The Air Mattress in Our Basement
He walked over to the corner and looked at the sump pump. He actually did. He lifted the float, let it run, let it shut off.
“Pump’s fine,” he said. “Check valve’s a little loud, that’s all. It’s not the pump that’s the trouble in this house.”
Then he came up the stairs, past Gary, and held out his arm to my mother like he was asking her to dance.
“Ready, Joyce? Truck’s nice and warm.”
Gary took her bag. At the door he turned around and looked at Rick, who had come up as far as the top step. Gary had been an usher alongside him for eleven years.
He did not say anything at all. He just looked, and then he put his cap on and went out.
Josh rinsed his bowl, put on his coat, and stopped beside his father on his way to the door.
“You should’ve just said sorry Tuesday,” he said, and he was not being hard about it. He sounded sad. “It would’ve been so much easier.”
That was the end of the stubborn part. It was not the end of the basement.
Rick did not come upstairs that night, and this time it was not pride. Pride makes him loud. He came home, ate what I put in front of him, said “Thank you” to his plate, and went down those stairs like a man going where he had been sent.
Sunday he did not want to go to church. I told him I was taking my mother, because she had asked to go, and he could do what he liked. He came. He sat at the end of the pew.
Nobody said a word to him about it. I had braced for whispering, and there was none. Dale shook his hand at the door same as always. Gary nodded. Brenda from the altar guild came straight past Rick to hug my mother and ask what she could bring for supper Wednesday, and three more women lined up behind her.
It would have been easier on him if somebody had told him off. What he got was a whole fellowship hall being kind to Joyce, right around him, like water going around a rock.
He did not go to men’s breakfast that week, or the next.
At home, Josh was polite to him. Yes, sir. No, sir. Pass the potatoes. I had never understood before how cold politeness could be coming from a child who used to wrestle you on the living room rug.
I did not go down to the basement once. I am not proud of that and I am not sorry for it either. He had made his bed, or his son had, and I had a woman to take care of.
It turned on a night in the second week.
I had been up with her at midnight, and I must have gone under hard, because I did not hear her get up again. What woke me was the cold spot where she should have been, and the light under the bathroom door.
And a voice in there that was not hers.
I got up and stood in the hall.
The bathroom in our house sits right over the corner of the basement where the furnace is. I had never thought about it. For six weeks, Rick had slept at the far end of the hall with a box fan running, and he had never heard one thing that went on in that bathroom at two in the morning. He had known my mother was sick the way you know a thing from the newspaper.