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  The woman who came in every day to care for Vaughn's father arrived at eight o'clock in the morning. She cleaned up, made him breakfast, turned on the television—for him at first, and then, when he got tired, for herself, the Spanish stations, the volume very low. Often Vaughn's father did not know her name since the same woman did not come every day. Usually there were two different women every week. Sometimes the same two women for two weeks, then two other women the next two weeks. Sometimes three women a week. It was never the same. It went on like that. None of them spoke English well. Vaughn's father spoke no Spanish. He was an orderly man and kept the apartment clean with the help of these women. He had all of his important papers and documents lined up on the dining room table in stacks. When he looked for his investments, he knew exactly where they were, in which folders, in which stacks. Insurance, similarly. Medical papers, the same—all arranged around the dining table so he could get at them as necessary. At one end of the table were his personal items—his car keys, though he hadn't driven in over a year, his wallet, change, the credit cards he gave to the women when they went to the grocery store for him. He had recently stopped going upstairs because the stairs were impossible. There had been talk about renting a new apartment all on one floor, but moving seemed out of the question, so he had abandoned the upstairs of the town house. He lived downstairs—the kitchen, the living room, a small bath, the dining area, a small den. The living room was large and open, with a nine-foot ceiling and white, cut-pile carpet, white walls, white vertical blinds covering a pair of three-panel sliding glass doors on the west wall. Outside, a small patio was surrounded by fencing on which still grew a vine he had planted many years before. The vine seemed lavish—lacy green stems dotted with pretty pink flowers.

  When the woman who was taking care of him arrived, she opened the blinds and flooded the downstairs of the apartment with light. Because the weather had already turned cool, she opened the sliding doors to air out the apartment. Vaughn's father was still resting on the couch in his blue pajamas, his body tangled in sheets. The sheets were not fitted to the couch, of course, but he was short and it was a large couch, so he fit inside its arms. It was the size of a coffin. Every night he slept there on top of a sheet with a second flat sheet pulled over him, and often a blanket in winter. The woman had a Catholic Services name tag on her uniform. He dozed off after the woman arrived, then woke again with a start to the smell of bacon and eggs, elbowed himself up on the couch, and slid into his wheelchair, rolled himself over to the bathroom, and backed into it so he could relieve himself. He missed the bowl as he did almost every morning. He wanted to pee sitting down on the toilet, but he couldn't, so he struggled to his feet holding on to the vanity on his left, and a handle on the wall to his right that had been placed there for him. Still, he missed the bowl.

  He called to the woman in the kitchen, and when she came out and knocked on the bathroom door, he asked her to help clean him up with a washcloth that he handed her. She rinsed it in the sink, soaped it lightly, stripped off his shirt and cleaned his armpits, his chest, his shoulders, his arms, his wrists, his hands. She cleaned his neck and his back, rinsing with a barely damp cloth. He watched all this in the bathroom mirror. The woman was not unattractive. She was young and dark-skinned and wore an odd-colored lipstick, something in the flaming-brick range. She washed his face with the washcloth, taking special care around his eyes, his ears, under his chin, at the back of his neck.

  “You have to clean down there,” he said, pointing. She pointed, too, and raised her eyebrows. He nodded. She turned to the sink and rinsed the washcloth again.

  “Take the trousers off,” he said, motioning to his waistband. He was facing her. She hooked her forefingers in the waistband on either side and pulled the pants down to his ankles. She went all the way to the carpet with the pajama pants, squatting there, holding the waistband at the floor.

  “Help me get my feet out,” he said, slapping his leg and motioning upward with his hand. She remained crouched there, lifting first his left foot by the ankle, then his right, and snapping the pajama pants out from under each foot in turn. Now he stood there naked in the small bathroom with the woman from Catholic Services, who retrieved the washcloth from the edge of the lavatory and began to clean his penis and his testicles, to rinse his pubic hair, to wipe between his legs with the washcloth, to clean his backside and the crack of his ass, constantly rinsing the washcloth, soaping it lightly, applying the soap, then re-rinsing and applying the damp cloth to his skin. In this way she worked down his legs to his feet, cleaning the tops and then, as if he were a plump two-legged horse, lifting one leg after another, and reaching around to clean the bottoms of his feet.

  When she had cleaned him head-to-toe, she said, “You dirty,” and motioned with her hand for him to stand there and allow the air to dry him while she took the washcloth and the pajamas into the laundry area in the kitchen.

  Vaughn's father stared at himself in the bathroom mirror. He reached down and encircled the head of his penis with his thumb and forefinger and pulled the penis out and down, as if trying to elongate his member, to un-shrivel it, but the penis would not cooperate and it contracted back into the extra flesh and hair of his crotch. It was barely there at all.

  When the woman returned she had fresh pajamas—white this time, with blue piping—folded over her arm. She shook out the pants and put them on the white carpeted floor of the bathroom, like two small connected pools, and then in the reverse of the procedure used to take off his pajama pants, she put one foot after the other in a leg hole, and then pulled the pants up and knotted them at his waist and tied a bow there. She held out the pajama top as if helping a gentleman on with his coat and threaded his left arm, then his right into the sleeves, and then returned to the front and buttoned him up—four buttons—bottom to top. She patted his arm and smiled at him, wiggled her finger in a circle to tell him to turn around and face away from the bathroom door, then fetched the wheelchair, which had been around the corner, just outside the bathroom, the whole time. She rolled the chair up behind him, helped him sit, and pulled him backward out of the bathroom and into the living room where she pushed him to the small table at which he would eat the breakfast she had been keeping warm on a hot plate in the kitchen.

  As he was eating, and knowing that she could not understand what he said, he spoke to her, while she was in the kitchen cleaning up.

  “I expect to hear from the boys today,” he said. “I expect to get a couple of calls today. We have some business to talk over—some matters about the estate.” He ate his eggs—they were poached—and his toast, and he listened to himself chew, and he looked out the window at the little pink flowers crawling on the wooden fence of the patio.

  Speaking louder, he said, “I'm going to need you to go to the store for me today.”

  She turned around and said, “Qué?”

  “The store,” he said. “Groceria.”

  “Sí,” she said.

  “I'll need to make a list,” he said.

  “Qué?” she said again from the kitchen.

  “I'll give you a credit card,” he said.

  “Card,” the woman said.

  “I think I'm going to need some things from the store,” he said again, and this time she did not reply.

  At mid-morning he busied himself with a grocery list. He worked first from memory, then rolled into the kitchen and opened the cabinets, one after another, with a rubber-tipped stick that he had made for this purpose. He had the Catholic Services women front all the cans in the cabinets so he could see what vegetables he had in those cans, so that he could inventory his holdings in vegetables. If there was a blank spot at the front of a shelf, he knew he needed peas, beans, or soup, depending upon which row was empty. He was an orderly man.

  At noon he gave her the list, gave her the keys to the car, and gave her his Visa card along with a signature card that she needed to show at the grocery store so that she could sign the Visa receipt
.

  At the door she turned and said, “Chips? You want chips?”

  He shook his head. “No, we have chips.” He waved at her from across the room. She went out and he listened to the door lock.

  When she was gone, he returned to the bathroom and with an elaborate effort managed to get himself out of the wheelchair and onto the toilet. This was such a relief for him, to be sitting on the toilet. He sighed and closed his eyes, grateful to be alone in the house and to be in the bathroom with his stick, the one he used in the kitchen and elsewhere when there were things out of reach that needed to be touched or moved. Now he used the stick, reaching out toward the door and shoving it almost closed. Now he waited.

  Minutes passed, a quarter hour. He wanted to go to the toilet now, because if he could, then the woman would, if necessary, clean him up when she returned. If he didn't go to the toilet now and he had to go after she left for the evening, there would be no one to clean him up. He could do it himself with the toilet paper, but the results were not always satisfactory. He could do it with the washcloth, but that required cleaning the washcloth, and sometimes the sink and vanity, and the results were often not completely satisfactory. He preferred when the girl did it, though while he was there on the toilet in the small bathroom, he noted with comfort that there were dozens of washcloths folded and stacked alongside the lavatory.

  On this occasion he managed to shit and on inspection saw that the shit was well-formed, well-colored, and cleanly off him. Buoyed by his success, he wiped his bottom several times with the toilet paper, flushing the toilet after each pass, and then, without getting off the toilet, wet a washcloth and passed the wet cloth between his legs. It burned his skin but after a couple of attempts the cloth emerged unsoiled, and he returned it to the sink, under the running water. He pulled up his pajama pants, and eventually got back into the wheelchair, rinsed the washcloth, then got out of the bathroom, and back into the living room where he sat in the wheelchair facing the couch where he slept every night, realizing that the sheets were not freshly folded on the arm of the couch where they usually were with most of the other Catholic Services women who saw to him.

  Later in the afternoon he watched CNN as the woman prepared his lunch—a small, bony steak. In the news that day: a drive-by shooting in Los Angeles, more casualties in a recent airliner crash, a rise in the snake population of Alaska. When he switched to the local weather channel, he saw that rain was expected by the end of the week. His testicles itched.

  As the afternoon dragged on he took a nap, and the woman retreated to the kitchen where she turned up the volume on her TV, a nine-inch model he had bought especially for the Catholic Services women, and which was connected to the cable service that provided two dozen Spanish-language channels. At five-thirty she put his dinner on the TV tray and then she was out the door, smiling. He gave her a thumbs-up and a nod, and when the door closed he lifted the plastic top she had put over his plate, surveyed the food, and then replaced the top. “Too early to eat,” he said, to no one.

  In the early evening Vaughn's father telephoned Vaughn's wife, Gail. This was before the divorce, although there was already talk of it, and Vaughn's father was party to that talk. He found her at home and talked to her for some time about how much he missed her and about how much he missed the old times when she and Vaughn would come to visit. He told her he had a particular fondness for her and that she was always his favorite of his sons' wives. He wished she would come visit him sometime. He needed someone to take care of him, someone with whom he could talk, with whom he might share a meal, an evening. She was welcome to stay at the apartment. In fact, he would like it if she would stay at the apartment. It would remind him of old times. She said that might be a little iffy.

  “Nonsense,” he said. “Not at all. In fact, if you get tired of my son, you can come and live with me. And by the way, how is your job going?”

  “Fine,” she said.

  “Maybe you could divorce my son, quit your job, and come and live with me,” he said. “I could provide for you.”

  “We aren't divorced yet,” she said to Vaughn's father. “No matter what you think.”

  Vaughn's father, who was eighty-six, fell silent. Gail, who had presented herself to him as, perhaps truthfully, as sweet a woman as ever walked this earth, said, “Maybe later I could. Maybe I could come live there with you and take care of you. I could cook and do that sort of thing.”

  “It might not be too bad,” Vaughn's father said. “You don't really have a husband, do you?”

  “Well, sort of,” she said, and they laughed together.

  They went on talking about this as if it were a real possibility. Later she would report to Vaughn that on many occasions his father offered to do his best to satisfy her in every possible way.

  That night Vaughn's father watched a football game on television. He moved from the wheelchair to one of the deep, soft easy chairs that he and Vaughn's mother used to sit in every night when they watched television. He still sat in his chair while his wife's chair, a little tattered, remained empty. He watched the football game for a while with the sound on, barely following the action. The sound was loud as it ricocheted around the room, and he found that comforting. Later he turned off the sound and stared at the game and past the game to the brightly colored jerseys, the screaming green field, the bright lights, the fans, the players and their sparkling helmets. He stared and wondered what would become of him, how he would go on living alone in the apartment. Eventually he was just staring at the wall off to one side of the television, barely aware of the movement on the screen, a shadow-play in his peripheral vision. By eleven he was asleep in the chair. The food was untouched on the TV tray; the television was running. All the lights downstairs were on. Outside, footsteps of the other apartment dwellers passed back and forth in front of his door. In the distance trucks could be heard gearing up and gearing down on the freeway heading out of town. Air-conditioning compressors clicked on and off. Crickets sang. The night rolled on.

  He awakened at three-thirty in the morning, disoriented, and he stayed in his chair for a minute trying to get his bearings. The television was showing some kind of sports news program with two young anchorpeople. The TV tray was just out of reach in front of him and to the left, on the other side of his chair. The covered plate was still on the tray, along with a glass of water with condensation on the sides. There was silverware there. After a few moments in the easy chair, he sat up and pulled the wheelchair to him and began to transfer himself into the wheelchair so that he could go to the bathroom. He managed to get into the chair and to the bathroom, where he missed the bowl.

  Coming out, he decided to try the walker. It was chilly in the apartment and he wanted to look at some papers on the table, and to close the curtains. He did these things successfully, using the walker. He wondered why no one ever called him—why Vaughn did not call him, why Newton did not call him. He wondered why he had to live there alone, tended by a woman who didn't speak English, and who changed day by day. He wondered where his friends were, where his family was. He wondered what he had done to earn himself this precarious and uncomfortable circumstance. He remembered when he was a powerful man, successful, well-regarded, a leader of other men and the prince of his family.

  He remembered his wife and the fight they had the night she fell in the den and hit her head on the coffee table and how that started her sudden speedy decline. He wished they had not had the argument; it was about something silly. They had been together for so long and had had so many arguments that every new one seemed to be about life and death. He wondered whether, if she had not fallen, she would be alive and there with him still. He regretted treating his wife badly in the final years of their marriage, regretted that he was unable to cope with her problems and his own problems and the loss of authority, the loss of purchase in the world, the sense that both of them were lost in time and space and that she was no longer any good to him in the way she had been previously,
and that it didn't matter anyway since he was worthless himself. The children, the two sons, had loved her immensely and in her decline had been with her constantly. They traveled to town and stayed with her at the hospital, stayed with her at the rest home even when she could not speak, and when she was comatose they had stayed by her side. Days and days and weeks, on into months, when finally at his insistence the feeding tube was removed from her stomach, and his wife and their mother passed on within days. He wondered if that was why they had forsaken him, or was it more? Was it everything that he did and did not do—the whole of his performance, every slight, every strong word, every missed expression of affection, attention not showered? Was it everything? He did not have an answer.

  He sat in his apartment in his wheelchair. The television was blinking in the other room, and he sat in the middle of the living room and he did not know. He was tired and dizzy, sick to his stomach. Suddenly his head jerked and it felt as though someone had hit him with a bat, but no one had hit him. Everything swam in front of him, and he thought he should lie down. He got out of the wheelchair and reached for the walker, but missed and stumbled onto the couch, his legs splayed under the coffee table, his powerful hands still locked on the aluminum handles of the wheelchair. He began to cry. There was nothing left to do. There was nothing he could do. He tried to get up and get under the sheet on the couch, but he was on top of the sheet and couldn't seem to lift himself off the sheet in order to get it out from under him and spread it over himself for sleeping. His legs were stiff and heavy, hard to move, like weights attached to his body. He couldn't move very well and he was dizzy and he closed his eyes and let his head fall forward onto the couch; he stayed that way for a few minutes, and then he was asleep again.