All the Roads That Lead From Home by Anne Leigh Parrish Read Free Book Online

sound asleep. It’s unnerving
to sit there, with him so still and peaceful. You feel as if death could enter
at any moment without your knowing. But he’s not close to dying. He won’t die
for another four years, by which time you’ve given him a very late-arriving
grandson whose creation took faith and artificial means.
    Later you
stretch across the orange bedspread in your motel room and think of your father
trying to make up for being lucky, for not talking, for wanting Leslie to eat
her vegetables, but not for you, never for you. Maybe in his eyes you just
weren’t weak enough.
    How
well you’ve turned out, Dar. You’ve got such character. Don’t need a thing from
anyone. You’re one independent gal.
    His words,
not yours, whenever the conversation failed, as it always did, because you
didn’t want him to call. Didn’t want to tumble into something you didn’t
control, where the weight was all on his side.
    In the
morning you find you’ve slept in your clothes, and the bed is as rumpled as
you, but only on your half. You call your husband. He’s glad you did. He wants
to know how your father is. Out of it, really out of it , you say. You
say you’ll be home tomorrow, and remember to say that you love him.
    I love
you, too, Dar.
    Your
father is awake, and has had his breakfast. Egg has spilled on his front. He’s
fretful, and his bent hands pluck at the bed sheets.
    I don’t
know if I can go on helping my friends, Dar. I think I’ve run through all my
money.
    You nod.
    I hate
letting them down, but I don’t know what else to do.
    You’re at
a loss now, in the face of this candor, this worry. Your father never showed
worry before. Only steely calm, even when his second wife berated him, or when
Leslie said she hated him, or when you accused him of arrogance that day on
campus.
    You
make people into puppets! Sitting there in the dark, pulling strings! You’d learned that he had put in a good word at a college
you’d applied to, just as a way of helping things along. You didn’t want help.
You had faith in your own merits, or at least you argued that you did. In truth
you had no faith at all.
    For a
moment your waving arms and loud voice seemed to throw him off balance. His
face opened, then closed right away because someone walked by and called his name,
a colleague with a briefcase and expensive shoes. As your father called back
you walked off, perhaps not having the will to try to get his attention a
second time.
    You didn’t
go to the college he talked to. You went somewhere else, far away out west. The
desert air was good for you. You put down roots in the dry ground, yet you
returned, not to your home town, but further south. Why did you come back East
at all?
    “Can you
help me, Dar?” Your father’s voice is quiet. He doesn’t look at you. “I think I
may need help.”
    “You mean
pay another bill?” This would be as easy as the last, because you and your
husband are frugal, even cheap, and you’ve got a lot put by. The balance in
your money market account alone is over sixty thousand dollars.
    “No, no, I
couldn’t take a penny from you. Just help me manage what I’ve got. I can’t seem
to keep track of it these days,” he says.
    You agree
to take a look at his checkbook and see if you can make sense of it.
    He directs
you to his rooms, his “cottage,” he calls it, at the retirement home. The
receptionist in the main hall opens the door for you, but doesn’t leave you the
key. The front room is larger than you expected, with a sliding glass door.
Outside the door is a small concrete slab meant to serve as a patio. There’s a
single folding chair there, and an empty glass someone overlooked. You lift the
glass and smell it. You bring it inside and rinse it in the tiny
stainless-steel kitchen sink.
    The
bedroom is much smaller. Cardboard boxes line one wall, stacked three high. The
dresser is low, one you remember from childhood. A bright red drop of nail
polish, like plastic