Final Cuts by Unknown

Author:Unknown
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2020-06-02T00:00:00+00:00

LORDS OF THE MATINEE

Stephen Graham Jones

IT’S NOT THAT my seventy-two-year-old father-in-law is actually going deaf, it’s that he’s a, in my former mother-in-law’s words, “lazy-ass listener.” I say “former” for her because she passed three years ago, kind of right on schedule as far as I’m concerned, but my wife Sheila’s still kind of torn up…not so much about her mom being gone, her insides chewed up, bubbling up red down her chin, as that the two of them never made up proper before she went. Which, again: nothing all that surprising, this is the way things go about 99 percent of the time between moms and daughters, as far as I can tell.

Either way, the result of all this is that, with his wife gone, Sheila’s dad’s been kind of letting their apartment go to hell. Crusty dishes tottering on every flat surface, newspapers and engineering journals stacking up into fire hazard after fire hazard, the whole place an ashtray, pretty much. So, to pick up her dead mom’s slack—though it’s also her two brothers’ slack if you ask me—Sheila commits to cleaning her dad’s place up one Sunday. I offer to help, of course, it’s what you do when you’re married, when you’re shouldering burdens together, when it’s a team effort, and then it turns out that the best way I can help out is by ushering her father out of the apartment for the afternoon.

“So what do I do with him?” I say to Sheila. We’re standing before the open hatchback of her car, her mentally going through the two tubs of cleaning supplies arrayed before us. I haul one up, swing it onto my hip, and she takes the other, shuts the hatchback and beeps the lock in one efficient motion.

“He just can’t be there,” she says, already getting her grim attitude on for the coming mess.

I look out into the haze of the city, trying to imagine her father and me muttering to each other over a Chinese food buffet for four or five hours, or the two of us doddering through a museum or art gallery, neither of which we’d know what to really do with.

“Does he like movies?” I ask, some fake cheer to my delivery.

I should say here, he and my mother-in-law were at the wedding, of course, but that was sixteen years ago. I shook their hands and called them Mom and Dad and took all the necessary pictures that day, but, since then, I’ve successfully avoided any meaningful interactions with them. Just the usual holiday stuff, here’s a pot roast, thanks for the shoeshine kit I love it, no we don’t have any secret kids yet ha ha, yeah I like my new job too, your daughter’s the best, sure I can install that new washing machine, thanks, thanks.

Which is to say: Who was this musty geezer I was now to spend an afternoon with?

All the same, my time for this had probably come. You can only dodge bullets for so long.

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