You Think That's Bad by Jim Shepard Page A

the way it scares our son?” she demanded in return.
    â€œIt doesn’t scare me,” Henk told us.
    â€œIt
does
scare you,” she told him. “And your father doesn’t seem to register that.”
    For the last few years, when I’ve announced that the sky is falling she’s answered that our son doesn’t need to hear it. And that I always bring it up when there’s something else that should be discussed. I always concede her point, but that doesn’t get me off the hook. “For instance, I’m still waiting to hear how your mother’s making out,” she complains during a dinner when we can’t tear Henk’s attention away from the Feyenoord celebrations. If its team wins the Cup, the whole town gets drunk. If it loses, the whole town gets drunk.
    My mother’s now at the point that no one can deny is dementia. She’s still in the little house on Polluxstraat, even though the Pernis she knew seems to have evaporated around her. Cato finds it unconscionable that I’ve allowed her to stay there on her own, without help. “Let me guess,” she says whenever she brings it up. “You don’t want to talk about it.”
    She doesn’t know the half of it. The day after my father’s funeral, my mother brought me into their bedroom and showed me the paperwork on what she called their Rainy Day Account, astaggering amount. Where had they gotten so much? “Your father,” she told me unhelpfully. When I went home that night and Cato asked what was new, I told her about my mother’s regime of short walks.
    At each stage in the transfer of assets, financial advisors or bank officers have asked if my wife’s name would be on the account as well. She still has no idea it exists. It means that I now have a secret net worth more than triple my family’s. What am I up to? Your guess is as good as mine.
    â€œHave you talked to anyone about the live-in position?” Cato now asks. I’d raised the idea with my mother, who’d started shouting that she never should have told me about the money. Since then I’d been less bullish about bringing Cato and Henk around to see her.
    I tell her things are progressing just as we’d hope.
    â€œJust as we’d hope?” she repeats.
    â€œThat’s it in a nutshell,” I tell her, a little playfully, but her expression makes it clear she’s waiting for a real explanation.
    â€œDon’t you have homework?” I ask Henk, and he and his mother exchange a look. I’ve always believed that I’m a master at hiding my feelings, but I seem to be alone in that regard.
    Cato’s been through this before in various iterations. When my mother was first diagnosed, I hashed through the whole thing with Kees, who’d been in my office when the call came in. And then later that night I told Cato there’d been no change, so as not to have to trudge through the whole story again. But the doctor had called the next day, when I was out, to see how I was taking the news, and she got it all from him.
    Henk looks at me like he’s using my face to attempt some long division.
    Cato eats without saying anything until she finally loses her temper with the cutlery. “I told you before that if you don’t want to do this, I can,” she says.
    â€œThere’s nothing that needs doing,” I tell her.
    â€œThere’s plenty that needs doing,” she says. She pulls the remotefrom Henk and switches off the news. “Look at him,” she complains to Henk. “He’s always got his eyes somewhere else. Does he even know that he shakes his head when he listens?”
    Pneumatic hammers pick up where they left off outside our window. There’s always construction somewhere. Why not rip up the streets? The Germans did such a good job of it in 1940 that it’s as if we’ve been competing with them ever since. Rotterdam: a deep hole in