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Someday

Deanna Morris

    Every morning, as the coffee brews, Ellie retrieves the newspaper from her front porch and wonders if one of these mornings she will find her son on the doorstep next to the rolled up early edition or - having opened the paper - using it as blanket. It would be a long drive for him, but he’s been known to arrive unexpectedly.
    She only talks to him on the phone now. The last conversation they had, he said he was writing a letter to the aliens. And he remarked that he really was supposed to be the Pope, but it’s too late now, and, also, he has always been a genius. He tells her he lives on social security and that he is rich. And, oh, he is so happy. She hopes he is. Ellie is getting too old for these conversations, but he is her son.
    He has owned four German Shepherds. Every one of his dogs was depressed. He had to carry the last one up and down four flights of stairs because the dog was either too tired or sick, or both. When her son speaks of his own health, he says he hopes that when he dies, someone puts his body in a garbage bag and leaves it on the curb – that’s if the German shepherd doesn’t eat him first.
    She says, “Don’t talk like that.”
    But he does talk like that. It’s almost a relief when he doesn’t call, but it has been ten months now. She’d call him, but she is having trouble hearing. Of course, when he speaks to her he rarely takes a breath, asking no questions about her. When he does stop speaking for a moment, Ellie asks him what he has been doing besides writing a letter to the aliens. “I’ve been building a machine out of old Miller cans and scrap wire to contact them” since he does not know where to mail the letter.
    Ellie finishes her coffee and the paper. The phone rings. It is her son. He does not sound like her son. He is sullen. He is more than sullen. It seems his feet have swollen to twice their size and itch with a kind of relentless stinging only relieved by a foot soak – water in an empty wastebasket. Then there are the roaches and the bedbugs. He has never mentioned those before and he has never been sick. He says people get sick because they want to.
    “I am sending you a thousand dollars. Go to a doctor.”
    “O.K. but they don’t know anything.”
    The next time he tells her his legs, as well as his feet, are swollen twice their size. He tells her he can only walk about 6 inches, shuffle really. Maybe he should go to the doctor he says. “I got the check.” After he hangs up, Ellie wonders if he will live much longer, unassisted. It is time to for him to come live with her, no matter how difficult it might be for her. She’ll call him next week after she organizes her closets and makes room for him.
    Ellie had him when she was a 21 year old war bride. She raised him alone the three years his father was in the Philippines. When he returned from war, he took her in his arms and kissed her long and hard and then saw his son out of the corner of his eye. “Is that child a boy or a girl?” he asked. Ellie promised to get the shoulder length curls of her son cut the next day and she did. She begged her husband to leave the night light on for the child, but he said big boys aren’t afraid of the dark. Her husband commented that “he sure doesn’t look like me. He’s all you, Ellie.”
    That was a long time ago now. Ellie is in her 90’s, her husband passed on several years ago and her son lives across the country from her. She decides she must ask him to come live with her. What else can she do? He is deteriorating. She should have done it long ago, but she didn’t want to turn him into a sissy man. Then she could stop worrying any longer that he’d show up on her front porch unexpectedly, or that he die alone in his one bedroom walkup.
    She pulls out the scrapbooks to remind herself of whom she is inviting home. There are many pictures of him. He is not smiling in any of them. She thought for sure there was at least one of him smiling. One of the photos is of her husband on a sunny afternoon, the shadow of her husband a silhouette on the garage door behind him. Her son is directly beneath the shadow. Neither of them are smiling.
    She’ll set up a room for him in her sewing room. She no longer sews, her eyes dimming and her hands no longer nimble. She knows she will have to supply him with cigarettes and bourbon, but she no longer smokes or drinks so she can afford that. The only thing she really worries about is that he will talk to her all day long and that he will rarely shower.
    The weeks pass, Ellie prepares and then picks up the phone. On the other end at her son’s apartment, the phone rings on and on. There is no answering machine. The German Shepherd whimpers. His ears cock at the sound of the garbage truck pulling up to the curb.

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