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S UNDAY MORNINGS WHEN I was a kid, my mother would sleep in late, and my father would wake me early, sometimes before the sun even came up. We lived in the Fairfax District, in walking distance to twelve different synagogues, a farmer’s market, and CBS Television City. Most of the week we were ensconced in our own little section of LA. My father taught at Fairfax High (I eventually went there, once the rebuilt/earthquake-safe campus opened my junior year); my mother worked at a law firm across the street from Canter’s Deli. But on Sundays, my father and I would get into his red Mustang convertible and ride, with the top down, to parts unknown. Or unknown to me, as a kid, anyway. Every week it was a thrift shop in the valley, a yard sale in West Hollywood, an estate sale in Beverly Hills, all in the name of my father’s never-ending quest for stamps.
Each week, we’d return home just before lunch—I’d be full from the donuts my father would buy me to eat on the way (a treat neither one of us divulged to my mother)—and my father never came home empty-handed. Sometimes, he’d have someone else’s old collection (or a piece of it); other times, letters—sent and saved or unsent and lost. Every once in a while, when our endless riffling through yard sales turned up nothing, we stopped at the post office on the way back, and he bought a sheet of the newest stamp that had come out that month.
So you’re not actually going to use those to send letters? my mother asked when we came home with new stamps, her voice rising skeptically, the way I imagined it did at work. She was a paralegal for a firm that handled real estate law. I sometimes pictured her in the courtroom, even though I knew that the lawyers she worked with mostly did paperwork.
My father just smiled at her, and took his stamps up to his hobby room to file them away with the rest of his collection.
This memory returns to me today, this Sunday morning, as I drive toward Santa Monica to visit my father at the Willows. Not in a red convertible, of course, but in my old blue Toyota hatchback, which is on its last legs, pushing a hundred thousand miles. I remember so suddenly, so vividly, exactly what stamp he bought at the post office once—a five-cent Humane Treatment of Animals stamp, featuring a cute black-and-white dog, just like I always wanted for a pet as a kid, and never got.
And what lingers in my mind as I arrive at the Willows is this: I am no one’s child anymore. I can never return to those Sunday mornings with my father. We haven’t done one of those trips in years. Not since before I left for college, since before my mother died. But still. Now there’s no going back.
The good thing about the Willows is that it’s only a half hour from me, in a beautiful section of Santa Monica. The bad thing is also that it’s in a beautiful section of Santa Monica, which, in LA terms, translates to outrageously expensive. My father will run through his savings, his teaching pension, and his life insurance collection from my mother’s death long before he’s ready to leave the Willows, I’m sure. But the Willows is also the best memory care facility in LA, and every time I’ve been to visit my father so far, it seems he has been mistaking it for a grand hotel. He asks me if I can help him locate his plane ticket, when he’s going home. He can’t seem to find his itinerary, he says. And rather than reminding him, gently, of the truth, I promise him I’ll look. That I’ll find his documents, somewhere.
“Morning, Mrs. Nelson.” The nurse at the front desk greets me as I walk inside.
“Hi, Sally.” I wave, and walk up to the desk and sign in. Sally’s in her twenties and clearly green enough that dealing with memory care patients on a daily basis hasn’t worn her down yet. She’s petite and wears a giant sparkling engagement ring on her left hand, and though she’s a licensed nurse, she’s dressed in jeans and a sweater. The Willows doesn’t feel anything like a hospital or a nursing home. And one of the requirements for my father living here is that his health, his physical health anyway, is good.
“You’re here early today,” Sally comments.
I nod, but don’t offer a reason. What would Sally think if I told her that I haven’t been sleeping? That since Daniel left, I wake up at five a.m., even on Sundays, even if I don’t fall asleep until two. That my house, my bedroom, my bed, all feel strange and dark and empty. But I would never admit that out loud, especially not to someone who barely knows me.
I’ve come to visit every Sunday since I moved my father in here three months ago, and to the staff, I’m still Mrs. Nelson. Okay, so I’m technically still Mrs. Nelson everywhere, given that I haven’t actually signed the papers yet. But in my head I dropped the Mrs. (and the Nelson ) months ago. My father doesn’t know about Daniel leaving me, and why upset him or confuse him? Sometimes I feel a little guilty that his disease has turned me into such a liar.
“So how’s he doing today?” I ask Sally. I like to prepare myself before going back to his room.
“Not bad,” she says. “Ted’s having a good day so far. Lucid at breakfast. He went to art class this morning, and that put him in a good mood. Told me he was going to knitting with some of our ladies after lunch.” She laughs, and I smile in return. The Willows is like a cruise ship. Packed with classes and activities, to stimulate the mind and pass the time. No wonder my father always thinks he’s on vacation.
Sally tells me I can go back, and I walk down the long hallway toward his room. The hall is decorated with patterned wall-to-wall carpet like a hotel, and large glass chandeliers hang from the ceiling, making the pathway brightly lit. Too brightly lit, for someone who drank a little too much chardonnay last night, as I am apt to do these days, and I pull my sunglasses down. He’ll know me today . He’ll be totally fine , I chant to myself in my head as I walk, as if by thinking it, wanting it enough, I can make it true .
When I reach his room, I stop, stand in the doorway and watch him for a moment, before he notices that I’m here. He sits in a blue velvety armchair by the wide picture window, reading a book, his reading glasses arched at the bridge of his nose. He looks the way he always did, the way he always has: he’s very tall and thin, but also strong. He’s a little thinner now, maybe, and also mostly bald. But still my father.
He looks up and sees me, and he breaks into a smile. “Kate the Great!” I smile back when I hear his childhood nickname for me. He knows me. Sometimes he thinks I’m my mother or even a nurse. But today, Sally was right. It’s a good day.
“What’re you reading?” I ask as I walk into his room. He holds up the book so I can see the cover. “ The Philatelist’s Guide to the Universe . Oh, Dad. That sounds so boring.” But I’m happy he remembers who he is this morning. What he loves. My father was never a reader of novels like me and my mother. He taught high school history for years, and he read nonfiction, thick books about wars and generals and history and, of course, stamps. This particular book is worn, and he must’ve looked through it many times before, whether he remembers that now or not. Though, maybe he does. It’s mostly his short-term memory that’s affected by his disease so far. The past is often still vivid to him, sometimes so vivid that he believes he’s reliving it in the moment. That he believes my mother is still here.
“Speaking of stamps,” I say, and I pull up a chair to sit near him. “I’m having your collection appraised.”
He opens his mouth and slams the book shut. “Why would you do that?”
That wasn’t the reaction I’d been hoping for, and I immediately try to mollify him. “Well, you always said you were looking for the Hope Diamond of stamps, and I wanted to see if you’d found something valuable.” I try to keep my voice light, but I notice the way his face seems suddenly paler, his brown eyes a little darker, and I wish I hadn’t brought this up at all.
He turns and looks out the window, as if the pale blue sky and the arch of the barren brown mountain beyond hold some kind of answers I can’t see. “Every stamp is valuable.”
“I know, but that’s not what I mean.”
“Where’d you take it?” he asks.
“A stamp dealer. Benjamin Grossman,” I tell him.
“A Jew at least,” he says, and his voice softens, as if he’s coming around to the idea of getting his collection appraised. It hadn’t occurred to me that Grossman is a Jewish name. The only thing more important than stamps to my father is his Judaism. But to me—as a grown woman who married a non-Jewish man—I’ve left almost all of my religion behind. I’d never tell my father, but one of my favorite times of the year throughout my seven years married to Daniel was decorating our Christmas tree. Maybe because it was such a novelty or maybe because it was something I purely associated with my marriage. The thought of Christmas, practically right around the corner, saddens me now. What reason does an almost-divorced Jewish girl have to get a Christmas tree?
“You won’t sell anything,” my father says, emphatically, interrupting my thoughts, and I bring my mind back to the stamps.
“If you don’t want me to, I won’t.” I lean in and put my hand on his. “I didn’t mean to upset you. I didn’t know what else to do with your collection when you told me I could have it. But I can go get it back. And I’ll just... keep it.” I wonder what Benjamin Grossman will think of me when I do, or how much I’ll owe him, for simply wasting his time.
But my father doesn’t respond. He turns back to stare out the window. “The stamps were everything,” he murmurs, and maybe he’s pushing himself to remember the specifics of his collection. Once, it wouldn’t have surprised me if he had committed every single stamp in it to memory. But now, who knows what’s still in his mind and what’s lost.
“I know. Your collection is huge. It filled up my entire car.”
“But you never understood it, Rissa. Never even wanted to.”
Rissa. I sigh. In an instant I’ve turned into my mother in his mind. I’ve wasted his few good, lucid moments this morning talking about stamps, and I want to take them back and talk about something real with him instead. To tell him about what happened with me and Daniel, about how I haven’t been able to bring myself to open the envelope with the divorce papers yet. About how a part of me is still hoping Daniel will change his mind, that we could figure out a way back to each other if we really, really tried. About how thinking that makes me feel weak, and I hate that. I want to ask for his advice, the way I always have. “Dad.” I touch his shoulder gently.
“You never understood it,” he repeats. “You never even wanted to.”
“Don’t worry, your collection is safe. I’ll go get it back, and I’ll take good care of it. I promise.” I’m echoing the words Benjamin Grossman said to me when I left everything at his office. Though my promise feels empty. I’m not sure what I would do to take good care of it.
His book falls from his lap to the floor, but he doesn’t seem to notice. He watches the outside world carefully, as if he can envision my mother there, beyond the hills, beyond the Pacific Ocean. I look, too, as if she might really be there, visible, a ghost, until the brightness hurts my eyes and I finally look away.
I pick his book up off the floor, and it’s filled with stamps, pages and pages of stamps categorized by year, country, engraver. Was all of this committed to his memory once, too? But these days does it appear just as new, as foreign, to him as it does to me?
I hand him back the book and kiss the top of his head. He turns to me, and something brings him back. I can see it in his eyes. He sees me again. “Kate,” he says, sounding surprised. “You came today.”
“Yeah.” I put my hand on his arm. “I come every Sunday.” I pause and wait to see whether this information registers, but his stare is blank and I’m not sure. It’s so hard to watch him come and go, when I really need him to be here. “I have to go to work.” I give him a hug. “But I’ll be back soon. Next week, okay?”
“Kate,” he calls after me as I walk away, and I turn. “My tickets. I can’t seem to find my passport.”
“I know.” I force myself to smile. “I’m still looking.”
Every time I leave the Willows I feel like I’m sinking. Like I’ve dived into the cold waters of the Pacific without a wet suit. I am numb, cold. Tired. I really do have to work. I’m supposed to go to a movie premiere, but I still have a little time, so I head home first to collect myself. I don’t live in Fairfax any longer, but near UCLA, in Westwood, where there are still a fair number of synagogues—I just haven’t been in any of them.
When I get back home, I consider calling Daniel, asking him to assign someone else to the premiere. Sitting in a dark theater and concentrating on a movie, a Chevy Chase National Lampoon movie about Christmas no less, feels nearly impossible after this morning. But these days, I try not to ask Daniel for anything. I’ve tried to avoid him at work, communicating mostly through notes in our inboxes and outboxes on our desks, and I certainly don’t want to call him now and ask for a personal favor.
I make myself a pot of coffee and try to regain my composure. But then I sit in the kitchen to have a cup at the very same table where Daniel and I ate dinners and breakfasts for so many years. Daniel offered me this house in the divorce settlement as a gesture of kindness. He said he didn’t want to force me to sell so we could split the equity, force me to move out of my home when everything else in my life was in upheaval, too. And so he’d graciously just... given it to me. Graciously. That was the word my lawyer had used, anyway. But there are so many memories of us together, everywhere in this house.
When he had first said the terrible words to me last spring, we were eating dinner at this table. I’d made lasagna and a salad, and I’d taken the day off work. Earlier that morning I’d visited the Willows for the first time and had made the decision to put my father on the waitlist for a room there. In a way, it had felt like a relief. I’d come home and thrown myself into chopping, cooking, baking. I’d also made a cake—chocolate chip with buttercream icing, Daniel’s favorite.
“But I made dessert,” I said that night, in response to his unexpected announcement that he was done, that he no longer wanted to be married, that he’d be moving out. I’d thought, at first, that he was joking. That I’d offer him the cake and he’d laugh and take the words back.
“We’re just not working anymore,” Daniel had said, calmly. “This is the first time we’ve had dinner together in months.” Was it? I tried to recall the last dinner we’d shared at this table, and I couldn’t. My father really shouldn’t have been living alone at that point, and I’d been spending all my free time with him.
There were probably a thousand things I could’ve or should’ve said, starting with the fact that things were going to get better once I moved my father into the Willows. I could’ve gotten angry, yelled at him that taking care of a parent was no reason to leave someone, or that it wasn’t okay for him to just decide all this without even discussing it with me first. Or that no matter how many dinners or nights we’d spent apart I couldn’t imagine my life without him. But I was so shocked by his announcement that instead, I just kept talking about the stupid cake. “Cake,” I’d emphasized. “I made you a cake.” I never baked a cake, unless it was his birthday. The cake was my apology, in a way. I knew we’d grown apart. I’d just believed, right up until that moment, that it would be okay. That we could still fix things, that this was just a rough few months in a marriage that would last forever.
“Katie,” he said, evenly. “Our marriage is over.”
And then it hit me: He was giving up on us? I cut him a slice of cake. I shoved the plate toward him, harder than I should’ve, and the cake bounced off the plate. Daniel stared at me, then at the cake, half on the table, as if suddenly he wasn’t sure what he was supposed to do with it.
“It’s your favorite cake,” I finally said, and though it’d felt like a gesture of kindness when I was making it, I sounded bitter, angry, when I said this to him.
Daniel looked down, picked up his fork, and took a bite of the cake.
After dinner he packed a bag, and left to go sleep at a hotel.
A few hours later, after I get home from the premiere, I sit in bed, chewing on my pen, trying to find the words for my review. But the page in front of me is totally blank, and my mind is still lost in my morning visit to my father. I have the urge to pick up the phone and call him now, the way I often used to back in college when something occurred to me, late at night, or when I just wanted to talk, hear his voice. After my mother died of cancer my freshman year, I knew he would be awake, no matter how late it was. He was always a night owl; so am I. Daniel left me , I might tell him. I can’t even bring myself to open the divorce papers because I still can’t accept that we’re done. Once, years ago, when Daniel and I were first married, we got into a stupid fight and Daniel left me then, just for the night. I’d called my father in tears, sometime after midnight. And I still remember what he said: Kate, when you really love someone you don’t run. Any goodwill he’d had for Daniel dissipated after that, and I’d felt a little bad that I’d called him at all. But now I’m grateful for the memory of it, his words. That’s probably what he’d say to me, if I did call him tonight. But anyway, I can’t call him. The Willows doesn’t accept phone calls after eight p.m.
I remember the promise I made to him earlier that I’d get his stamps back, and I decide to call Benjamin Grossman now and leave him a message instead. But after two rings, Benjamin, not his machine, picks up.
“Oh,” I say. “I didn’t expect you to answer, to be in your office so late on a Sunday night. I figured I’d leave you a message.”
“Who is this?” he asks.
“Right, sorry. It’s Katie. Katie Nelson. I brought you my father’s collection last week.” He doesn’t say anything, so I jump in, with the reason I called. “I need to come back and pick his collection up. I changed my mind. I don’t think I want it appraised after all.”
He’s quiet for another minute, and I have no idea whether he’s surprised or annoyed, or just uncaring and maybe doing something else in the background. I picture him sitting at that messy desk, adjusting the antenna on his TV. “I found something unusual in his collection,” he says.
“Unusual?”
“There’s a stamp on a letter,” he says. “A World War Two–era Austrian stamp. And I’ve never seen anything like it before.”
“It’s valuable?” Every stamp is valuable, my father had said to me this morning. But what if he really did find a gem? My father would be thrilled. I know he would be. Not to mention we could use the money for his care, for the Willows.
“It’s unusual,” Benjamin counters.
“But unusual means valuable to a stamp collector, right?”
“Philatelist,” Benjamin corrects me, the technical word for stamp collector rolling easily off his tongue, though I’ve never really liked that word. It strikes me as oddly sexual, a little embarrassing.
“But unusual is good, isn’t it?” I ask.
“Maybe,” Benjamin says. “Can you meet me? I want to show you what I mean. In person.”
“Now?” I glance at the clock, at my half-drunk glass of wine. It’s almost ten, but I’m wide-awake. I haven’t drunk enough wine yet to begin to feel myself ready to slide into sleep.
Benjamin exhales on the other end of the line. “Sorry,” he says. “I’m an insomniac. I do my best work at night. Sometimes I forget that other people sleep.”
“I don’t sleep either,” I admit.
We’re both quiet for a moment, and then Benjamin says, “I know a diner, Frankie’s, off the 405 just a little south of my office. It’s open twenty-four hours. If you want to meet over there?”
“I’ll be there in thirty minutes,” I say.