text: Edith Palfrey stares at the human wreckage that had once been her father. He is sleeping fitfully; with his gaunt frame, he looks like a skeleton covered in bedsheets. A thin rivulet of spit runs down one cheek, and she reaches out to wipe it with a tissue, tossing it into the trashcan near the bed. She lifts an overhanging bit of sheet to check the collection bag for the catheter and sees that it is only a quarter full. The catheter is the type they call a Texas catheter, which some people also call a condom catheter, which gives you a better idea of how it works. Needless to say, it took her quite a while to get used to putting it on and taking it off of her father--though if she were completely honest, she would tell you she had never really gotten used to it. Edith reaches over and brushes the hair away from her father’s face with her hand; his hair is as white as snow, with thin patches where she can see glimpses of his scalp. It is hard to believe how thick and dark that hair had once been, in another lifetime. She steps out of the room as quietly as she can and goes into the small kitchen, where her tea is finished steeping. She removes the Lipton bag from the cup and tosses it into the trash, then tears the end off of a packet of equal, measuring half the packet out into a spoon. She stirs it in and adds a dash of milk, then drops in a single ice cube to cool it down just a little. Taking a tentative sip, she nods her head in satisfaction before taking her cup of tea to the living room, where the TV is still on with the volume turned down. Edith takes a seat in the chair that has always reminded her of the one Archie Bunker always sat in on All in the Family. She leaves the volume turned down as she watches some crappy sitcom she doesn’t really like play itself out on the screen while taking small, satisfying sips of tea. After a while she starts imagining what is going on in the show, making up a storyline to go with the wordless images she is seeing. A tall, older gentleman steps out from behind a curtain he’s been hiding behind, and Edith decides that this man must be the Blonde’s father, and that he has been hiding because he doesn’t want her to know that he is secretly seeing the Brunette. She can almost hear the reaction from the studio audience, one of those cheesy ooohs that always accompany a scene were something racy is hinted at. Just then a younger man comes bursting onto the screen, and the camera cuts back to the Blonde, the Brunette, and the Dad/Secret Lover. They all look a bit sheepish, and when the camera cuts back to Young Guy, he looks perplexed. As the camera hangs on him, Edith imagines the Brunette saying something off-camera: “This isn’t what it looks like.” And the audience laughs. Finishing the last sip of tea, Edith picks up the remote and hits the power button, and the TV goes blank. She goes to the kitchen and slowly washes and rinses the cup before leaving it upside down in the dish rack to dry. She shuts off the kitchen light and makes her way down the hall to the back bedroom to check on her father. She cracks the door just a bit and peers inside; there’s not enough light to see anything, so she opens the door just a little more to let in some of the light from the hall. A gasp escapes her and she rushes into the room, flipping on the light as she goes. Her father is lying on his side on the floor, wedged between the bed and the bedside table. It takes some time (especially with him fighting her the whole way) but she gets him back up onto the bed. Some noises escape his throat, noises that might have been words if he could still talk. “It’s all right, Daddy. You’re okay; you just had a little accident.” Then the stench hits her, and she realizes just how right she is. She lets out an exasperated sigh, then immediately feels guilty for having done so. She knows that none of this is his fault. He had once been a happy, outgoing, man--a man’s man, her mother had called him. It all started when he began having trouble remembering things, and eventually, the road had led right here, to this room, to this night, and all the nights to come. The dark secret that lay in her heart, the nasty thing that she would never admit to anyone, that she could barely admit to herself, is that she often hopes that there won’t be many more nights to come. “We need to get you changed,” she says. She gets a pad and fresh pair of protective underwear from the linen closet (she can’t think of it as a diaper, never that) and sets it on the bedside table. Then she lifts her father and slips the pad under him to catch any spillage. She then works on getting his soiled protective underwear off of him, mindful of the catheter tube snaking out of one side. The soiled pair gets rolled up and thrown in the trash. She uses some wet wipes to clean him and then gets the fresh pair of underwear on him. She lifts him up on his side again to slip the pad out, rolls that up, and tosses it into the trash. As she works, she pretends that she does not see the tears in his eyes, or see the trembling of his too-moist lips. She can’t bear to see those things, and so she just doesn’t. She covers him with his sheets and gives him a quick kiss on the forehead before taking the bag out of the trashcan and tying it in a knot. She shuts off the light and shuts the door, then takes the bag of soiled things to the kitchen, where she stuffs it into the kitchen trashcan. For a moment she stands in the kitchen, leaning against the counter. Then she walks slowly to the study where her father used to while away the hours once upon a time, reading, writing correspondence, or just napping (though he always denied that last one). She turns on a lamp and soft light bathes the room in a warm glow. She touches a few of the books lined up on the shelf: Gulliver’s Travels, Don Quixote, The Collected Works of Poe. She moves over to the desk in the corner where her father used to sit happily writing letters, and not-so-happily looking over the latest electric or heating bill. Mounted on the wall over the desk is one of the scale model ships he used to build as a hobby. He had built at least a couple dozen of them over the years; the others were carefully packed away God knows where, but this one has always been his favorite, and so it was set on a shelf mounted on the wall of his study. It is a 1/50 scale model of the HMS Bounty. It had been up here on this wall ever since Edith could remember. She had often seen her father take it down and set in on the desk to just look at it, almost as if he were surprised that he had actually made such a thing. A few times she even dared to take it down herself, but never while her father was home. As she looks at it now up there on the wall she can see that time has taken its toll on the ship. A few of the sails sag where they should be taut, a few scuff marks mar the hull, and the mizzenmast is bent slightly out of shape. She thinks that the ship must have taken a tumble from the wall at some time in the past; it must have happened when she was away, living her own life away from the house where she had lived as a child. For just a moment she considers taking it into a hobby shop to see if it can be repaired, put back in its original condition. Then she decides against it; why spend money just to fix something that will just stay hidden here in the study, where nobody will see it, anyway? She moves to the doorway and takes another look at the study, inhaling deeply the smell of the room, still retained, that smell that is so distinctly her father. Then she turns off the light and closes the door, leaving the room and its ghosts in darkness. Edith leaves the house and slowly descends the porch steps. She walks to the street, turns right, and starts walking. At the stop sign she stops and turns back to look at the house that had been her home, then was her parent’s home, and now was her home again since her mother died and left Edith as the only one to take care of her father. There were a few lights on, and she couldn’t help thinking that the house looked like a big ship, lost and adrift on a dark sea. She turns and starts walking again, thinking that she will turn around at the place where Oak intersects Ridge. The big night sky envelops the world like a velvet glove, and a cool breeze blows gently in her face, blowing wisps of hair around her head. When she gets to the intersection of Oak and Ridge, she thinks that she will walk to the next intersection, and then she will turn back. But when she gets to the next intersection, she keeps going, thinking that it will be nice to walk just a little farther.