Eat Cake: A Novel by Jeanne Ray

break the news to Hollis?”
    “It was not our finest hour.”
    “Your dad is a wild card,” Sam said with a sigh. “I think this is going to be hard on her.”
    From somewhere in the distance I heard a whoop.
    “I think it’s going to be hard on all of us,” Sam added.
    “Are you there with him now? Can I talk to him?”
    “No, I’m down the hall at a pay phone. Guy was going to have a bath. He said he’d rather I gave them some privacy.”
    “Sure,” I said. “Listen, you’re an absolute saint for doing this.”
    “It had to be done. You won’t completely discount Des Moines?”
    “Not if you promise we can leave my parents in Minneapolis.”
    “We can sneak out in the middle of the night. Camille can take care of them. She could whip them into shape.”
    I wouldn’t have minded sneaking off with Sam. After all, how many men would not only accept the fact that his divorced in-laws are moving in but actually go to pick one of them up? Considering all he had on him at the moment, he was unfailingly game.
    After I got off the phone I had a heightened sense of resolve. I was going to be as game as Sam. I got the sheets washed and the tennis shoes stored away. I moved the little television out of the kitchen and into Wyatt’s room. I even went out to the side of the house and cut a fistful of the few brave crocuses that were still standing and put them in a glass beside the bed. When Camille came home from school I spelled it all out for her: her grandfather, her grandmother, and the inherent limitations of the mix. I begged her to try to be helpful.
    “Great,” she said. “My dad’s unemployed and I live in a nursing home now.”
    I told her to go and straighten up her room.
    The last time I had lived in a house with my father I was two years old. Even before I was two, I gathered, he hadn’t been muchin residence. Good or bad, this was all the experience I was probably going to get in my life with my father, and no matter who was against it, I decided to give it my best shot.
    Given how long it takes to get discharged, all the various conversations there were bound to be about medicines and rehab and follow-up visits, I assumed that they would be late, that Mother and Camille would be in bed and that I would be waiting up alone when they came in. I had not expected that Mother and Camille and I would be sitting in the kitchen eating lasagna (made with steamed vegetables and tofu as per Camille’s request) when the back door swung open.
    “The return of the natives,” Sam said in a weary voice. In either hand he held a ridiculously old-fashioned suitcase with sharp corners and smooth tan sides. He set them on the floor and flexed his hands back. He looked like a man who had just run over to Kosovo for a loaf of bread.
    My father, who had always seemed so much larger than life throughout my childhood, was in fact not such a large man at all. He was thinner than usual, and his white hair, which he liked to wear too long, fell down in his face. He had on a pair of tuxedo pants, black patent-leather shoes, and a hospital gown that tied up the back. He teetered slightly toward the dishwasher and Sam slipped his hand under one armpit. It was not what I had been expecting. I had been thinking casts, hard and white and plastered up in a tidy manner. The most dramatic thing I had imagined was maybe a sling. The truth was considerably less cinematic: Both arms were surrounded by silver halos, bright rings of Saturn through which thin metal rods pierced into his skin. His hands and wrists, puffy and scratched red, were suspended and eerily still. Onthe right side the apparatus reached higher. His elbow was pinned as well. Camille made a tiny sound and I gave her knee a gentle squeeze under the table. My father held his arms at an awkward forward angle as if he were coming in for an embrace or warding off another fall.
    “Ruthie!” he said, trying to put some boom into his voice. “Let me look at you,