Mrs. O’Reilly was in the kitchen, wrapping a scarf around her throat. She only had to go up a single flight on inside stairs, but she always complained the landings were cold.
“He was all right today,” Mrs. O’Reilly said. “Nothing serious going on. He soiled himself a couple of times. I cleaned him up.”
“Thank you.”
“You should get those diapers they have these days for people like him. It would make things easier. Easier on all three of us, if you ask me. And he’s not ever going to get it back, not anymore. He’s not ever going to be able to go on his own after this.”
“No,” Dessa said numbly. “Of course, not.”
“What you really ought to do is find him a nursing home. It’s crazy, what you’re putting up with here. It’s crazy what we’re both putting up with. We’re not doing him any good.”
“I didn’t get a chance to go to the bank today,” Dessa said. “I’ll have to get your money out tomorrow. Do you mind? Or would you like to have a check?”
“Don’t know what I’d do with a check,” Mrs. O’Reilly said. “I can wait until tomorrow.”
Mrs. O’Reilly had the scarf wound around her neck now, just the way she liked it. It made Dessa think of a bright yellow neck brace. Mrs. O’Reilly left the kitchen and went through the living room to the stairway at the front.
“Torpedoes,” Dessa’s father said again.
Mrs. O’Reilly ignored him. “I’ll be down at ten minutes after seven in the morning,” she told Dessa. “I think I’m going to try to make tomato jelly, if he’s having a good day. He doesn’t have a lot of good days any more. You ought to try to remember that.”
“I do,” Dessa said.
Mrs. O’Reilly went out the living room door to the vestibule at the front and then up the stairs. Dessa closed up behind her and listened to the sound of her feet moving heavily from step to step in their thick-soled rubber shoes.
I shouldn’t have spent the fifty dollars at Fountain of Youth, Dessa told herself. I shouldn’t be thinking of spending four hundred and fifty more.
“Torpedoes,” Dessa’s father said.
Dessa sat down at the kitchen table. She opened her cloth bag and got out the folder from Fountain of Youth. Her father was never quiet the whole night through. He couldn’t be trusted to sleep. Later, she would have to clean up what he had done and get him into his pajamas and tie him to the bed. If she didn’t do that, he got out and wandered around and broke things.
Dessa opened the folder and looked at the first of the things in it, a little flyer advertising the wonders of diet and exercise as purveyed by Magda Hale and the Fountain of Youth. “A New You for the New Year,” the flyer promised.
Dessa desperately hoped so.