Chicago, Illinois

things break. The last time, on the last day, the pipes in the kitchen burst and flooded my parents’ blonde wood floor. When I’m up in that 87^th floor apartment, I look at the sky’s blank expression. I keep the little square office window open for the sliver of nature. It’s hard to read with Fox News blaring, so I drift from room to room.

Each time before I fly to Chicago, I lose my debit card. This time it leapt out of my raincoat pocket on my way to the grocery store and refused to reappear. I had the new one shipped straight to the Hancock.

In the morning I wait for the muffled clump of the walker followed by the sound of the kitchen TV coming to life, then I join my father for breakfast.

Sometimes I hear the front door first—that’s my stepmother, Elaine, bringing in the daily papers she will stagger on the table like a horizontal newsstand. She has already arranged his grapefruit bowl (a pet bowl my daughter painted and labeled “Grandpa”), cereal bowl, bowl of berries with a half-banana in a plastic snack bag propped on the side, Raisin Bran box, and prune juice. Two spoons to work his way from out to in. His apron embroidered with “Wally” is folded over the chair. After he slides the grapefruit bowl aside he swivels with difficulty to pull the 2% milk from the refrigerator behind him.

He tears the weather section from the Sun-Times and hands it to me, even though I have a phone that reports it more efficiently. We comment on wind, potential rain.

What time is that thing at the thing today? my father asks. It’ll be wet out.
The appointment is tomorrow, Dad. Pure sun, see?
I show him the sun symbol on the paper.
Are you sure? Ok, what time is the damn thing?
Ten-thirty.
So we should leave at 9:45 to be safe.
It’s around the corner, Dad. Ten is plenty of time. 

He looks carefully at his watch, takes a bite of cereal, and looks at it again. 

On Friday at 9:30 am, with Elaine walking behind, I wheel my father to the bank to sign forms for their new home equity loan. One for each thousand, he jokes. (It’s a hundred thousand dollar loan.) He hasn’t been outside in months. He wears his Scottish patchwork cap and I help him remove his ancient Barbour coat. 

Should I write Junior? he keeps asking at the big dark table.
Not when you initial, Elaine says.
Oops, I wrote Junior.
That’s fine, she says several times. 

Charlie the loan officer—who’s been rushed in to accommodate our extreme earliness—stands in a puffy down vest gathering papers to Xerox, and sends us home with a tome in a red folder. 

Oonch it down a little here, Shell, see the driveway—cross there, turn it around in the elevator so I’m facing out. 

He eats lunch in the den now on a tray, so he doesn’t have to leave the colorful TV noise. He’s even lost interest in the stock market. He used to watch stock quotes crawl across the screen, predictions blaring. And every day he thought it mattered. Each time it was exciting, as it is for my cat when he spots a moth, a cockroach, or a fly. He kept a careful chart, entering changes the moment it closed. Are we rich today? Elaine would ask and he’d recite their net worth.

Sometimes he opens that book, the memoir I helped him write, and reads a small section of his life to remind him, or looks at the pictures. Jeez, I’ve done a lot of stuff.

Last visit my dad fell three times. 

Shell!

Fall #1 occurred in the tiny back bathroom. I forced my way in while my stepmother stood outside. He’d landed against the door, khaki pants still unzipped. I pulled him hard by the armpits, but his legs refused to assist.

No good, he said.

We called the fire department and three men arrived. Two huge firemen managed to slip into the bathroom and carry him out. After they got him in the wheelchair, the small fat one in charge asked questions. My dad wanted to chat about the incident but the fat fireman asked him who was president, what day it was, and Dad got the day wrong.

Do you want us to lift him into bed?
No, he can handle it from here, we said. 

One minute after the firemen left, he took fall #2 stepping from the wheelchair to the bed. I watched him writhe on the carpet, clutching at the heavy bedspread, a drowning man. Panic and will finally hoisted him up on his stomach. My stepmother and I each grabbed a leg and shoved his body the rest of the way as if we were pushing a wheelbarrow. We took off his shoes and wrestled off the khaki pants, leaving blue boxers. I pulled on his pajama shirt. 

The next morning he made it through breakfast with no mishaps, but went down trying to transfer from the living room couch, where he was reading, to the wheelchair. During fall #3 his belt caught and tipped the glass and metal coffee table; my stepmother stifled a panicked yell. I unhitched the belt. Firemen arrived with a stretcher and whisked him to the ER.

Eight hours waiting on a Wednesday, the first two in a cavernous lobby without him, until I saw him, abandoned in his wheelchair in the room so huge birds flew through it. I wheeled him over to join us and we entertained ourselves betting on the birds. Would that one land over the doorway or on the windowsill? They flew in when the automatic door opened but could not get out.

Could you check again, Shell?

Every fifteen minutes I walked into the smaller ER waiting area to follow my father’s progress on the list. Wheelchairs filled with sleeping patients were arranged in rows, as if for somnambulism class. 

The next morning, after I helped him open his orange juice container in the long-awaited hospital room, I left for the airport.

I’m done, he says to me one late morning in the den.
Do you believe in an afterlife?
No, he says. They’ll burn me up then poof, I’m gone.
But the thing that animates you, the consciousness that leaves the body when you die, where does that go, do you think?
It’s a nothing thing. Done. Poof, he repeats. 

At 3:20 pm Elaine says, Here, Honey Boy, and hands him his tea and cookie, in time for Jeopardy. We watch Elaine yell winning answers at the TV in the form of questions. (We did not mind that Alex Trebek showed up to host for several months after he died.) 

Helicopters fly past the den window like giant dragonflies, and far below, if we looked, we could see the Chicago River flowing in reverse, away from the lake, the way the city miraculously trained it. 

The corner view of lake and loop was the selling point when my dad walked through the unfinished outline of this apartment in a hard hat in 1968, after riding an elevator smoother and faster than any in existence—ear-popping fast. Down each day in his suit to the street, up again to the sky. 

My dad has stopped wearing his khakis; he now just wears sweatpants, so we won’t have the problem with the belt catching. One of his shirt collars was so faded, Elaine had the tailor turn it around. He’s attached to that shirt. 

At the end of the day my dad folds his TV-watching blanket. He has an elaborate system to execute this from his wheelchair. I watch as he lines up the corners and leans precipitously to slide it onto the shelf under the coffee table. He wheels away to bed, where he will prop the tiny window open with the garlic press (which he calls “the mushroom puncher”). 

On my last visit he wadded the blanket sloppily and shoved it onto the shelf. 

My bag is packed. I lie on the pull-out office bed, listening to the famous wind seethe on Lake Michigan, and watch fireworks explode over Navy Pier. The corner crack in the ceiling—above and to the right of the window—is widening.

I only know this one tall part of Chicago, my tall father, his tall building on the Magnificent Mile.

Most recently, Shelley Stenhouse won 3^rd place in Australian Book Review’s Jolley Prize for her story “M,” printed in the August issue. She also won the Palette Poetry Prize (judged by Edward Hirsch), the Pavement Saw Press Award for her poetry collection, PANTS, and her latest collection, Impunity, was published by NYQ Books. She received a New York Foundation for the Arts (NYFA) Fellowship, an Allen Ginsberg Award, was a National Poetry Series finalist, had two Pushcart Prize nominations (one by Tony Hoagland), and three residencies at Yaddo Art Colony. Her poem, “AIDS,” hasbeen quoted in Poet’s Market. Her poetry and fiction have been published in New York Quarterly, Antioch Review, Prairie Schooner, Quarterly West, Nimrod International Journal, Margie, Third Coast, Brooklyn Rail, Washington Square, Enizagam, and Poetry After 9/11: An Anthology of New York Poets (among others). Shelley has read on National Public Radio’s All Things Considered. Her work is forthcoming in NYQ’s anthology, Without a Doubt.