Free Terminated by Simon Wood

warped by one more degree. Weeds overran the small sun-baked yard. It was duty that brought him here. Nothingelse. The door opened before he reached the stoop. Lupe Corrales smiled and held the door open. “Hello, Steve,” she said with that ever-present smile. “You’re a little late today.”
    “Chores,” he replied, lightly irritated by her mild reprimand. “How’s Dad been?”
    Lupe’s smiled dropped. “The same.”
    Lupe was a slight woman nudging fifty. How she manhandled his dad physically as well as verbally he never knew. Training, he decided. Not being a blood relative helped too. A stranger could always dismiss his father. He couldn’t.
    She’d changed out of her nurse’s uniform and looked eager to leave. She was a full-time stay-at-home nurse, six days, seven nights. Stephen stood in for her on Saturdays.
    “Anything I should know?” he asked.
    “No. Business as usual. He’s in the living room.”
    “OK, Lupe. Enjoy your day off.”
    Lupe threw a wave over her shoulder and disappeared in the Toyota financed by his monthly checks.
    He closed the door, aware of the Durango parked across the street.
    “Hey, Dad, it’s me,” he called out.
    “In here,” he barked, then more quietly, “like I’d be anywhere else.”
    Dennis Tarbell’s world extended as far as the four walls of the living room. It provided his place to sleep, his dining room, his entertainment room, his treatment room and his bathroom most of the time. The room was by no definition palatial, but it was simply the biggest available to get all the equipment in to enable Dennis to live somewhat comfortably.
    Tarbell found his father hunched over in his wheelchair with a clear plastic tube running to his nose from an oxygen bottle strapped to the wheelchair’s side. Even with the oxygen’s assistance, he struggled to breathe, sucking in air like it was soup.
    In his prime, Dennis Tarbell had beena strong man. Where his son was gawky, the father had been muscled from a life spent working in the Richmond and Vallejo shipyards. Dennis didn’t look so big these days. Forty years of smoking three packs a day had caught up with him in the form of emphysema and other smoking-related complications. His lungs rattled and wheezed every time he breathed. He looked deflated, his flesh hanging loose on his bony frame. He was a far cry from the behemoth Tarbell remembered as a frightened child.
    “Come to ease your conscience?” he said.
    It was an old and much used greeting. Tarbell placed it in his father’s top ten slurs. It had been a couple of weeks since he’d trotted that one out.
    “You want something to drink?” Tarbell said on his way to the kitchen.
    “A beer.”
    Booze had been another of his father’s crutches that his health denied him.
    Tarbell opened the fridge door. “Coffee or juice?”
    His father didn’t answer.
    Tarbell made coffee and returned to the living room with two mugs. He set one on the lap tray on the wheelchair. He set his own down on the side table next to the sofa.
    “You want the TV on?” he asked.
    “If I wanted the fucking TV on, I’d put it on. I ain’t got much but I still got one good finger to press a button on the remote. See?” He shot Tarbell the bird to illustrate his point.
    His father’s acting out was his way of compensating for his body’s failings. He could no longer throw a fist when his dinner was cold or backhand his son for losing a schoolyard brawl, but he could still hurl an insult and have it hit the mark every time. Tarbell put it down to lost pride. Once, his father had been breadwinner. He steered a family. His name meant something to the people who knew him. Now he elicited only pity. It couldn’t be a lot of fun pissing into a pan and havingyour son wipe your ass when you didn’t make it to the toilet in time. So he let his dad exercise his one remaining skill, his foul mouth.
    He lobbed a few more taunts Tarbell’s way. It looked like it was going to be a long