A Family Matter

The old man had been dead for two weeks before anyone showed up at the house besides Justine, who worked weekdays, and Patty, who swapped in on Saturdays at eight a.m. There was also the gardener, and the pool guy, but they rarely came inside. The men who took the body away were the last ones to ring the bell, leaving Mrs. Klein in the peace and quiet she’d been asking for. “Why won’t he die already?” she’d said to Justine more than once. And then he did.

Justine was wary of the quiet since he’d died. The house had gone from restless at all hours to comatose too quickly. Mrs. Klein slept, and Justine kept it dim, too much light feeling like a judgment, like she was chastising Mrs. Klein for sleeping. She’d had enough of that.

But it didn’t feel right to be there somehow, to inhabit all that dim quiet too freely––maybe it was the echoes of the old man’s shouts and complaints, his absence loud in its own ghostly way. So Justine mostly sat tucked away in one particularly plush chair in a corner of the second bedroom, where she also slept. On the glass bedside table she kept the monitor that showed Mrs. Klein sleeping in her own bedroom on the other side of the house, which was far too big and empty for a dying lady, in Justine’s opinion. But she wasn’t about to argue herself out of a job. If this was how some people chose to do it, she’d be there to assist. And get paid.

At first, Justine kept the house as she had all year, things where the old man liked them: stamps readily available on the kitchen counter, certain sturdy cups at the front of the cupboard, his usual paths from room to room kept completely free of any obstructions. But after a few days, she stopped taking extra measures. She left her shoes where she liked.

The Kleins were the first couple Justine had worked for, so she hadn’t known exactly what to expect from this new phase. Her past few jobs had been with widows, and before that a rare widower. Until now she’d avoided handling the immediate aftermath of death with the remaining spouse––the severing of two halves fused together over seven decades, for better or worse, richer or poorer. In this case, mostly richer.

But Mrs. Klein hardly spoke about the old man’s absence. She hardly spoke much at all anymore, only in little bursts.

They both needed a break, Justine decided. It had been a long couple months. Mrs. Klein slept eighteen to twenty hours a day, and Justine didn’t blame her. It was one hundred and ten degrees from morning till night. “Hell on earth,” she called it. The old man had liked that, until he hadn’t. “Enough of that,” he would say when he grew tired of one of Justine’s little expressions. “A couple more times,” she would reply, testing the limit.

Now she had no one to spar with; Mrs. Klein could hardly hear her when she asked what she wanted to eat. Justine had recently taken to hand signals to avoid the squinting incomprehension, pointing to her mouth instead.

Then, quite suddenly one morning, the landline and the doorbell rang at once.

“Klein residence,” Justine answered as usual, hurrying to the foyer with a multi-tasker’s air of concentration.

“Hi, this is Matt, the grandson. I’m at the front door.”

He was disarmingly handsome, to the point where Justine felt she needed to shield her eyes from him like the sun. He wore basically nothing––a nude-colored tank top that clung to his skin, and short shorts that reminded Justine of a photo she’d seen of the old man at the beach in the fifties, he and Mrs. Klein smiling and skimpy in their early twenties. She saw echoes in Matt’s face of other photos kept around the house that included a chubby, childhood version of this six-foot man, this surprise statue at her door. Their door. Justine’s own young adult daughter, Naomi, reminded her often: “don’t self-identify, mom.” Justine was pretty sure she understood. It’s not your family.

“Matt, hello, you look so different!” was all she could think to say, attempting to summon her perky spirit.

“Can I come in?” Matt said, seeming annoyed by her equivocation, by the way she filled the door frame, blocking his easy entrance. She attributed this sort of disdain for her stocky figure to the sculpted and v-shaped, whether or not it was explicit or true.

“Oh yes, yes,” she said, deferring, of course, to a family member, gesturing inside. A flicker of panic crossed her mind. Did Mrs. Klein know of this visit? How would she respond? Justine was sure she had said nothing about it. Maybe it was Patty, the weekend aide, forgetting to pass along another crucial piece of information. Justine was not impressed by Patty, the way she rushed out of there on Monday mornings and rarely left any notes about how the weekend had gone. Justine usually had to text her a string of questions, to which she received spotty replies with many typos. But the old man hadn’t hidden his contempt for Patty, so Justine tried not to judge her too harshly, at least not out loud.

Matt dragged his rolling suitcase across the hardwood in a way that made a scratching sound, like something was broken in the wheels. To Justine’s horror, a long, thin gash trailed his entrance.

“Oh!” she said involuntarily. He turned around and noticed it, too.

“Will she care?” he asked, nonchalant.

It was hard to say. One day Justine thought she was gone, a shadow of herself, or the self Justine had come to know over the past year, which must have been its own sort of shadow. A shadow of a shadow. And then suddenly she’d snap to––“why is that shelf empty?” “I cleaned out his socks, Mrs. Klein.” “No, no, no, why would you do that? I need to look through these things.” “They’re right here, Mrs. Klein,” Justine would say, holding up the black trash bag, but by then she’d have turned her back, ready to take her agitation to bed.

“I think it’s okay, she won’t notice,” Justine said to Matt. But when she looked up from the damaged floor, he’d already turned away and moved on.

––

He knew where he was going, he’d clearly been here before. He wasn’t entirely unpleasant at first, and asked Justine a few relevant questions:

“What does she usually eat for lunch?”

“Does it seem like she’ll bounce back?”

But when Justine started to answer, his eyes glazed over. She’d seen this before: a bad listener.

Mrs. Klein was enthusiastic. It was a version of her that Justine had rarely witnessed. And it lasted a minute; two––tops. “This is my grandson!” she chirped. Then she retreated.

Justine watched them both as subtly as she could while they ate their first meal together. He seemed anxious. She almost wanted to put her hand on his shoulder to stop him from shaking––his legs, his hands. But instead she busied herself with cleaning up after both of them. Once she’d depleted her small appetite, Mrs. Klein pushed her plate away with such disdain, such surprising force. She was there but not there, thought Justine.

“Did you not like the sandwich?” Matt asked.

“It’s fine,” said Mrs. Klein.

On that first night, Matt took Mrs. Klein’s credit card and her car. Justine had helped her into bed at five forty-five, and by six Matt was asking Justine for the keys and the wallet.

“Are you going into Palm Springs?” she asked, rifling through Mrs. Klein’s purse.

“Yeah, I want to have a look around,” he said, and off he went, leaving a trail of vanilla-scented cologne in his wake.

Mrs. Klein got up twice while he was away, at eight p.m. and again at nine-thirty.

“Where is Matt?” she yelled with her face scrunched, her eyebrows practically vertical.

“He went out,” Justine explained. “To see downtown.”

She was angry, worked up in a way Justine hadn’t seen since the last real fight between Mr. and Mrs. Klein, when the old man had said ruthless things––that she was lazy, had no interests––letting loose some long-held beliefs that had been simmering and seething. Or else it had been the dementia talking. Justine tried not to make judgments about things she didn’t fully understand.

“He took the car? You shouldn’t have let him do that.”

Like this family, so far-flung and flimsy––she couldn’t understand it. The children hardly call, and then this grandson shows up out of nowhere? Justine’s mother had died in Justine’s house. She had so many visitors near the end that Justine had felt like she was working a second full-time job, managing a schedule of short, early morning and late afternoon engagements for a woman she’d really wanted all to herself. She’d been greedy for her dying mother, resentful that others felt they had a right to take up her waning hours. But here in the Klein house, family existed more in pictures than in the flesh.

She tried not to make judgments, but she couldn’t always help it. Money did unnatural things to people, she thought.

“I’m sorry, Mrs. Klein. We can talk to him about it in the morning,” Justine said.

“I’ll talk to him,” she retorted.

Justine heard him returning hours later, just after midnight. She rolled over in her bed toward the door, which was cracked open just enough to see the lights come on, and two shadows stretched across the length of the living room floor. Eventually the shadows turned to figures––two men, one taller and even brawnier than Matt––making their way to the sliding back door and out onto the patio, fumbling around for light switches. She opened her door a bit more, in time to see Matt and his guest strip naked and dive into the warm, sun-baked pool like drunk Olympians.

––

Mrs. Klein was up at six thirty. “Justine, I need you.”

She drank her Ensure for breakfast, sitting at the kitchen counter with her head in her hands between sips, making sounds like “ugh” and “blech.”

“When did Matt come home?” she asked with sudden urgency, arriving at the memory of one of her half-awake pitter-patters.

“Oh, I’m not sure Mrs. Klein, I went to sleep pretty soon after you.”

“What?”

“I was asleep!”

“I know, I called for you.”

“You did?”

“Yes, and I pressed the button but you never came. I wanted to check that Matt got home safely.”

It wasn’t that Justine thought Mrs. Klein lied, but she was mixed up––how could you not be, when you’re constantly going in and out of sleep like that? She did press the button, it made the ding, and Justine came quickly––at eight and nine-thirty. But Mrs. Klein remembered it wrong.

Mrs. Klein would say she just lay there sometimes, that she wasn’t sleeping, that she was trying to sleep. But Justine checked on her often, and by all observable measures she was out. When she was up, she got up. It was a lot of back and forth, in and out of the bed, without much ceremony around getting ready for night or day. She hadn’t showered since the old man died, for example. Justine would have to bring that up soon, she had delayed it as long as she could. She wondered if Mrs. Klein would dispute the fact that it had been weeks now. Justine had spent a lot of time arguing with the old man about the facts––what time he’d said to pick him up from dialysis; what the expiration date had been on the cream cheese she threw away; who had filled up the gas tank, and with what credit card. He was a lawyer, he needed a little argument. “I’m pleading the fifth!” she’d say, throwing her hands up and running away when she was in over her head.

“The car is in the garage, Mrs. Klein,” Justine finally said, choosing not to dispute whether she’d slept through an alert from the call button. “So he must have come home after I went to sleep.” Mrs. Klein nodded, probably pretending to have heard.

She went back to bed once the Ensure was half-drunk. They’d come up with that agreement between the two of them, under the guise of avoiding the old man’s questioning. He grew very concerned about her nutrition near the end, pestering her angrily about what she ate and why she wasn’t trying to get stronger and do more with him. Like they were going to take a trip soon, visit their friends in Tel Aviv one last time. “They died,” Mrs. Klein would remind him, which didn’t help matters at all.

Mrs. Klein came rolling out of her room two more times before Matt was up.

“Young people,” Justine yelled while Mrs. Klein squinted at the word game on her phone. (She would sit on the couch for thirty, forty minutes playing that game, dragging letters together to make words––plink!––and then shuffle back to bed.) “They like to stay up late and sleep late!” Naomi was the same way. Justine tried to convince her to try something different––wind down earlier, do something calming before she got into bed at say, ten or ten-thirty, and then see when she woke up naturally, maybe from the sun, even. But no, it was out of the question. She was afraid of the lying there, the not sleeping, the trying to sleep. The thoughts that bounced and burned. Justine didn’t know this, exactly, but she had the sense her daughter was tortured. How could you not be, being nineteen in this world? She didn’t fault her for wanting to go out, drink margaritas with her friends, smoke a joint under the stars when the temperature finally dropped. But then she was groggy all day and didn’t want to make any decisions. Justine was trying to give her the benefit of the doubt. There was already so much pressure to have it all figured out––school, apartment, love, money, diet, body positivity. You’ll never have it all figured out, she wanted to say, but that felt too discouraging. More of a reminder for herself.

When Matt sauntered shirtless out of his bedroom at eleven fifteen, he was alone, thankfully. The guest had left. Mrs. Klein was asleep or just lying there, and Justine was cleaning the kitchen counters for the third time that day. There was less to do with the old man gone, so she found herself repeating the same tasks, much like the old man had repeated his tasks in those confused, final weeks––reading through the mail in his office, shuffling to the bathroom to shower, reading through the mail, showering, mail, shower, sometimes three times.

Justine watched Matt stare into the bright light of the refrigerator for a long minute, one arm stretched against the fridge door, the other hand resting on his right butt cheek, fingers tucked under the waistband of his tight bathing suit, arm cocked. He looked like a dancer, all his muscles in perfect alignment.

“Did you have fun last night?” she asked too loudly.

“Jesus!” He turned around clutching his chest. “You scared the shit out of me.”

“I’m so sorry, I thought you saw me here when you came in!”

“My heart is racing,” he said. “Don’t do that again.”

Alright Matt, she thought.

“Did you have a good time in Palm Springs, I was wondering?”

“I heard you.” His attitude was thick and unflattering. “It was nice, yeah.”

“Your grandmother was unhappy with me for letting you take the car and go into town.”

“Oh yeah?”

“Yes, do you know why?”

“What do you mean?”
“Why she would be so upset about it? Is it a religious thing?”

He squinted at her and she saw the Klein in him, that same face the old man had given her. Maybe she had crossed a line feigning this sort of intimacy between them, but the way he was standing there all of a sudden in her (their) kitchen, tall and firm and practically naked in the middle of the day, so erect and alive––it made her want to start something.

“Just that I was surprised she had such a strong reaction,” she continued. “I wondered if she wasn’t accepting.”

He finally let go of his chest and looked at her properly. She had the feeling he was taking her in for the first time since he arrived; it made her very conscious of what her face was doing, how she was pursing her lips.

“Well, she never called me a fag or anything.” She still felt his scrutiny, their eye contact intense. But she’d managed to avoid flinching at the word, which he seemed to register. She thought she saw him soften. “We never really talked about it, to be honest.” He looked away. “She probably just thought I drove home drunk or something.”

“Oh. Did you?”

Whatever she’d noticed, he blinked it away in an instant. “Am I under interrogation here?” he said, turning back to the fridge. He grabbed one of Justine’s yogurts and walked out of the kitchen. She heard the heavy, sliding door open and close, followed by a faint “Oh, fuck.” It was a hundred and twelve degrees.

Justine wondered if she should call the boy’s father, a serious man she’d talked to on the phone a handful of times. Then she remembered Matt was probably, like, twenty-six, a man in his own right. At the very least, she wanted to get back the keys and the credit card and keep hold of them until she had a better understanding of the situation. She’d have to present a scenario to Matt that was clearly an indisputable need for the car and the card, and that he’d also want nothing to do with. A doctor’s appointment––easy. She imagined Matt tagging along. Pictured him, shirtless and posing, at one of the last visits for the old man. His defensive posture as his grandfather ranted incoherently at the doctor. Retreating to a corner of the room while Justine stepped forward to intervene with specifics, with context, with a hand on the old man’s right shoulder, where she’d learned she could rub gently to slow the progress of his ravings in order to provide some facts the doctor might take seriously. She couldn’t imagine anyone taking Matt seriously.

She took a deep breath. No reason to antagonize the guy. They’d just made it to the other side of discord in this house. She hoped he wouldn’t cause trouble or stay long.

When Mrs. Klein woke up again, Matt was in the pool.

“Go tell him we’re going out to lunch,” she said to Justine, frowning. Her stiff, white hair was flattened against the side of her face that she slept on, like she’d run sideways into a wall. Justine got a vision of Wile E. Coyote as Mrs. Klein plodded away. She was chasing death and it was mocking her, Justine thought, flattening her beyond recognition.

“Do you need help getting dressed?” she bellowed.

“No, I’m fine.”

Justine went outside to fetch the boy. The heat hit her like an anvil. She practically tiptoed across the tiles, not wanting to spook him again. He was taking pictures of himself in the pool, and as Justine got closer she saw that he was naked, his bathing suit splayed out poolside in the sun. She brought her fingertips to her lips and watched for just a minute, entertained by his attempts to tilt and float with masculine grace while not dropping his phone in the water. The distorting ripples made his butt look twice its actual size.

“Oh my god!” he said, catching a glimpse of her as he spun around toward the house for a different angle. And down went the phone.

“Goddammit! I told you not to––” He came to his senses and dove down to get it, rising out to complete his thought: “––to scare me like that! Look at this!” He scampered out, his semi-erect penis swinging to and fro.

She rushed inside to fill a bowl with rice, clawing at the unopened bag and spilling a bunch of it in the process. Did he turn himself on, she wondered, taking pictures of his own body? When she returned he’d covered himself with a towel, but she could still see the evidence of his hard-on stretching the fabric into a little pyramid that deflated gradually as he hemmed and hawed.

“Does this even work?” he said, submerging the phone in her bowl.

“It’s better than nothing,” she said.

“Are you ready to go?” Mrs. Klein had appeared with her walker, dressed in all black, her bedhead fixed.

“Go where? My phone is ruined, Justine made me drop it in the pool.”

“What?” Mrs. Klein barked.

“Your grandma would like to go to lunch with you,” Justine interjected.

He sighed dramatically. “Okay, I’ll drive us.”

“No, Justine will drive.”

“What? Why?” He looked at Justine like this, too, was her fault.

“Just because, Justine’s driving.” Mrs. Klein said.

Justine got the keys back easier than she thought she would. They drove mostly in silence, the two of them in the back and Justine at the wheel like a chauffeur. She’d tried counting all the hats she wore at one point when the old man was alive. She’d gotten up to eighteen.

“You went out last night?” Mrs. Klein asked eventually. Justine spied on them in the rearview mirror. Matt stared out the window as he replied, “Yeah, I went to this little strip of gay bars, it was cute.” “Don’t do that again,” she said quickly, staring out of her own window. “I worry.” Justine caught him rolling his eyes and scooting away from his grandmother, leaning against the door in what looked like well-rehearsed resignation. Justine realized just then that she had yet to see them hug or kiss cheeks or touch whatsoever.

Lunch was at a deli-style place, she’d driven the couple there countless times. Mrs. Klein would get a pastrami sandwich and maybe some kishkes with gravy––which in her head Justine called squishies. She’d probably have three or four bites. Justine retrieved the walker from the trunk after parking near the entrance, and was beginning to help Mrs. Klein up the ramp when the old lady stopped her. “Matt can help me. You come pick us up in an hour,” she said.

Justine watched grandma and grandson make their way into the restaurant, the gap between them wider than arm’s length. As they entered, a handsome man in his late forties exited. Matt followed him hungrily with his eyes, forgetting to catch the door, which hit Mrs. Klein softly in the behind. It was Justine’s turn to roll her eyes.

––

Justine drove around the neighborhood. Hot parking lots and strip malls in these parts, separated by golf courses and gated communities, one after another. She lived with her husband and daughter about twenty minutes north of here in a modest rambler that they’d owned for ten years. They hadn’t planned to move to the Coachella Valley, to this desert of gays, geezers, and grannies. (And those funny, leaping roadrunners she loved to spot.) But the work was good for home health aides, and they’d gotten a good deal on the house. Apparently its value had increased significantly in a decade, and her husband kept bringing it up, like he was hoping Naomi would move out already so they could downsize and splurge. On what she didn’t know.

But Justine wasn’t in a rush. She loved knowing her daughter would likely be there Saturday morning when she finally got home after five days at the Kleins', asleep in her curled-up way, the comforter twisted and wrapped around her like a snake. She imagined returning to her house in three days––Matt gone back to wherever he came from, Patty having taken her place in the plush corner chair while Mrs. Klein slept. The old man still dead, free of his aggravation, his anger, his obsession with the bills and whether they’d be covered by his mountains of money. With his painful teeth, and whether there was something stuck deep in his gums, constantly bloodied by toothpicks. Justine touched her lips, ran her tongue along the inside of her own bottom teeth. Don’t self-identify, Naomi’s voice reminded her. She imagined letting it all go, finding her wise and messy grown-up daughter heavy with dreams in her childhood bed, and curling up right there beside her.