For the second time, the second time in as many weeks, Meena woke to the smell of burning cardboard.
Sometime in the middle of the night, Meena’s father had gotten up to put a family pack of frozen corn dogs in the oven before returning to bed. She was forced to wrap a castoff t-shirt around her mouth and rummage through the smoke-blackened kitchen for an expired fire extinguisher.
Why a 91-year-old Indian man craved corn dogs in the middle of the night, a food he was oblivious to until offered one by a sleep-starved orderly during an overnight hospital stay, was a mystery of aging or brain chemistry or deep frying. But, more practically, it meant that the battered sausage had overtaken falling out of bed or an aortic stroke as the most likely instigator of her father’s eventual passing.
This also meant that she would have to make a second run to the grocery store without the benefit of a home health aide to look after her father.
Meena dressed her father in a down jacket, scarf, and flat cap despite the mild spring weather. As she fastened him into the passenger seat of her long-serving sedan, he asked her again where they were going.
“We’re going to the theatre to see a play,” she said. She didn’t know why she said this, but her father nodded, taking the information in easy stride.
She had no aspirations to caretaking (who does, after all?), but as the oldest sibling, unmarried and childless, there seemed an unspoken agreement, to which she felt bound, that the responsibility for tending to aging parents would fall under her domain, regardless of other considerations (money, space, and the like).
Her younger sister, Geeta, was presently on a Greek Isle, one of the lesser known ones, and posted photos of the family excursion to her Facebook page for Meena to browse, filling her with awe and longing.
At times Geeta—or Geets, as she called her—would propose taking over caretaking responsibilities for a week, perhaps longer, but these promises were never brought to bear. Visits were few and far between, and beyond the impromptu FaceTime video, she seldom checked in on their father.
Mena parked in one of the designated handicap spots and helped her father out of the car. She held his upper arm tightly as they crossed the parking lot.
Once inside the store, Meena had her father push the shopping cart for light exercise (and to steady himself). She had a habit of picking up oddments rather than completing a full shop, so she would have to return several times each week to meet their dietary demands. Impractical, surely, but it gave her an excuse to leave the house.
“The dogs,” her father said.
“Yes, dad. We’re getting them.”
She had read somewhere about designated “slow lanes” in Dutch grocery stores, where aging patrons could enjoy social interaction without the usual bustle of checkout lines. She wished that such a concept existed in American grocery stores, but it was difficult to imagine a domestic store forgoing its bottom line for the sake of placating the solitary few.
Meena’s father steered the cart ahead to the bakery, eying the array of fresh baked goods in their plexiglass cases. In the meantime, she unspooled a plastic bag and began counting out apples.
The apple selection never failed to fill her with anxiety that the apple she held in her hand, the apple she was weighing purchasing, was a substandard strain of apple. She always assumed a more optimal, flavorful apple existed at a similar price point, but this speculative pome remained elusive. Out of reach.
After knotting the bag, she looked up for her father, but he was no longer in the bakery. He must have rounded the corner with the cart, she thought. She hurried to the deli section, which was just beyond the bakery. But she didn’t see her father or the shopping cart.
She felt her composure wearing thin. Once, her father had gotten himself trapped in a convenient store beer freezer. When she found him, his body was trembling and cold to touch, despite his face conceding no inkling of discomfort.
She checked the beer freezer in the back of the store, but it was emptied of customers. One by one, she checked the aisles for her father: organic snacks, paper products, toiletries. In the double-wide aisle with bags of chips, she found her father’s scarf coiled like the sloughed skin of a snake. She held the fabric to her nose. It harbored a sour smell (an undesired side effect of one of his medications). He had a habit, whether at home or in public, of progressively unburdening himself of outerwear until all that was left was the shriveled figure underneath. She shoved the scarf into her bag.
There was no sign of her father at the store’s market cafe, which was deserted save for a single man in a fishing cap blowing on a steaming cup of soup. She wondered if her father had wandered off to relieve himself, but her half-hearted entreaties into the men’s and women’s bathrooms came back unreturned.
Having exhausted the footprint of the store, Meena beelined for guest services, where a young man, barely out of high school, was unraveling a tangled ball of plastic bags. He wore an expression of youthful insouciance. She asked him if they could call her father’s name over the PA system, the one used for reminding people of the dollars they could save by enrolling in their customer loyalty program.
“Sure thing, lady.”
He switched on the microphone and repeated her father’s name, despite its foreignness to his tongue.
She had little hope that her father would connect the disembodied call with his own circumstances, much less manage to plot a course to the poorly marked service counter.
She waited several minutes in silence, watching him continue to untie bags, one by one.
“I hope you find him,” the young man said. “I heard about this old man at the Presbyterian hospital downtown who got stuck in the stairwell and no one found him for days.”
“What happened to him?”
“He died, I think.”
She thanked the young man for his help and returned to combing the aisles for her missing father.
Lately she thought more and more about her desire to be euthanized, to bookend life on her own terms, without becoming a burden to those around her. (Though who would even offer to take her in?) But besides physician-assisted suicide being outlawed in her state, it was off-limits in her culture, firmly outside the bounds of an appropriate and dignified death.
At the end of aisle with boxed pastas, her phone began to ring. She accepted the call without screening the dialer’s number. The woman spoke in a distant, tinny voice, as if calling up from the pit of a well.
Meena ended the call.
Every few weeks she received a phone call, email, or letter from a new debt collection agency that had bought up a portion of her father’s unpaid medical debt. If she ignored the messages, they would sometimes go away. Other times, they would double down on their appeals. She imagined the debt collectors as cancer cells—swarming, multiplying, spreading from one site to another, leaving its host haggard and sallow.
She began asking random shoppers—single women, young professional types, rushed couples with children in tow—if they had seen an older Indian man, yea tall, wearing a thick jacket in late spring. They shook their heads, or swiveled around, as if he might be lurking just behind them.
Meena thought of the time she and her mother lost Geeta at the shopping mall. When they finally found her, she was wading knee-deep through a stone fountain, picking coins from the bubbling water. If Meena had ever wandered off in a kindred fashion, her parents had never recounted to her the story.
Relative to her sister’s upbringing, Meena saw less of her mother and father; they were more concerned with their own professional lives. She had few memories of dedicated time spent with her parents. They were absent from graduations, dance performances, parent-teacher conferences. Birthdays were frequently forgotten, remembered only when an aunt or uncle from India called to relay their well wishes, at which point her father would present from his wallet a crinkled ten-dollar bill.
In the middle of the cereal aisle, she sat down on the floor and began to sob, her knees turned outward and hands cupping her face. Life had never felt fully in her favor, but it had always moved with a kind of ease. For all her disappointments, her life felt uncomplicated, free of vertiginous highs or chasmal lows. A trade-off that was agreeable to her. But now she had neither fulfillment nor the predictability of a life absent of variables or compromise.
She could feel a silhouette fall over her slumped body. She looked up from the ground.
“Miss?”
The teenager from guest services was standing in front of her, a look of unlikely concern on his face.
“We think we found him. Your dad.”
“You did?”
“He’s like from another country, right?”
“Yes.”
“Yeah, we think we found him.”
She rose to her feet and with the back of her hand dusted off her pants. The man guided her to the front of the store, past the drone of barcode scanners and rattling carts, where her father was sitting on a mesh bench next to an older woman with hair dyed jet black. She was scratching off four lottery tickets at once.
“It’s all about timing,” she said as he looked on. “You have to wait until several folks have come up empty. That’s how you tip the odds in your favor.”
“Dad?” said Meena, trying to recompose herself.
“The dogs.”
“I know. We’ll come back for them.”
He nodded his head.
“Thank you for watching him, ma’am,” Meena said to the woman, who was scratching at her tickets with the earring from her left lobe.
“He’s my lucky charm. I’ve made $19 so far.”
She held up a pair of winning tickets.
“We have to get home, dad.”
She took the scarf out of her bag and wrapped it around his neck.
“Home?”
“That’s right.”
She helped him up from the bench and he followed her to the car, pushing the empty shopping cart in front of him. They left the cart in a nearby corral, then she grasped the underside of his elbow and lowered him into the passenger’s seat.
Meena turned on the engine but kept the car in park. She could feel her hands trembling against the steering wheel.
“You can’t do that, dad. Wander off like that. You could have been hurt or kidnapped or I don’t know what. I was really worried.”
He reached into his pocket and took out a cranberry muffin. The muffin had been atomized, crumbs falling all over her father’s lap.
She thought about how we spent a lifetime accumulating memories, competencies, talents, only to watch it go to seed. Waste away. All that remained were simple patterns, routines, the most basic of muscle memory.
Her father pointed to her quivering hand. She opened her palm to him. He sifted the remains of the muffin into her hand, then looked at her expectantly, waiting for her to piece it back together, to make it whole once more.