One thing I have learned about the life I have found myself in is that I have to b fairly wary of Ed's daughter Pam. I have caught her looking sideways at me a few times since I've been here, but it's not necessarily because she believes her father has been replaced by a stranger. Rather it's clear that she believes she is dealing with the same man she has always known and that he is as frustrating as ever.
This is a woman in her 40's who is clearly in the "now I have to parent my parent" part of her life, checking in relatively consistently by phone. If this old bar phone rings and Pam's number comes up, I had better answer or I won't hear the end of it.
It appears that Ed has been a widower for a number of years with his wife dying -- I won't say young but perhaps sooner than expected, if that makes sense. I think most old guys expect to go first and the sense that I get is that nobody was prepared for old Ed to be on his own.
She seems like a perfectly lovely woman, other than the combative relationship I have found myself in with her. There's actually something kind of comforting about having someone be so concerned about you, even if the tone is a little pushy. The dynamic of a small Mainer family is a little closer to home for me than the sprawling and hyper-involved version I saw when I was one of the "Carey Girls" (although I eventually became accustomed to that... lost stories from my time between blogs.)
As I mentioned, when I returned dramatically late with her son, Pam gave me considerable grief, but somehow it did not seem utterly out of character that Ed would go off on his own like that, which was a silver lining, as Pam's wrath was more confined to irritation that her father acted, if anything, extremely in character.
The next time I heard from her, it was to nudge me about another dangling thread. "So did you go get Caesar yet?"
Caesar?
"Um, the dog?" she sneered at me, in her default tone of exasperation, "Jeezum crowbah dad, he's been at the kennel for over a month, you've got to go get him!"
I was really surprised. Ed's message hadn't mentioned anything about a dog. In fact, it hadn't mentioned much about much. I hunted around to try to figure out how to find this dog, eventually getting the number of the kennel, where they gave me a somewhat surprising answer: the dog had already been picked up by my son Danny.
Ed doesn't have a son Danny -- that would be one of the new identities Ed and Cayden took on. That made a lot of sense, that Ed would go pick up the dog but it somewhat complicated things. I couldn't very well explain to Pam why I didn't have the dog but that it was OK.
I ended up taking a long drive down to Springfield, Mass, to the address that Ed had declined to give me where he and Cayden could be found in their new lives. It was a little apartment building. As I approached, I thought how insane it was that I was imposing on these people, who had not made it easy for me to find them, but I felt like I at least needed to hash this out in person.
After a deep cleansing breath, I knocked on the door. A young man with short cropped and receding hair answered, dressed in shabby pajamas and toting a video game controller. He took one look at me then turned away to call out to someone else in the room.
"Gramps, it's you!"
Cayden stepped aside and a woman stepped into the doorway, a young Indian woman wearing a loose-fitting plaid overshirt and boot-cut jeans. Her sleeves were rolled up and it looked like she had just been doing dishes. From what I could tell she had an ungainly stride that -- if you knew what you were looking at -- gave away that she was a 70-something-year-old man in a young woman's body, along with her flat, unwashed hair and lack of makeup.
He looked at me under a furrowed brow, tilting his head back to look up at me. "What brings you around?"
Before I could answer, a black furred German Shepherd-Border Collie type of dog padded to the door and approached me enthusiastically.
"Well, he does, actually," I said, petting Caesar who seemed very pleased to see his "owner."
Ed -- aka Parveen -- looked at me quizzically. "What do you want with Caesar?"
"Well, he's..." I stammered, "He's not mine, but..." I was at a loss how to explain that, for appearances, it was somewhat expected that I keep the dog.
"Yain't takin' him," he said firmly in a voice that definitely sounded as much like a grandpa as a 20-something-year-old Indian woman's throat could produce. He then pushed the dog back into the apartment -- as it whined for me -- and stepped outside with me, closing the door and standing with his arms folded under his chest. "That's the end of it. You tell Pammy that he's got a good home and he's safe and you'll get another dog if it makes her happy. Now if you don't mind, I'd just as soon you don't come back unless there's an emergency. It's confusin' him and besides, I don't much like being seen this way. Drive safe."
And abruptly, that was it. Puzzled, I went on my way. Rather than face the 3.5-hour drive back, as the trip had seriously worn out my old bones, I stayed the night in a motel (secretly hoping I would stumble into yet another cursed inn and get a fresh set of problems) and drove back in the morning, waking up at 5 AM or so.
I got back and explained to Pam what Ed had told me to say -- I had given Caesar away to a nice young couple. Pam was borderline apoplectic, giving me another round of "Jeezums" and wondering how I could do such a thing.
I came to realize that Caesar is, in an informal sense, a therapy dog, who Pam got for her dad to help him after his wife died. I think Pam thinks that he never warmed to the dog and resented having it, stubbornly wanting to go through his grief alone, but I can tell from his insistence on keeping it that that is not the case. For whatever reason Ed seems to have never let on exactly how important the dog is. Knowing that, I actually have no business keeping him but of course from Pam's perspective me losing him or giving him away is both unthinkable and very characteristically selfish. It put us in a really weird situation but at the same time, Ed seems to have been a really weird guy prone to making these command decisions that don't quite make sense to others, so I think it the long run a very irritated Pam has let me off the hook as just another quirk of her father's.
Being an Inn person isn't always as simple as rolling out of bed and into a blank slate you get to define how you want. No matter who you become, you really do get stuck in these entanglements that you have no control over.
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