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All Fall Down

James Penha

    Linda closed her old HP laptop and bore with her right hand a treacherous tunnel through the mountain of unopened QVC boxes on the kitchen table in order to see her husband better. Dennis sat where she had situated him after the memorial service.
    Her plan had been to scatter his ashes in the Kensico Reservoir where Dennis used to take his Sun Dolphin row boat to fish, but Linda’s son-in-law David, a state trooper, told her it was illegal to dump anything in a reservoir.
    Linda did not react well to the warning. “It’s not trash, you know; it’s your fucking father-in-law!”
    Jennifer intervened to calm relations between her mother and her husband. “Mom, David doesn’t want you to get into any trouble.”
    “Dump!” Linda repeated. “Dump! Like garbage?”
    “C’mon, Linda,” David said, “I didn’t mean anything. You know how much I liked David. I mean . . . I used to go fishing with him in Kensico. Let Jenn and me help you—” David took a breath. “—scatter Dennis’s ashes somewhere appropriate. But I can’t abet anything illegal.”
    “Abet? Wow! Suddenly a thesaurus word . . . like scatter! No, of course not, no abetting.” Linda turned to her daughter. “So what would you suggest?”
    Jennifer thought. Ever since the first of his two cancers—lung then throat—six years earlier, her father, forced to retire from the pharmacy, had lost interest not only in fishing but in almost everything else except his den’s big-screen TV before which he would smoke cigarettes in his recliner until he and the rat terrier curled in his lap both fell asleep. “How about Belmont?” Jennifer excitedly said.
    “Perfect!” David said. “He loved playing the ponies.”
     “And you and he used to go to the big race every June, right Mom?” Jennifer added.
    “Well, yeah.”
    “We can do this,” David said. “I’ll work it out with the Nassau County boys, and we can d— scatter Dennis in the paddock near the statue of Secretariat.”
    “What do you say, Mom?”
    “Yeah, it’s a nice idea. He’d like it. He loved Big Red.”
    But whenever Jennifer called to ask if they should pick her up for the drive down to Belmont, Linda put them off. “No,” she said every time, “I’m not ready.” Once, when David phoned, she added with a well-rehearsed smirk in her voice, “No need for you to go abetting at the track today.”
    Most recently, Jennifer told David, her mother had said that she didn’t think she could live without Dennis. “That scared me. I thought she was threatening to kill herself. But then she said she thought she’d get an urn.”
    “Yeah, right,” David said. “I’m sure they have an Urn Day on QVC.”
    But for now, in the square box the crematorium had delivered into Linda’s hands, Dennis’s ashes remained on his chair at the kitchen table. The box prevented Jasper, the rat terrier, from climbing onto the table via the chair. And it—Dennis—kept Linda company.
    “How could you do this to me, Dennis?” she whispered every morning as she poured, out of habit, two cups of coffee. “Leave me alone like this?”
    The death certificate reported the cause of death as pneumonia. But the more Linda sorted out Dennis’s affairs—a life insurance policy about which she had known nothing; limit-verging credit-card statements stapled to a letter from Dennis’s financial adviser (her husband had a financial adviser?) assuring him that should he die, New York law required his bills to be forgiven; envelopes containing documents or mementoes carefully addressed to certain friends and relatives—the more she understood that Dennis had planned for his death . . . or, more accurately, he had planned to die.
    His endless smoking and his refusal to eat anything except the Ensure Linda forced on him had prompted Jennifer not infrequently to tell her mother that Dennis was committing suicide, but very, very slowly. Linda hadn’t wanted to hear it. But now she came to believe it.
    At the memorial service, Jennifer said to her mother, “I was right, you know. Dad did a Willie Loman, but much more cleverly.”
    “Smart-ass!” Linda said to the box on the opposite chair. “I don’t want to be alone!”
    There was no response, of course. But Dennis had always been taciturn anyway—more so since the radiation on his throat gave him a voice as rough as sandpaper. It was Linda who always kept conversations going, usually in reaction to the Facebook comments scrolling on her laptop or, face-to-screen, with Fox News or, of course, the QVC presenters babbling from the little flat TV hanging above the kitchen table. Fully engaged in her monologues, she often failed to notice, until Jasper leaped on the table wagging parcels to the floor, that Dennis had left the kitchen for the den and his recliner.
    Jasper missed Dennis. And he missed Abby, the toy poodle who had died of old age just two weeks before Dennis’s passing. Her ashes were in a box on the dining room table. Abby’s death had hit Dennis hard; he loved his dogs, and they loved him.
    Linda got up and made her way to the dining room. The big package on the table contained the MacBook Pro she had ordered from QVC but never opened. It was too late now to return it. Atop the parcel was the gaily-decorated box labeled “Abby” from the veterinary crematorium. Linda undid the cardboard tab from its slot. Inside, Linda smiled to see a shapely Chinese-red ceramic receptacle with a screw-on top. She wondered if Dennis too was already in an urn. She hadn’t thought to ask. David had taken care of all those arrangements. Carefully lifting Abby’s vase and nestling it against her chest, she returned to the kitchen table on which she made room for the little urn and set it down.
    The corrugated cardboard box containing Dennis was carefully and neatly sealed with fabric tape. His name was inscribed in a handsome label on the top. Linda grabbed a steak knife from a drawer and carefully cut around the upper edge of the box until she could flip open its top. Inside was another box. She removed it from its container, put it on her chair, and applied the same procedure with the knife. An odd metallic smell emanated from the box, but Linda saw at first only several layers of cotton balls. After transferring them to the now-empty outer box, Linda saw clearly that Dennis inhabited no urn, but only a thick zip-lock plastic bag like those used for the dehydrated dog food Jasper loved. She unzipped the bag. Dennis didn’t look as appetizing as the dog food, Linda thought. His remains were as rough as his voice had been and as gray as his complexion during those final days in the hospital.
    She undid Abby’s urn. The dog looked no different from her master, so similar that Linda decided to pour the canine ashes into the plastic bag containing the rest of her husband. Although Linda hadn’t made bread in years, she dug into the bag of ashes up to her forearms and kneaded the mixture until Abby and Dennis were inseparable.
    “Inseparable,” she said aloud. “Inseparable.”
    Linda lifted her arms toward the top of the bag and, as carefully as she could, wiped them free of the ashes so that they sprinkled back atop the pile in the plastic. She lifted the bag from its box and lugged it to the bathroom off the master bedroom where, after plugging its drain with a rubber stopper, she emptied all the ashes into the bathtub and set aside the plastic bag. She knelt at the side of the tub and stretched her hands to draw swirls and curlicues in the grit, moving eventually to impress the small hills of Dennis-Abby with her handprints.
    “Inseparable,” she said aloud. “Inseparable.”
    Linda stood and removed her clothes. Naked, she entered the tub. Her feet remembered the rough sand of Zach’s Bay Beach on Long Island where Dennis and she used to picnic when Jennifer was a tot. She sat, stretched out her legs, and lay her head back. Linda was comforted. She scooped handfuls of ash and rubbed them on her breasts and between her legs. She hadn’t felt anything there in months. “In years,” she laughed out loud. She remained that way for hours, relaxed enough to catnap until Jasper appeared outside the tub and barked for attention. The dog was hungry. Linda rose. None too careful now about ashes dropping to the tiled floor, Linda opened the medicine chest and found the opiates prescribed for Dennis just in case. She shook four into her hand and offered them to Jasper. The dog swallowed them before bothering to taste or think about them. Linda poured the remaining capsules into her own mouth and returned to the tub where she opened the tap and bent to drink to swallow the medicine. After playing with the handles to moderate the temperature and the flow of the water, Linda again lay down in the tub, rolling over and over and over in the mud until, dizzied, she fell asleep.

 

This story was previously published in print in Thin Air 25 (2019)

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