Death Benefits (2 page)

“You,” she replies, between gasps. “What did you think? That I was sick of you?”

“Uh, yeah.”

“Oh, honey,” she says. “Never.” She snorts again. “Well, almost never.”

“Then who were you and Marta talking about?”

She stops laughing and wipes her nose on the sleeve of her sweater. “Your grandfather.”

I think about that for a minute. Since we've been here, Mom has visited her father every other day and called him every evening. On the weekends, she cooks all his dinners for the following week. She does his laundry and his grocery shopping. She cuts his hair. The few times I'd been to see him, he'd seemed fine to me. Old and cranky, but fine. Mind you, he never actually talks to me. He looks at me, grunts and goes back to whatever he's watching on tv. He bitches about Mom's cooking. Or the way she makes his bed. Or the kind of toothpaste she buys him. Now that I think about it, I can see why she might want to put him in a home.

When I went to visit him with Mom about a month ago, the first thing he said to me was, “You look like crap.”

Coming from an ancient geezer in baggy brown cords, a stained beige sweater and slippers with the toes cut out, I though that was pretty rich.

“Right back atcha, Gramps,” I said.

We glared at each other for a few seconds before he turned to my mother and said, “You need to get married again. The boy needs a man around the house. Someone to take him in hand. You're obviously not up to the job.”

Mom and I walked past him and up the stairs to the kitchen, where we put away his groceries in silence. Mom's lips were pressed together in a straight, hard line as she slammed the cans of soup into the cupboard and flung the milk into the fridge. When we were finished, she turned to Arthur, who had followed us into the kitchen, and said, “See you next week.”

“Can't you stay for a few minutes?” he whined. “Make me a coffee?”

She shook her head. “Errands to run. Sorry.”

“What about you, boy?” he said. “Know how to make coffee?”

“Nope,” I said. “No man around to teach me.”

We left, with Arthur shouting after us that we were both useless, selfish parasites. I haven't been back.

“So what are you gonna do?” I ask now.

“I'm not sure yet,” she says. “If we had a bigger place, maybe he could live with us.” She shudders. My head is throbbing and I feel sick to my stomach. Maybe I have a concussion or maybe it's the thought of living with Grandpa.

“I'll just have to find a caregiver, I guess,” Mom says. “He'll love that.”

“Better find one with a high tolerance for verbal abuse,” I say.

“You got that right,” Mom replies.

As I turn to go downstairs, she adds, “And I hope you meant what you said about getting a job.”

Two

B
efore I go any further, I should fill you in on a few things. First of all, my name is Royce Peterson. I have no middle name. When I was twelve, I started a campaign to add Isaac or Ichabod to my name so that my initials would be R.I.P., but Mom wouldn't sign off on it. She said two names were enough. When I was a baby, my dad started calling me Rolly (Rolls Royce, get it?) and it stuck. Now the whole family calls me that, and everyone but me still thinks it's cute. When we moved to Victoria, I made my mom promise to start calling me Royce. I didn't want a repeat performance of what happened in Lunenburg when I was six and the kids at school called me Roly-Poly, which didn't even make sense, since I was (and am) built like a stalk of bamboo. Skinny, with knobby bits.

Anyway, my mom's name is Nina and my dad's name was Michael. He died when I was two. Went for a run after dinner one summer evening and got slammed by a drunk driver. Died on the spot. I don't remember him at all. I used to think that I had some memories of him, but then I realized that all my supposed memories were just fantasies I had constructed from pictures in our photo album. Dad at the beach, throwing a Frisbee for a dog we used to have. Dad in the backyard, digging a flower bed for my mom. Dad tending a fire at a campsite by a lake. Dad after a run. I can smell the ocean, the damp soil, the smoke from the campfire, his sweat. I can feel his stubble on my cheek when he kisses me good night. But it's all crap, no matter how much I want it to be otherwise.

My mom was only twenty-four when my dad died. Her father was god-knows-where and her only sibling was in Australia. Marta's married to a banker named Horst, and they have six children and a bunch of grandchildren. They all play tennis. And golf. Some of the guys play polo, if you can believe it. Not water polo, which would be dumb enough. Real polo. The kind with horses. They have year-round tans and so far none of them has skin cancer. All my cousins but the youngest one—Mandy, who's about twenty—are a lot older than me. I met a couple of them—the twins, Chris and Rick—when they came to Canada for some extreme sports event when I was about ten. Mountain biking or snowboarding or hang gliding. I forget which. I've blocked it from my mind. They scared the crap out of me with their multi-pocketed hiking shorts, their mirrored shades, their wooly socks and their hairy calves. They called me “mate” and tried to talk my mom into sending me out to Australia so they could take me snorkeling on the Great Barrier Reef. Make a man out of me. Introduce me to barracudas and sharks. When Mom told them I couldn't swim, their bright blue eyes widened and their identical cleft chins dropped. “We're gobsmacked, bloody gobsmacked,” they said in unison. The next day they took their muscles up to the top of some mountain, and I haven't seen them, or any of my other cousins, since. If they asked me now, I might go to Australia. I might even learn to swim when I got there. I'd have to draw the line at polo—horses terrify me—but at least I'd be away from here.

My mom never knew her mother. My dad's family lives in South Africa, so they weren't much help after Dad died. The occasional birthday present. A Christmas card or two. So Mom started earning money doing the two things she was good at: teaching piano and gardening. I was always with her—in a bassinet beside the piano, in a playpen in a client's garden. She saved on daycare and I got an overdose of classical music and sunshine.

I never met my mom's father until we moved here. Arthur was close to eighty when I was born. He told my mom that his traveling days were over, so he never came to visit us, even though he could afford it. He never offered to fly us out to Victoria either. Never remembered birthdays or Christmas. I guess we weren't sufficiently interesting or useful to him. That all changed in late October when he had a small stroke and ended up in the hospital. Mom, who was listed as Arthur's next-of-kin, got a call from a doctor in Victoria who said Arthur was going to be sent home soon, but he couldn't drive anymore or cook his own meals or look after the house. For two weeks after his release from hospital, he would have twenty-four-hour care, paid for by his health insurance. After that, he was someone else's problem. Marta was too far away and too busy with her tennis and her banker and all her children and grandchildren. Mom only had me and a few piano students. And a shitload of guilt, it turns out.

We packed everything up, said goodbye to our friends and drove across the country in our old Audi wagon. It wasn't much of a road trip. Not like in the movies. Before we left Nova Scotia, I took a vow of silence that lasted until Saskatoon, where I broke down and begged for a burger rather than the sandwiches Mom made in our crappy motel room every night. She may have been enjoying the quiet for all I know, but all she said was, “McDonald's okay with you?” After that, it took more effort to stay silent than to talk, so the western provinces went by pretty quickly.

By the time we were on the ferry to Vancouver Island, I was positively giddy (for me). I stayed outside for the whole trip, watching for whales, taking pictures for Japanese tourists on their expensive digital cameras, covering my ears when the ship's whistle blew. Another ferry passed us, dangerously close it seemed to me, and I waved at a guy who was leaning over the railing of the other ship. He didn't wave back. I flipped him off, but then I realized that he was puking. Oops. A woman in a red jacket stood behind him, arms crossed, watching him vomit.

My mom had joined me on the deck, the wind whipping her ponytail into her face. She squinted at the couple on the other ferry and grinned. “Good times,” she said. “At least you're not a puker.”

“You know me,” I said. “Stomach of steel.”

A hair was stuck to her lipstick and she brushed it off. “I'm sorry about this, Rolly. The move. Your grandpa. I know it's hard for you. But I couldn't just leave him on his own. He raised me. Just because we're not close now doesn't mean he didn't do his best.”

“Right,” I said. “His best was live-in nannies, boarding schools and summer camps. What a guy.”

“He had no choice,” she protested. “My mother left us when I was three months old. He had to go where there was work. He couldn't very well take a baby on tour, could he? And he was in great demand. Berlin, New York, Paris. Everyone wanted the great Arthur Jenkins. There just wasn't enough Arthur to go around. So I did without.”

“Bitter much?” I said.

She glared at me and turned to go inside. “Not as bitter as he is,” she said.

Now, after a couple of months of catering to his every whim, she's interviewing caregivers and considering the seniors' equivalent of boarding school. No privacy, bad food and inmates who wet the bed. Tit for tat, Grandpa. What goes around, etc., etc.

Mom interviews about a dozen applicants before she finds one she likes even a little bit. A tiny woman who looks like she's about eighty herself, prides herself on getting her “old gents” squeaky clean “down there.” Gross. One guy arrives on a huge chopper. He has a shaved head and a lot of prison tats—all blue, all nasty. He says he only looks after “old straight white dudes” and he always has to have Mondays off for his “meetings.” Mom looks him in the eye and tells him that Grandpa is black (which he definitely isn't) and gay (ditto) and Jewish (I'm not sure, but with a name like Jenkins I doubt it). Biker dude stomps off, muttering about kikes, fags and niggers. “Nazi creep,” Mom says.

By the time Mavis arrives, Mom is desperate. Mavis is a retired nurse, British, with a faint white mustache, stained teeth and muscular forearms. She says she has lots of experience with “old folks” and that she's sure Mr. Jenkins is a “poppet.” Not bloody likely, I want to say. She also claims to like “a bit of Brahms over tea,” which endears her to Mom, and she is so much better qualified than any of the other applicants that Mom gives her the job on the spot. No reference check, which seems unwise to me.

She starts work the next day, and Grandpa, predictably, hates her on sight. Refuses to talk to her or eat her cooking. I could have told Mom that Grandpa, even though he's really old, would still want to be looked after by someone young and hot, but since no one of that description applied for the job, I didn't think she would find my opinion helpful. He phones Mom on her cell about twenty times that first day, raving about cutting her out of his will. Telling her how ungrateful she is. He even compares himself to King Lear, which I guess makes Mom Cordelia, the good daughter. Which probably makes me the Fool. He calls Mavis an old cow, a dyke and a sadist (apparently she cooked him something called Spotted Dick). Two days later Mavis quits, and Mom starts the whole process again.

This time she gets lucky right away. Lily is from the Philippines, she's trained as a care aide and she's super-motivated, since she's trying to save money to bring her husband and kids to Canada. She doesn't know anything about classical music, but she laughs a lot, she's tattoo-free (at least as far as I can see) and she's clearly not a dyke. She asks for Sundays off to go to church. That's it. She's happy to work six days a week, twelve hours a day, happy being the operative word. I've never met anyone who laughs so much with so little reason.

“She's perfect,” Mom says after Lily leaves. “Dad will absolutely love her.”

“Yeah, right,” I say, imagining him grabbing Lily's ass as she brings him his lunch.

For a minute Mom looks as if she is in pain. Maybe she's reliving some past injury or it might simply be a leg cramp. Her father never remarried after her mother took off. She's not even sure her parents were ever married, but according to Mom, he always had a female companion when she was growing up. He'd turn up for lunch twice a year at her boarding school with Carmen or Graziella or Therese. All much younger than him, all musicians. He particularly liked singers. None of them came a second time. And now Mom has sent a sweet, youngish, relatively attractive woman into the dragon's den.

“I'm sure it'll be fine,” she says. “Dad is far too old…”

I snort.

“And Lily's married, Royce.”

“What does that have to do with anything?” I ask.

Two weeks later, Lily is history. Apparently Grandpa flashed her, and not just at bath time. The first few times, she laughed it off, but when he asked her to sit on his naked lap, she ran out of the house, called my mother and quit.

“I guess I'm lucky she hasn't filed charges.” Mom is on the phone to Marta the day after Lily quits. I sit across the table from her in the kitchen, trying to guess what Marta is saying. Nothing good, from the look on Mom's face.

“I can't ask him to do that,” she says. “And I can't afford to take the time off work. Not now. Not ever. And even if I could, I'd kill Dad within a week.” She forces a laugh, but she's still frowning. Her hair looks like mine: dull, flat and stringy. The only difference is that she pulls hers back into a ponytail when she's working outside. Ponytails on guys are lame. She stands up and starts pacing the kitchen: sink, fridge, stove, table, sink, fridge, stove, table.