Heart Valve

Every evening at 5:00 pm, the third wife would raise a bottle of liquor above her head and yell Ding-dong! It was five o’clock somewhere and somewhere was here. She was the kind of person who had heavy, brown ceramic mugs shaped like Moai on hand at her homemade makeshift outdoor bar; the kind of person who garnished drinks with fruit chunks and paper umbrellas; the kind that stocked the cabinets with pineapple juicе, grenadine, and apricot schnapps. And now she was dеad. The woman who put tiny, decorative, shell-shaped soaps in the bathrooms when company came over was dead, and she had left us alone with our father. She had been pulling the tubes out of her arms for several days, screaming I’m no longer beautiful let me die. They put the tubes back in each time, of course, but soon enough she went under and was gone. Without her, our father was difficult to wrangle. He was a complicated man. The rules were different. He had a bad heart valve, which made it difficult for his heart to pump, but he also had anemia, which thinned his blood and kept him alive. Cancer was keeping my father alive. He still said, You’re an abomination, but I could deflect him more easily now. I know, dad, but would you like half a sandwich? It was enough to change the subject. He wanted to keep living in the house, so he did. And since I was living in the guesthouse and helping out, he reinherited me. Everything was fine until the night I came home and found him in the living room, stuck in an Eames chair. He had been stuck for hours. The next day we started visiting assisted living facilities. My brother left New York to help. He moved into the house with me. I had already claimed the master bedroom with the Jacuzzi and walk-in closet, the glassed-in gym, and the side patio; he took the office, maid’s room, dining room, and library. He turned the office into his studio. I made a studio in the garage, under the guest house. We shared the kitchen and the pool. Our father had a single room at assisted living, but it was large. We brought over furnishings from the house. It was a strange edit, a condensed personality. Now he had comrades. He charmed the ladies in the dining room. He met a woman who had also been a lawyer and they started sneaking into each other’s rooms at night. They held hands at lunch. They took naps together and listened to books on tape. I think it was the first time he had actually fallen in love. She managed to stay alive for seven months. After she died, he moved to hospice. He was angry and extraordinarily sad, and it had done him in. I did not visit him, he wanted to spent the time with the other son. It was the right decision. He wanted to be buried and not cremated. My brother bought him a new suit and new shoes, selected a casket. The executor said the suit was a waste of money. The rest of the formalities had already been decided. We carried out his wishes as instructed. His lawyer made sure we did.