Part 17 (1/2)
”What did you eat?”
His father glanced at him from over the rim of his mug. ”Little Debbies.”
When Carson's lip curled, his father chuckled. Score one for the old man.
He'd set the whole thing up beautifully, stage-managing a decline so precipitous, Julie had been forced to send an e-mail. Your father's going feral. He needs looking after, and I'm not up to it.
Carson had suggested a housekeeper.
He needs you, she'd said. Just you.
Two days out from breaking ground on a new emba.s.sy building in the Netherlands, he hadn't been able to travel right away, but he promised to come as soon as he could.
A week later, he got another call. The old man had slipped on the icy front porch and banged up his leg, and the hospital social worker echoed Julie's opinion. Lengthy recovery for a man his age ... I think he'd benefit ... No family in town capable ...
Carson came home.
It was so much worse than Julie had said.
The house looked like a badger was living in it. Random junk spilled over every available surface, and his childhood bedroom housed a floor-to-ceiling a.s.sortment of discarded furniture and old copies of Life magazine. Dad kept the thermostat too low, survived on convenience-store food, and smelled stale.
Less than six months since Carson's mother had died, and Martin Vance had turned himself into a shambling, grumbling, Sudoku-obsessed cry for help.
”Just about got the front room cleared out,” Carson said. He opened the bread bag and grabbed two pieces of bread to slot into the toaster. ”I'm going to tackle the spare room next.”
Work, don't think.
That was the motto.
No glancing at his backpack where it leaned beside the front door. No speculating about when he'd be released from small-town bondage and allowed to return to the real world again. Speculation got him nowhere, and there was so much to do.
”What do you mean, you're going to tackle it?” Martin asked.
”I'm going to clean it out.”
”You're not touching my collectibles.”
”Collectibles?”
”In the spare room. That stuff is worth money. I'm going to sell it on eBay.”
”You haven't got anything worth a dime up there.” You don't have an Internet connection, either. Or the first f.u.c.king clue how eBay works.
What's your game here, old man?
Because his father was definitely up to something. At first, Carson had been so shocked by the rapidity of the downward slide, he hadn't noticed the incongruities. Like the fact that there was dirt ground into the living-room carpet, but the bathroom still sparkled, and so did the interior of the microwave.
Like the way he'd heard Dad whistling as he got dressed two mornings in a row.
Like how when he wasn't watching, the random, strewn-about junk started rearranging itself into more orderly piles. As if somebody couldn't keep himself from tidying it up.
Carson knew a bluff when he saw one. He'd played enough poker with his father as a kid. It was the only thing they knew how to do together without arguing.