Love on the Road 2015 Read Free Page A

bouncing from one job to the next. Then one night Goldie sat Monroe down at their kitchen table. She had baked mandlebreit and made him tea. Monroe dunked the cookie into the cup, counted the seconds, extracted the cookie and, just as he was taking that first satisfying bite, Goldie launched a surprise attack.
    ‘My nephew Carter, I know he’s been a schlimazel, a constant source of worry to my poor sister, but he tries hard. What he needs is a break. An opportunity. I was thinking maybe at the Woodmere store, you could show him the ropes.’
    Monroe had a gift for business. First one clothing store than another had sprung up like mushrooms, all over Long Island. Monroe admitted he could use the help. Soon, he and Carter were visiting the factories in China, hefting bolts of fabric, checking dye lots, inspecting samples for defects and pulls. Then, a year before Goldie’s death, just when they figured out the chemo wasn’t working, Carter stole Monroe’s list of contacts. By the time they called in the hospice people, Carter had opened his own chain.
    Monroe had never known such betrayal. And now Carter sat in the first row like the heir apparent, commandeering the high-profile seats with his third or fourth wife – who could keep track? – and blowing his nose like a bugle.
    ‘Did you see that?’ Monroe pointed to the TV. It wasn’t one of those fancy models that hung on the wall. This one was a behemoth, an antique, a box thirty-six inches wide, plopped on a black plastic cart.
    ‘Wardell, I’m talking to you. Are you deaf?’
    The black orderly looked around, hoping there was someone else in the room. He stared at his reflection in the mirror. Green scrubs, latex gloves, his bald head in need of a fresh shave.
    ‘You want me to change the channel?’
    Monroe felt like a prisoner in his own body, caged by bed rails one minute, tethered to his wheelchair the next.
    ‘Look. Look at that for Christ’s sake! The man with the hat is the rabbi. That idiot in the first row is my nephew Carter. Don’t you see them? Don’t you see them?’
    The orderly walked over to Monroe’s hospital bed, plumped the pillows, sighed.
    ‘Mr R, you seem a bit agitated.’
    ‘A washing machine gets agitated. This is not agitated.’ His cheeks blotched purplish red, Monroe began to shout. ‘Do I look agitated?’
    Up and down the rows, Monroe searched for faces from his past. He had been an only child. His father had been a haberdasher in Brooklyn, his mother a seamstress. They worked with their hands while the radio blared, their lives in rhythm with their machines.
    They called him a change-of-life baby – a baby that comes after you’ve converted the empty nursery into a sewing room. They were going to move out West, they always told Monroe, but his birth changed everything. His mother, a blond, blue-eyed beauty, had dreamt of travelling the world. She framed magazine pictures of California and hung them up on walls of their home. The Golden Gate Bridge. Yosemite. Lake Tahoe. Whenever she’d walk by them, she’d touch them with her fingertips as if each were a mezuzah containing a hidden prayer. ‘Life,’ she would tell her son, ‘sends you detours.’
    Wardell shook his head. ‘You should consider some of them pills, Mr R.’
    ‘You can take my pills and shove them up your ass, Wardell. I hate pills! And they can’t force me to take them either!’
    There are a lot of crazy white people in here, but not this old man, thought Wardell. This old man has all his pistons firing. He smiled, unzipping his mouth slowly from one side to the other so that the old man could count his teeth.
    ‘I imagine it’s a gift, Mr R. Being a guest at your own funeral. It’s a gift.’
    Monroe raised his eyebrows. ‘A gift?’ The old man pointed a gnarled and crooked finger at the TV. ‘This isn’t adream. It’s more like a nightmare. And it’s real, I tell you. As real as you are, standing in this room.’
    Monroe lay back in his