The Angel of Rome by Jess Walter

Author:Jess Walter
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2022-04-23T00:00:00+00:00

Town & Country

MY FATHER’S GIRLFRIEND CAME home from the casino a day early and caught him having sex with the woman across the street.

“I thought you were going to be gone another day,” my dad said by way of apology, or explanation, or perhaps just narration. His girlfriend, Ellen, had been away on her annual girls’ weekend in Jackpot, but since these “girls” were all at least seventy, they were forced to cut the trip short when one of them had a heart attack playing keno at Cactus Pete’s.

All of which is to say, my father and his girlfriend were not the age you’d expect for this kind of drama. Dad was seventy-three, but he’d lately begun exhibiting signs of dementia, one of which, I was surprised to find out, was this late-in-life promiscuity, an erosion of inhibitions. Dad literally could not remember to not screw the sixty-year-old lady across the street.

This wasn’t the first time, either. To hear Ellen tell it, my father had devolved to the point that he had the impulse control of a teenager. He’d whistle at women on the street and proposition waitresses right in front of her. Ellen could be a little crass herself, and she didn’t seem overly angry, or even that sad. “I’m just done with the son of a bitch,” she said. The neighbor was the last straw. She told me she had no choice but to kick Dad out of her house, where he’d lived since my mother died fourteen years earlier.

As I backed Dad out of her driveway, Ellen stood, arms crossed, behind the screen door. Next to me, in the passenger seat, Dad squirmed under his seat belt like a kid. The backseat was filled with boxes of his clothes.

“I feel like she’s slut-shaming me,” Dad said.

“That’s not what that means,” I said.

I HAD KNOWN for some time that Dad was fading; it was one of the reasons I moved back to Boise from Portland three years earlier. Dad had begun forgetting names and places and said increasingly strange and inappropriate things. He seemed lost at times, disoriented, and was often unsure of the year, the season, the day—classic signs of dementia. But, for me, there was nothing as alarming as the day in 2016 when Dad told me he’d voted for Donald Trump for president, that he liked Trump’s whole “make shit great again” thing. There were two reasons this worried me: (1) Dad was a lifelong Democrat, a third-generation union craftsman who had never voted Republican in his life. And (2) my father was not a moron.

“Dad, you said a month ago that Trump was a dangerous idiot.”

“Yeah, but that woman he’s running against, I don’t like her.”

That woman. Could he even remember Hillary Clinton’s name? I pointed out how that woman had been secretary of state, a U.S. senator, and first lady for eight years. That Dad had twice voted for that woman’s husband.

“But this email thing—” he said.

My dad didn’t own a computer. He wouldn’t know an email from an emu.

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