Make it Stay by Joan Frank

Author:Joan Frank
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 1579623042
Publisher: The Permenant Press

“The police never found enough evidence to indict anyone,” Neil says.

He considers his laced hands, hanging hammock-like below the chair back on which he’s propped his chin.

“They questioned some people. No one they could ever pin it on. No witnesses either—at least none who’d come forward.”

I do not ask—and Neil has not offered—how much he may have had to do with this fact, or whether at that point in the city’s history he could have had anything to do with it. I doubt he could. Burglaries, he reminds me, were routine by those years, vandalism, carjacking, shootings. The papers bristled with accounts, far more serious—drug busts, gang wars, kidnappings—pushing the ante to that weary point in a burgeoning city’s police force when it is all the cops can do to keep track, never mind solve.

Mike’s attack had been ischemic, meaning that a clot blocks blood flow to the brain. The stroke had occurred in the left side of his brain. He did not in fact go blind, but the right half of his body and left side of his face were paralyzed.

Finny Business was a complete loss. To Neil’s sorrow (but not surprise), Mike had not insured the store well. Impossible to recoup the capital needed to replace it.

The most immediate crisis was finding money to sustain a crippled Mike.

He would receive a pitiful amount of disability, time limited, and a small social security stipend. Overnight he and Tilda became dependent on her income from the tasting room, which came nothing near (in Tilda’s words) “an adult salary”; though in sympathy for her new hardship Windemere gave her a couple of weeks’ paid time off, and increased her hourly wage by a dollar. Neil thanked every god in heaven Tilda had had the wits to enroll herself and Mike in a medical plan the winery offered, which included generic drugs. Addie and Chet pledged a generous check every month. But even after Mike had learned to walk, excruciatingly, with a cane, and to speak, also with agonizing slowness—the Spenders’ mail slot bled bills. Specialized drugs, physical therapy (only partially covered by insurance, time-limited). Oh, the clauses, disclaimers, the resistance; the erroneous bills! The wheelchair, the braces and bandages, the special seat Tilda had to set up for Mike in the shower. At the beginning she had to clean him, prop him, help him shit. After he was semimobile and could mostly feed himself, Tilda tried to have all his food, drink and meds apportioned and laid out within easy reach before she left for work each morning: toilet paper rolled into grabbable pads, jazz station on low, sliding glass door open a crack to the concrete patio—everything at the ready. She hurried between home and work every day lest he may have fallen, dropped something, or worse.

Neighbors in the apartment complex said it wasn’t that they were not sorry, but didn’t working people have the right to a peaceable home? They could not bring themselves to meet Tilda’s eyes when

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