, let’s rent out our house. I say let’s stop and catch our breath. Our kids’ teenage years will soon be adventure enough.

 

For me the romance of Rockdale came retrospectively, after time and space allowed me to sift the beauty from the dust, separate the story from the stress. I loved our spiral staircase with its helical lines and maple treads, the way the sun would stream in through the big picture window, casting it in a spotlight like the art it was, on display for passing cars. I adored the welder who lived up the road, with his mind for math and his pointer finger rounded at its nub, the way he came every day wearing his Older Than Dirt baseball cap and welded each tread into place. He could fabricate anything I could dream—a chandelier with Edison bulbs, legs to turn a wood post into a bench, a metal ring to hold the firewood. I loved our friend’s painting—we’d purchased it instead of a couch—the way the rust-colored fractals looked against the brick, and I loved the coppery glaze of the bathroom sink made by our potter friend. I thought of the thousands of meals we’d shared with friends and family that my husband had cooked on gleaming appliances we could never have afforded had he not worked for the company that made them.

The same welder made us an identical chandelier and a stair stringer for our new house, this one straight with walnut treads. We sat outside on camping chairs, our three children bundled and piled on our laps, the day the crane lowered it into the house. Our friend’s painting hangs on our Rockdale-brick walls, the masonry aglow in lamplight, firelight, sun. The hefty wooden bench made from one of Rockdale’s original posts, hand-hewn in the 1840s by a chisel’s hard blows, sits by our front door.

***

Jennifer Anderson has worked as a psychiatric nurse for children and adolescents for more than twenty years. She has workshopped numerous essays and short stories with Madison Writers’ Studio and holds an MFA in creative nonfiction from Antioch University. She lives northwest of Rockdale with her husband and their three teens.

Welcome back to our new series of prizewinning “viral” prose for these days of social distancing. Our staff here at TMR hope that you are all having a good start to the new week. We are kicking off this Tuesday with the 2018 Editors’ Prize winner in fiction, “Exit Seekers” by Tamara Titus. In this piece, Titus’s clever characters learn lessons on friendship and forgiveness, and the struggles of aging. 

Exit Seekers

by Tamara Titus

Even before I open my eyes, I smell smoke. At first I think I’m still dreaming—too many memories of my time under the stars, when everyone smelled like smoke or sweat—but then I see Cecil’s outline over by the open window. He’s sitting in his wheelchair with a blanket over his legs, and I can hear the oxygen machine chugging even as the haze from his cigarette settles around us.

“Cecil,” I whisper. The digital clock on my nightstand reads 2:13, and the hallway outside is quiet.

His head is bowed, and he doesn’t answer. While I watch, the orange tip of his cigarette falls into his lap.

“Cecil!” I hiss, and his head jerks. He mumbles, and I pull my chair over to the bed. When I’m fully awake, I can transfer without assistance, but even then I like to know there’s someone within shouting distance, just in case. I set the brakes and hoist my ass into the seat. Then I settle my left stump onto the pad. It only takes five seconds, but it’s too long. When I look back at Cecil, his nightshirt is already on fire.

Cecil screams, and I press the call button clipped to the bedrail and wheel over to the door in nothing but my undershorts. The corridor outside is empty.

I yell Fire! twice before rolling back into the room and grabbing a couple of hand towels at the sink. Cecil flails with his good hand while I soak the towels. I’m wrapping them around my fists when the bedspread catches, and I have just enough sense to switch off the oxygen before I grab the blanket from Cecil’s lap and press my arms against him.

At some point there is noise behind me—people yelling over the fire alarm. The light comes on, and someone blasts us with a portable fire extinguisher. Cecil howls. I hold up my right hand and squint. My skin is splotchy, and pain moves like lightning across my synapses. “Don’t let them take us to Grady,” I say to the nurse closest to me, but she’s not listening. She wraps a clean towel around my hand and wheels me out the door.

 

When the ambulance pulls up at Grady Hospital, all I can think is it’s a good thing they’ve already shot me full of morphine. Before I moved into Cedar Grove, I spent my share of nights in the ER here. Winter nights, mostly. I lost my foot to frostbite, and they tried hard to talk me into going to a nursing home. But I knew I’d have to clean up, dry out. And I wasn’t ready for that. Not then.

Once we get inside, I can hear the EMTs bringing the staff up to speed. Cecil’s next door in room seven, and I know they’ll work him up first cause he’s bad off. I close my eyes and see the blue print of the dressing gown seared into his flesh. Then my brain misfires, and pain licks me in places I no longer possess. I’m drifting when I hear the one voice I do not want to hear tonight.

“Ben Gibson. I thought you were done being a frequent flyer.”

It’s been almost four years since I broke Dr. Loflin’s nose. I was high on a little bit of everything that night, and I had a seizure in the middle of Briarcliff Road. Apparently, when I woke up in the ER, I woke up swinging. I don’t remember any of it, but I’m sure she does. “A little bird told me you’d been missing me,” I say.

Dr. Loflin pulls up one of those rolling stools and takes a seat beside the gurney. “And a little bird told me you were smoking in bed.”

I’d like to pinch her, grab the tender flesh on the back of her triceps and squeeze like my sister Angie used to do. But I know what that’ll get me, so instead I flip the blanket down and point to my stumps. “I’m a diabetic, not a dumbass.”

“In your case, Mr. Gibson, one diagnosis does not necessarily preclude the other. But I’ll make sure your objection is noted in your chart.” She touches my wrist with one gloved finger. “In the meantime, why don’t you tell me what happened.”

“Cecil set himself on fire, and I was trying to put him out.”

When she lifts the dressing from my hand, I hear her suck in a breath. She scoots closer, and I examine her face while she examines my hand. Whoever fixed her nose did a good job; you can’t even tell it was broken. She’s changed her hairstyle, too. There’s silver at her temples now, fine hairs that almost disappear into her blond bob.

“Are you burned anywhere else?” she asks.

“I don’t think so.”

“Okay,” she says as she rotates my hand. “Okay.”

I can tell by the lack of ill will in her voice that it’s not okay, and for the first time in weeks, I feel a panic attack coming on. It only happens when I’m in close quarters.

“On a scale of one to ten, how bad is your hand hurting now?”

My palm is puckered, all bright red and weeping. “At least an eight.”

She stands and presses a button on the wall. “Not for long,” she says. Then a nurse steps in and hands her a syringe, and it’s Dr. Loflin’s turn to make my world go black.

 

When I get back to Cedar Grove the next afternoon, I notice right away that Cecil’s things are gone. The big picture frame that said family. His wall calendar, his clothes. I’m lying in bed staring at my hand, which is wrapped so thick it looks like an oven mitt, when Marianne taps on the open door.

“Knock, knock,” she says, and she waits.

Marianne looks a little like Liv Tyler, only with brown eyes, and she’s wearing a dress that falls to the floor. It suits her frame—it softens her elbows and hips—but I withhold the compliment. Her smile is too tense.

I nod at the chair by the bed. “Is Cecil dead?” I ask as soon as she sits down.

“No.” She glances at the empty side of the closet. “But they’re going to keep him at Grady for a while. He needs skin grafts.”

“I take it I’m in for a new roommate?”

Marianne pulls the tray table over to her and sets a folder on it. Normally we discuss my care in her office, which is really just a windowless closet at the end of the West Unit hallway. The folder is bad news.

“Cecil’s daughters have filed a grievance with the state licensing agency. They want to know how their father, who is wheelchair-bound and partially paralyzed, could have gained access to cigarettes that they did not provide.” She folds her hands in her lap, and I wonder for the thousandth time how she can do this. How she can come to work, day after day, with people who are batshit crazy, and not wind up that way herself?

“Maybe he lifted them,” I say.

“Ben.” She peers at me over her glasses. A strand of hair slips across her shoulder and rests against the side of her breast.

“I shared a smoke with him twice out in the courtyard. That’s it. Both times I gave him one, and he smoked the whole thing outside.”

Marianne opens the folder. “We’re instituting a new smoking policy.”

I don’t move, but the room does. It shrinks around us like something out of Alice in Wonderland.

“From now on, your cigarettes will stay in my office. You can smoke three times a day, but only with supervision. I need you to pick one time in the morning and a couple in the afternoon.” She pulls a form from the folder and turns it around so I can see it. “On the weekends, you’ll have to get the shift supervisor,” she says as she sets a pen on the table.

“I’m grandfathered,” I say. Smoking is the one vice they let me keep. I had to give up booze and drugs, but they promised I could keep smoking as long as I lived at Cedar Grove. It’s written in my resident contract.

“That hasn’t changed,” Marianne says.

“Right. I’m just restricted to three a day, with you as a babysitter.”

She pulls something else from the folder. “Maybe you could tell me what this is,” she says, and as soon as I see the handwriting, I feel my sugar spike. She’s got my list. Normally I keep it on me at all times, but at night I stick it in the Bible in my nightstand.

She points to Rose Green’s name and reads aloud: “Wears Mardi Gras beads and a bad wig. Always has lipstick on her teeth. BSC.” Marianne looks at me. “What’s BSC?”

Keeping tabs on the people here is how I stay sane. It’s how I stay separate from them. I pick up the pen with my good hand. “Batshit crazy,” I say.

“That’s not how we refer to our residents with dementia.”

“Tell that to the CNAs.” Cedar Grove has a politically correct term for everything. When somebody falls out of his chair and busts his head it’s a bad outcome. And the nut jobs who try to escape are exit seekers.

I push the release form away and turn to the last page of my list, to the newest admissions. Under Cecil Carter it says Emphysema. Stroke. I add the word moron in all caps.

Marianne closes the folder and leaves the form on the table between us. “I’m sorry about your hand, Ben. Angie said she’d be in tomorrow to check on you.” She delivers that bomb so smoothly, it’s like she’s opening the cargo doors of a C-130 from an altitude of twenty-five thousand feet.

I tuck my list into my shirt pocket and press the nurse call button. “Do me a favor, Marianne. Come back when you have good news.”

 

Cecil’s departure means I have a room to myself until they get another male admission. There’s a lot to be said for privacy, especially in this place, and I briefly consider masturbating. But I’m right-handed, and the pain is stronger than my desire to get off. That night, my hand wakes me up at three am, and I watch National Geographic and Pawn Stars until I can’t stand it anymore. Then I hit the call button and ask the nurse for more pain meds.

“You’re not due for another dose until seven. I can bring you a couple of ibuprofen,” she says.

I rest my burned hand against my stomach and imagine the night sky. Orion in winter, Centaurus in spring.

“How about a smoke break?” I say. “A quick one.”

“I’m sorry, Ben. You know I can’t.” A minute later she brings the ibuprofen in a tiny white paper cup. She watches me swallow it before she steps back into the hall, and when I’m sure she’s gone, I roll over and stare at the empty bed.

Cecil was a good roommate; he just got desperate. Right now he’s probably alone in a third-floor room at Grady, staring at a window he can’t see out of. I tuck my hand to my chest and wonder if he hurts as bad as I do. And if there’s a part of him that would jump from that window if he could.

 

I’m still dozing the next morning when I hear someone settle into the armchair beside me.

“I brought coffee,” Angie says. Waking up to my sister’s voice is a little like waking up naked under a streetlight. When it happens, you know some seriously bad shit has gone down. Angie’s thighs press against the seams of her slacks. Now that she’s pushing fifty, she’s starting to pack on the pounds. She sets the Starbucks cup on the tray table between us.

I take a sip of the coffee, and it’s almost as good as the drugs they’re giving me. She even put real sugar in it.

“Marianne said you had second-degree burns.” She tugs on her earring, a nervous tic she developed when we got sent to foster care. Angie protected me back then.

“That’s what they tell me.”

“She also said your roommate’s daughters are pretty upset.”

I close my eyes and count to ten. I know what she’s thinking. She’s worried somehow she’ll get sued. Angie’s never screwed up in her entire life, and even now, even after I’ve been clean for two years, she still keeps me at arm’s length. “He’s not my roommate anymore.”

“Did you give that man cigarettes, Ben?”

I didn’t, but she won’t believe me. Angie hasn’t believed me since I took her Honda and totaled it when I was fifteen.

“I should have,” I say, and I hold up my bandaged hand. “I’m paying for it anyway, aren’t I?”

 

The West Unit corridor feels a thousand miles long now that I’ve only got one good hand. I tried to talk the physical therapy department into giving me a motorized chair, a hot rod to cruise around in till I heal up, but they said it would allow my upper body strength to degrade.

I pass Ella on the main hall. She’s got one hand on the rail and one hand on the collar of her nightgown. “Bring me a drink of whiskey,” she says, and for the first time in months, an ache comes over me, a need so strong it nearly blisters me inside.

Marcus is loading the vending machines when I get there, and he hands me a 3 Musketeers. “Your friend’s back,” he says.

“I try not to make friends in this place,” I tell him as I hand him my dollar. “Everybody’s got one foot in the grave already.”

Marcus laughs. “Not you.”

We both look down at my stumps. “No, not me.”

“Seriously, though,” Marcus says. “He’s back.”

“Who?” I ask.

“Your roommate. Sparky.”

I’m pretty sure Marcus is the one who bought cigarettes for Cecil, and I’d like nothing more than to lay him out. Unfortunately, I can’t even reach his head. “Where did they put him?”

“Over on South. Right next to the nurses’ station.”

I look down the corridor to my right. South is the dementia ward, a hellhole full of old women who scream and cry at all hours. Rose Green, of the Mardi Gras beads and the bad wig, lives on South. Cecil will never sleep again.

“The Dr Pepper’s been empty for two weeks,” I tell Marcus. “I’m about ready to call the ombudsman.”

He laughs, and when I don’t join in, he quits stocking the drink machine.

“What crawled up your ass?”

“Nothing. Open that door for me,” I tell him, nodding toward the courtyard. When it slams shut behind me, I wheel myself along among the flowers: salvia and snapdragons, bergamot and butterfly bush. Plants I know only because Angie teaches me their names on Sundays when she visits. She could take me out of here if she wanted to, but she’s never offered. She just brings plants and talks to me while she sets them in the dirt.

I stop when I get to the gazebo and tear open the 3 Musketeers bar. That’s when I notice Cecil at the far end of the courtyard, on the patio, where I’m still allowed to smoke. He doesn’t look too bad, considering. His face is swollen, and he’s got bandages on both arms. I take a bite of the candy. The sweetness is excruciating; it reminds me of the phantom pain in my feet. When Cecil sees me, I wheel over to the patio and turn my chair so we’re parallel to each other.

“You know you fucked us both pretty good,” I say. I glance at him, but he’s staring at his hands. They’re wrapped in gauze all the way to his fingertips. “Marianne’s got my cigarettes now. I can only have three a day, and she has to sit with me while I smoke.”

“I’m sorry, Ben,” he says, but on his tongue the words have too many syllables.

“Yeah? Well, at least they didn’t move me to South.” I turn my chair around and tap on the window until one of the CNAs opens the door. Inside, Marcus is closing the drink machine, and when I roll by, I give him the finger.

 

The next morning, Marianne is late. I’ve been sitting on the patio for ten minutes, watching Marcus drill holes in the brick wall, when she finally shows up with her hair still damp. “Morning,” she says, and she hands me a giant gray bib.

“What’s this?”

She puts on her sunglasses and pulls one of the rocking chairs off about ten feet so she won’t catch the brunt of my smoke. “Part of the new regulations,” she says. “It’s fire retardant.”

The bib is heavy. Not as heavy as a flak jacket, but I know I’ll be sweating before I can take two drags. Marianne pulls my Camels and my lighter from the pocket of her dress. “We’re admitting a new resident this afternoon. His name is Gus.”

I take my time lighting up. This is her backassward way of telling me I’m getting a roommate. “Is he a lifer?”

“I hope not. His family wants him home before Thanksgiving.”

I pull smoke into my lungs while Marcus hangs a bright red bag that says Emergency Fire Blanket on the hooks he’s just installed. It’s got a black strap at the bottom that you can pull to release the blanket. I exhale toward the sky. “When are the state inspectors coming?”

Smoke drifts Marianne’s way, and she makes a face. “They won’t tell us. But I’m sure they’ll want to talk with you when they get here.”

I turn the lighter over in my hand. “If you bump me up to four a day, I’ll sing your praises.”

Marianne’s perfectly sculpted eyebrows rise above the top of her sunglasses. “I’ve heard you in choir practice, Ben.” She holds out an ashtray. “Let’s leave the singing to someone else.”

 

After lunch, I figure I’ll take a quick nap before the new guy comes in, but when I get to the end of the hall I hear people talking in my room. They’re not speaking English, and I notice the nameplate by the door says Konstantinos Papadopoulos.

I start to back up in the hallway, but it’s too late. One of the women sitting on the bed has spotted me. “Come in. Please,” she calls. Inside, there’s a kid—seven, maybe eight years old—using my bed as a trampoline, and an old guy in a wheelchair over by the sink. His English isn’t any better than my Greek, so his daughters and granddaughter fill me in. They talk over each other, and the granddaughter keeps grabbing her son by the collar, saying, “Park it, Nick!” It’s all I can do to get out of the room before I hyperventilate.

“Leave the door open,” I tell Marianne when I get to her office.

“Okay.” She smiles calmly, like a veteran teacher on the first day of class.

“There’s seven people in my room right now,” I say. “That’s got to be a code violation.”

“It’s his first day, Ben. Give him time to get settled.”

“I won’t even be able to turn around with all those people in there. Much less take a piss in private. And you know how I feel about tight spaces.”

Marianne folds her hands together. “Yes, I do.”

“It’ll never work. I already need a Klonopin.”

“Well, there’s a private room available,” she says. “Do you want me to talk to Angie about it?”

We both know it’s an extra thirty dollars a day for a private room, and Medicaid won’t pay for it. Angie can afford it, but I’d rather eat broken glass than ask her. “I’ll get someone to pick me up a Powerball ticket,” I say. “But thanks anyway.”

Marianne opens the file cabinet and takes out my cigarettes. “How about we go sit in the courtyard awhile,” she says, “and I’ll walk you back to your room when you’re ready?”

Outside, I chain-smoke three Camels, and Marianne sits by the herb garden, running her hand over the rosemary. She brings her palm up and inhales, and when she sees me watching her, she looks away. “Catnip,” she says, embarrassed. “For people.”

“Careful,” I say. “That stuff will make you crazy.”

“Batshit crazy?” Her smile takes her from pretty to knockout, and just for a second, I imagine touching her nipples. Feeling them harden under my hands.

I want to stay pissed at her. I really do. But I stub out my cigarette and grin.

 

The only time I see Cecil is at dinner. He sits on the other side of the dining hall, and it takes him forever to eat. I nod at him on my way out each night and hold up my bandaged hand in solidarity. But Cecil is no longer my problem.

I’ve got new stressors thanks to Gus and the Greek chorus. People from his church come in and out all day, and his granddaughter shows up every morning to supervise his physical therapy. She brings her son, and while she’s in PT with Gus, the kid wreaks havoc. He’s supposed to stay in the activities room, but the minute she walks out, he’s off climbing the medication carts and pushing buttons on the photocopier behind the nurses’ station. Marcus even busts him eating Klondike bars from the freezer in the staff lounge. “And they think I’m trouble,” I say when he tells me. “That kid’s a Tasmanian devil. On speed.”

On Tuesday I catch Gus’s grandson on his knees in front of the vending machine. He’s got one arm up inside the plastic door, angling for a pack of Oreos, and his face is beet red from the effort.

“It’s a long road to juvie, kid, but you’re off to a great start.”

He pulls his arm out of the machine and walks over to me. “What happened to your legs?” He stares at my stumps.

“Same thing that will happen to your arm if you don’t keep it out of there.”

Cecil rolls out of the therapy room, inching along with his good foot, and I meet him halfway. The kid follows me.

“First you leave,” I tell Cecil, “and now I have to put up with this hellion.” I gesture beside me, but I’m pointing into space. The kid is over by the fire extinguisher, sizing up the glass cabinet.

“Nick!” his mother yells from the door to the PT room. “Don’t touch that.”

“Gus’s grandson,” I tell Cecil.

The kid takes off down the hall, and I follow as fast as I can. When I get to my room, he’s going through Gus’s dresser. “Find anything good?” I ask.

The kid squeezes past my wheelchair, sizing me up as he slinks out the door. He’s wondering if I’ll tell on him. And I’m wondering if I’ll ever have a moment’s peace. I pull the top drawer out of Gus’s nightstand and flip it over on the bed. Taped to the bottom is Cecil’s pack of Marlboros. Right where he left them. I bet Marianne never even thought to look. I tuck the cigarettes into my fanny pack and take out my list. At the bottom, I’ve written Gus Papadopoulos. Fought with Greek resistance in WWII. Hip fracture. Has night terrors.

When I pass the therapy room a few minutes later, I stop and watch Gus through the window. He’s doing weight-bearing exercises while his granddaughter takes notes. The kid is in the corner, pedaling the little device they use for diabetics with foot ulcers. Gus waves, and I give him a thumbs-up. At Cedar Grove, half of the admissions with hip fractures are dead within a year. If nobody tells him that, he’ll be home eating baklava before Christmas.

 

Gus’s family takes him out early on Sunday. I feel like I’ve won the lottery, and I spend the morning watching American Pickers and reading a Carl Hiaasen novel. Angie shows up after church, bearing the Atlanta newspaper. “Coupons,” I say. “Just what I need.”

“You want me to take it back?”

I roll my eyes. “It’s a joke, Angie.”

She sits down on the edge of my bed. “How’s your hand?”

I rotate it for her inspection. “Not bad,” I say. “Another week and I’ll be back to popping wheelies in my chair.”

She shakes her head, but I can tell she’s trying not to smile. “And how’s your roommate?”

I look over at Gus’s wall of pictures. “He’s great, actually. It’s his family I can do without.”

Angie picks at a spot on the bedspread. “Some people actually like their families, Ben.” Her expression is part hurt, part anger. It’s a look she’s perfected: she’s been wearing it since we were kids. “And I meant your old roommate,” she says. “Cecil Carter.”

I’m about to say “He’s alive” when Angie reaches for her earring and presses her thumb to the back, checking it.

“I didn’t give him the cigarettes, Angie.”

“I know you didn’t,” she says softly. “He told Marianne he got them from one of the maintenance guys.”

It’s as close as she’s ever come to saying she’s sorry.

I busy myself with the newspaper, flipping through the sections like I’m looking for something. I want to beg her to take me out of here. Anywhere, even if it’s just around the block. As long as we’re moving and the windows are down.

I set the brake on my chair and slide into it. “Let’s go outside,” I say. “The lantana looks terrible. Maybe you can tell them what to do about it.”

 

I take my last smoke break after dinner, and when I get to my room, Gus is back. With his entire family. There are four people sitting on my bed, and there’s a Dr Pepper and a 3 Musketeers on my tray table. “Who left that?” I ask.

Gus’s granddaughter hands me the candy and soda. “The man with the bandages.”

I back out of the room and head toward South. This time of night it’s deserted, and for once, it’s quiet. Cecil’s got a private room, and I’m thinking he’s a lucky bastard when I find him half out of his chair, clutching the bathroom doorknob. “Cecil?”

The look on his face is pure anguish, and there’s a broad stain across his lap. “Hang on. I’ll get somebody.”

At first I think there’s no one at the nurses’ station, but then I see the guy sitting behind the desk. It’s the second-shift supervisor. The one Marianne has a crush on. “How long has that call light been blinking?” I ask.

He glances at Cecil’s door. “I have no idea.”

Saliva floods my mouth. “Christ on a fucking cracker. Cecil’s pissed himself because y’all just let him sit there.”

“Language, pal,” the man says. He pages a CNA, and a minute later, an aide comes around the corner, swinging her hips slow and easy. “Twenty-two needs attention,” he tells her.

I’m trying to decide if I should wait for Cecil to get cleaned up when I notice Rose Green at the end of the hall. She’s wearing two strands of Mardi Gras beads—one red, one purple—and when she stops by the door to the parking lot, I hear it click, locking in response to her ankle monitor. “Let me out,” she says, leaning over her walker to push the door handle. She’ll be at it all night.

“Could you have someone bring Cecil down to the main hall?” I ask the supervisor.

“Sure.”

“Tell him I’ve got something for him,” I say, and I pat my fanny pack just to be certain.

 

When the big-hipped girl rolls up with Cecil, I’m finishing off the 3 Musketeers. “Thanks for the present,” I say, and he nods. Then we both go quiet. Cecil stares out the window, and I watch Gus’s grandson ricochet like a pinball from one doorway to another, looking for entertainment. He stops in front of the fire alarm, rocking heel to toe while he reads the instructions.

“Hey, Nick!” I yell, and he jumps like I’ve popped him with a pellet gun. “Come here.” I tell him to push Cecil to the courtyard door, and he licks his lips, considering it. His tongue is purple. “Help us and I won’t tell your mom you’ve been trying to rob the vending machine.”

That gets him. He pushes Cecil and comes back for me. “Now hold the door open. It’s heavy.” Cecil inches his way through, and the kid makes a face when I reach the threshold, his purple tongue snaking out to touch his chin. I put a hand on his shoulder. “You ever pull the fire alarm at school?”

He squirms away. “Nope.”

“I did.” I make a show out of glancing up and down the hall, like I’m about to divulge classified information. “The firemen let me sit in the truck while we waited for my mom to come. I got to work the siren and the electric ladder.”

Outside, the air smells like ozone and scorched concrete. I pull Cecil’s Marlboros from my fanny pack. “I believe these belong to you,” I say.

Cecil looks at me like we’re seventeen and I’ve just handed him the keys to my Camaro. Then his head overrides his heart. “They’ll catch us,” he says.

“And do what? Take away our bingo privileges?” I turn off his oxygen and roll over to the red bag that Marcus screwed into the wall. When I yank the black Velcro strap, a blanket falls into my arms. It feels like steel wool against my skin.

“What’s that?” Cecil asks when I hand it to him.

“A smoking jacket.”

Cecil takes off his nasal cannula. “This is a bad idea,” he says, huffing, as I unfold the blanket and tuck it around him.

“You got a better one?”

Cecil shakes his head.

“Me neither. We can smoke one before they miss us. And I have a feeling they’re about to have their hands full,” I say, pointing inside at Nick. I light two cigarettes, and we smoke, and watch, as the kid swoops up and down the hall with both arms out like an airplane. With each pass, he gets a little closer to the alarm.

“You think he’ll pull it?” Cecil asks.

“God, I hope so.”

The wind kicks up, and everything green bends and bows around us as Cecil takes a drag and taps his cigarette carefully into a plastic ashtray. “Not much left without this,” he says, laboring over each word. He stares at the Marlboro between his bandaged fingers. “What do you miss?”

Bourbon. Barbeque at Fat Matt’s. Lullwater Park in winter. My vision blurs, and I tell myself it’s just a sugar spike. I nod at the long wall of windows. Inside Cedar Grove, Gus’s grandson steps up to the fire alarm.

“Being him,” I say, and we both lift bandaged hands to our ears as the kid reaches out and pulls the lever.

 

 

Tamara Titus’s short fiction has appeared in Glimmer Train, Sou’wester, Emrys Journal, and other publications. She is the recipient of a Regional Artist Project Grant from the Arts & Science Council of Charlotte–Mecklenburg, as well as a North Carolina Arts Council fellowship in fiction. She co-edited This is the Way We Say Goodbye (the Feminist Press, 2011), an anthology of women’s essays on caregiving, and in 2013 she received an Honorable Mention from the James Jones Fellowship Contest for her novel-in-progress, Lovely in the Eye. Currently, Tamara spends her time writing and editing, caregiving, and serving on the Charlotte Historic District Commission.