I looked for him several times in the past week at the table they shared in the community dining room. Always empty.
Today was the final clearcut, pulling picture hooks out of walls, tossing the last daily activity schedule sheets and lunch menus she diligently squirreled away from last November, rolling - with a sue me smirk - yet another teetering, hotel cart load of shit right past the first floor receptionist who’d told me twice I need to schlep all carts to the basement, push them up the long basement driveway to the street yep, to my car that I could park by the hydrant where “someone” can watch it for you, sonny.
Almost done, I pause my cart by the elevator on the first floor. From the shadows down toward the dining room, the softly rounded figure with the rolling gait materializes, peering at me blankly at first, and then with the rising smile of a father reunited with a long lost son. He inquires about Lee, tentatively, gently in his way. Ok I tell him, she’ll get more help at her new place - her mobility is more limited, her memory more diminished. But, I tell him, when we were talking about this place the other day she said “who?”, I said “Michael”, she said “Oh yes, Mike” like a friend she had known forever. He smiles, mutters something about how creative she is. As I kidded her years ago, if she’d met Michael instead of my father 70 years ago, I’d a hatched different who knows.
I decline his offer of help and he shakes my hand again, sends his best specifically to Lee, Stuart, and to my whole family, and rolls off toward another day.
Michael and my mother were children of Brooklyn who made their 20th century way to rather different places, finally landing at the same place in Kew Gardens, she to a Stickley-furniture-stuffed “suite” with a view she barely viewed, he to a bare bachelor monk cell several floors down.
Not enough in the past years, I came to their table in that community room to share a meal, squirming like a truculent teen through the amiable silence they filled with kibitzing about Brookyn and the poetry of another century, nodding as he teased out yet another Torah teaching for us, bearing a bond together that spoke of home.