Everything Happens Today by Jesse Browner

into terminal decline, that he had seen the relevance of such preparations to his own life. That held even more true for Nora. Mother or brother? Mother or dog? It was even a game you could play by yourself, if there was no one else around to play it with.
    It was, by all evidence, a game adults played among themselves, too. Wes had hazy memories of the house once having been lively with visitors, boozy dinner parties that ran late and rose muffled to his room through the floorboards and the pillow, but the visitors had gradually stopped coming by when she could no longer walk and became moody and withdrawn. At first, Wes had assumed that they had stopped coming because they were not real friends and she was no longer any fun to be around, but then he understood that she was the one who had sent them away. Was it because she was ashamed of what she had become, or too prideful to let others see her in this condition, or perhaps even that she had never much cared for them to begin with and had seized on her aggravated infirmity as an opportunity to let them drop? After a while, it didn’t matter very much anymore. When it had become too difficult for her to negotiate the stairs to the second floor, they had considered installing an electric chair-lift, but that wouldn’t have solved the problem of the stoop and her wheelchair, especially in the winter, so it had been decided to relocate her to the garden floor, where at least she had some access to the outdoors. When the weather was fine, a few friends of long standing would occasionally drop by to sit with her in the dappled shade and light her cigarettes. But she hadn’t been kind or patient with them and they had gradually stopped coming. And it had become apparent by then, too, that Wes’s father was secretly—and then not so secretly—resentful of having had to give up his study with the French doors to accommodate his wife’s illness. One summer’s evening, as he and Wes had sat on the wrought-iron dining room balcony overlooking the backyard, directly above the wide-open French doors, he nursed his third scotch and complained bitterly of how restricted his private life had grown, between work and parenting and insurance claims, that the only place he had left to call his own, where he could retreat and write and
just think
, had been his room on the garden, and now that was gone too, and then he had compared himself to Shakespeare’s sister and reacted very peevishly when Wes had immediately recognized the allusion. And then he had moved out altogether for a while—Wes had almost forgotten that part—and didn’t come home until it was clear that she would be bedridden for good. When he moved back in, she had returned to her bedroom on the second floor, where she had remained ever since, excepting hospitalizations, and his father had converted the garden study into an apartment, where he now slept and wrote and fucked his students.
    It was his father who had destroyed the collective family pleasure of watching “The Joy of Painting” together by drunkenly denouncing Bob Ross as a sell-out.
    â€œIt just really gets to me how mediocrity is rewarded again and again in this country while true artists go hungry in the streets. I mean, this guy must be a zillionaire, and just look at the crap he’s making!”
    â€œDon’t you have to have ideals before you can sell out, dad?”
    â€œHe had ideals, this fucker, don’t think he didn’t. Of course he did! Everybody does. And now look at him. Making it harder on the rest of us.”
    â€œHow is he making it harder on
you
?”
    â€œThink I wouldn’t sell out in a second if I could? In a second! But I can’t. I’m not selling widgets here. I can’t just crank it out—it’s got to mean something to
me
. It’s got to come from
somewhere
.”
    â€œWell Bobby thinks he’s a very nice man. Bob Ross likes little