The Air Mattress in Our Basement

Our son was sixteen that winter. He was not a talker. He had his grandfather’s way, my dad’s way, of standing in a room for a minute and reading it before he said a word.

He stood in the kitchen and read it.

His father at the table with a second beer and nothing to say. Me at the stove stirring chicken noodle soup that had sat out long enough to lose its chill. An air mattress folded in the hall. The guest room door open on a desk.

“Where’s Grandma’s bed?” he said.

“In the garage,” Rick said. “I took it apart. I needed my office back.”

“Where’s Grandma?”

“In my room,” I said. “She’s resting.”

Josh looked at the air mattress. He looked at the basement door, which I had left open. I watched him put it together, the same way I had, a piece at a time.

“She was down there?”

Nobody answered him.

“Dad. She was down there?”

“For one afternoon.” Rick set his bottle down harder than he needed to. “I’m not going to explain myself to a sophomore. It’s warm by the furnace. It’s a perfectly good bed. I said to your mother, I’d sleep on it myself. This is my house, I’m the man of it, and I made a decision. That’s the end of it.”

Josh nodded slowly, the way he nods at his coach.

“Okay,” he said.

He put down his wrestling bag. He went into the hall and picked up the air mattress, the whole slumped thing, and tucked it under one arm. He went to the closet and got the foot pump. He went down the basement stairs.

Rick looked at me. I looked at my soup.

We could hear him down there. The wheeze of the pump, over and over, for a good five minutes. Then his feet on the steps again, and he went past us down the hall without a word, and came back carrying a fitted sheet, a flat sheet, the brown blanket off the back of the couch, and his father’s pillow, which he had gone into my bedroom on tiptoe to get.

Down he went.

Up he came.

The last trip, he went into the guest room, the office, and came out with the alarm clock. It was Rick’s, the big one with the red numbers that he had kept on the desk ever since I told him I could not sleep with it glowing at me. Josh wound the cord around his hand as he walked.

“What do you think you’re doing?” Rick said.

Josh did not answer until he came back up. He stood at the top of the basement stairs with his hand on the door frame, and he was not smart about it and he was not loud. He said it the way you would tell somebody their supper was ready.

“Here you go. Man of the house.”

Rick’s chair scraped.

“It’s all made up,” Josh said. “I put it right where you had Grandma. I pumped it tight, but it leaks, so you’ll want to top it off around midnight. Your clock’s plugged in next to it. I set it for five-thirty.”

“You watch your mouth.”

“I didn’t say anything about you, Dad. I said what you said.” Josh picked up his wrestling bag. “You said it was a perfectly good bed and you’d sleep on it yourself. So I made it up nice.”

But there was a sixteen-year-old boy standing in his kitchen holding him to his own word, and his wife was not coming to his rescue, and there is a kind of pride that would rather freeze than back up.