The Corrections

Before he could drill holes in the shower, he had to clear the shelves of the little bathroom closet. This in itself was a substantial job. Enid had saved, in a shoe box, every cotton ball she’d ever taken from a bottle of aspirin or prescription medication. There were five hundred or a thousand cotton balls. There were petrified half-squeezed tubes of ointment. There were plastic pitchers and utensils (in colors even worse, if possible, than beige) from Enid’s admissions to the hospital for foot surgery, knee surgery, and phlebitis. There were dear little bottles of Mercurochrome and Anbesol that had dried up sometime in the 1960s. There was a paper bag that Gary quickly, for the sake of his composure, threw to the back of a high shelf because it appeared to contain ancient menstrual belts and pads.

The daylight was fading by the time he had the closet empty and was ready to drill six holes. It was then that he discovered that the old masonry bits were as dull as rivets. He leaned into the drill with all his weight, the tip of the bit turned bluish-black and lost its temper, and the old drill began to smoke. Sweat came pouring down his face and chest.

Alfred chose this moment to step into the bathroom. “Well, look at this,” he said.

“You got some pretty dull masonry bits here,” Gary said, breathing heavily. “I should have bought some new ones while I was at the store.”

“Let me see,” Alfred said.

It hadn’t been Gary’s intention to attract the old man and the agitated twin fingered animals that were his advance guard. He shied from the incapacity and greedy openness of these hands, but Alfred’s eyes were fixed on the drill now, his face bright with the possibility of solving a problem. Gary relinquished the drill. He wondered how his father could even see what he was holding, the drill shook so violently. The old man’s fingers crawled around its tarnished surface, groping like eyeless worms.

“You got it on Reverse,” he said.

With the ridged yellow nail of his thumb, Alfred pushed the polarity switch to Forward and handed the drill back to Gary, and for the first time since his arrival, their eyes met. The chill that ran through Gary was only partly from his cooling sweat. The old man, he thought, still had a few lights on upstairs. Alfred, indeed, looked downright happy: happy to have fixed a thing and even happier, Gary suspected, to have proved that he was smarter, in this tiny instance, than his son.

“We can see why I’m not an engineer,” Gary said.

“What’s the project?”

“I’m putting in this bar to hold on to. Are you going to use the shower if we put a stool and a bar in here?”

“I don’t know what they have planned for me,” Alfred said as he was leaving.

That was your Christmas present, Gary told him silently. Flipping that switch was your present from me.

An hour later he had the bathroom back together and was in a fully nasty mood again. Enid had second-guessed his siting of the bar, and Alfred, when Gary invited him to try the new stool, had announced that he preferred a bath.

“I’ve done my part and now I’m done,” Gary said in the kitchen, pouring liquor. “Tomorrow I have a few things that I want to do.”

“It’s a wonderful improvement in the bathroom,” Enid said.

Gary poured heavily. Poured and poured.

“Oh, Gary,” she said, “I thought we might open that champagne Bea brought us.”

“Oh, let’s not,” said Denise, who had baked a stollen, a coffee cake, and two loaves of cheese bread and was preparing, if Gary was not mistaken, a dinner of polenta and braised rabbit. Safe to say it was the first time this kitchen had ever seen a rabbit.

Enid returned to hovering by the dining-room windows. “I’m worried that he isn’t calling,” she said.

Gary joined her by the window, his glial cells purring with the first sweet lubrication of his drink. He asked if she was familiar with Occam’s razor.

“Occam’s razor,” he said with cocktail sententiousness, “invites us to choose the simpler of two explanations for a phenomenon.”

“Well, what’s your point,” Enid said.

“My point,” he said, “is that it’s possible that Chip hasn’t called you because of something complicated that we know nothing about. Or it could be because of something very simple and well known to us, namely, his incredible irresponsibility.”

“He said he was coming and he said he would call,” Enid answered flatly. “He said, I’m coming home.”

“All right. Fine. Stand at the window. It’s your choice.”