Windfall

Chapter One: The Calls

Beverly Pulaski made the calls on a Tuesday in the middle of October, from the kitchen table, with a yellow legal pad in front of her.

She had written the important sentences out in advance. Not a script—she would have been embarrassed to call it that—but a list of phrases she trusted herself to say without her voice doing anything unhelpful. *Moderate cognitive impairment.* That was the doctor's language, and she liked it because it was flat and clinical and did not sound like a sentence being handed down. *We're managing beautifully.* That one was hers. *I'd like everyone here for Thanksgiving.*

Underneath, in smaller letters, she had written: *Do not cry on Mitchell.*

Through the window over the sink she could see Kenneth in the side yard with the leaf rake. He worked the way he had always worked, in long even strokes, moving down the line of the orchard from the first tree to the last. Forty-six years ago he had planted those trees the spring Mitchell was born—twelve of them, four rows of three, Cortland and Jonathan and two Northern Spies that had never done well. He used to bring the children out in September and explain, in the patient voice he saved for facts, that the apples you picked off the branch were worth money and the ones you found on the ground were not.

"Those are windfalls," he'd say, turning one over to show the bruise. "Nobody buys a windfall. You can't ship it, can't store it. You make cider out of it, or you let the deer have it."

Robin, who had been four or five, had asked why they were called that.

"Because the wind brought them down," Kenneth had said. "You didn't earn it. It just landed at your feet."

Beverly had thought about that for thirty years without knowing why it stayed with her.

She looked at the phone. Then she looked at the pad. Then she stood and wiped down a counter that was already clean, because it was 9:40 in the morning and Mitchell would be at the restaurant by ten and there was no point calling before ten.

The diagnosis had come three weeks earlier, in a beige office in Newark with a poster of the human brain on the wall like a cross-section of cauliflower. Dr. Sandhu was young, and kind, and had a way of leaning forward with his forearms on his knees that made Beverly want to tell him things she hadn't told anyone. He had asked Kenneth to draw a clock face showing ten past eleven. Kenneth—who had spent forty years as a site engineer, who could read a topographic map the way other men read a newspaper, who had once corrected a state inspector's grade calculation in his head—had drawn a circle and then put all twelve numbers down the right-hand side, crowded together like people pressed against the wall of an elevator.

He had looked at it. Then he had set the pencil down and said, "Well. That's not right, is it."

And Beverly, sitting in the chair beside him with her purse in her lap, had felt the floor of her life tilt maybe four degrees. Not a collapse. A tilt. Enough that everything on every shelf would eventually slide.

There had been signs before that, of course. She had catalogued them privately for over a year, the way she catalogued everything—the keys in the freezer, twice; the check to the water company written out and mailed and then written out and mailed again eight days later; the afternoon last March when Kenneth had gotten into the truck in a jacket and tie and driven twelve miles toward an office he had sold his share of in 2012, and had come home two hours later and said only, "They've changed that intersection at Cherry Valley," and gone upstairs.

She had told no one. She had told herself she was waiting for something definite. But if she was honest—and she was capable of being honest, in short controlled bursts, like a woman testing bathwater—she had been waiting because the moment she said it out loud to her children, it would belong to them too, and then it would be real in a way she could not manage.

At 10:02 she called Mitchell.

She could hear the kitchen behind him: a dish pit running, someone shouting about a delivery, the particular clatter of sheet pans. Her son answered with, "Ma, hang on—Hector, no, *the small ones*—okay. Hi. What's wrong?"

"Nothing's wrong. Why would something be wrong?"

"Because it's ten in the morning on a Tuesday."

"I'm allowed to call my son." She smoothed the legal pad flat with her palm. "I have some information about your father."

The noise behind him didn't change but somehow it receded. "Okay."

"We saw a specialist in Newark. There's a name for what's been going on. It's a moderate cognitive impairment. Which is a stage, they said, not a—it's a stage." She heard herself and pressed on. "He's on a medication. It doesn't reverse anything, it slows things down, potentially. He's fine, Mitchell. He raked the whole east side this morning."

"Moderate," Mitchell said. "Moderate meaning what?"

"Meaning he forgets things."

"Ma."

"Meaning it's going to get worse," she said, and her voice held, and she was proud of that. "They can't tell you how fast. I asked twice."

A long breath on the other end. She pictured him: the shaved-down haircut he'd adopted at forty when the front went, the chef coat he wore even though he mostly did books and payroll now, the way he stood with one hand flat on a stainless counter like it was holding him up.

"Is he driving?" Mitchell asked.

"Not since March."

"March. It's October, Ma."

"Yes," she said. "I'm aware of the calendar."

He let that go, which she appreciated and also resented. Then he said, "What do you need?"

And there it was, the door she had been walking toward all morning. "I want everyone here for Thanksgiving," she said. "You and Tammy and Nate. Laura. Robin. All of us, in this house, for one holiday, properly, before things change."

"Robin's not going to come."

"You could ask him."

"I could ask him." A pause. "Tam's got Nate's tournament thing, I think, the Saturday, but Thursday's—yeah. Thursday's fine. We'll come Wednesday."

"Wednesday," she said, writing it down, feeling the small blessed relief of ink on paper. "Thank you, honey."

"Ma." His voice changed. "Are you okay?"

"I'm managing beautifully," she said, and hung up before he could ask again.

Laura took four rings and then answered in a whisper, which meant she was at work, which meant she was always at work.

"I'm outside a partners' meeting," Laura said. "Two minutes. Are you all right?"

"Your father has been diagnosed with a cognitive impairment."

Beverly had planned to lead into it. She had a whole approach written down. But Laura was the one who did not need leading into things, and there was some meanness in that, in giving her the sharp end because she could take it.

Her daughter didn't say anything for a moment. Beverly heard a door close somewhere in Chicago, and the sound of Laura walking, heels on hard floor, getting away from people.

"Who diagnosed it," Laura said. "Neurologist or GP?"

"Neurologist. Sandhu. He's very good."

"What stage."

"Moderate."

"Okay." Beverly could hear her writing. Of course she was writing. "Have you done any planning? Legal, financial. Powers of attorney, health care directive, has anybody looked at the trust—"

"Bill Ruppel handles all of that."

"Bill Ruppel is eighty."

"He's seventy-one, and he has handled this family's affairs since before you could read." Beverly heard her own voice go tight and reeled it back in. "Laura. I didn't call for a consultation. I called to tell you, and to say that I want you home for Thanksgiving."

"I'll be there," Laura said immediately. "I'm already coming, I always come."

"You always come alone."

The pause was different from the others. It had an edge to it, like a step where you expected floor.

"There's a lot going on at the firm," Laura said.

"There always is." Beverly softened, or performed softening. "I'd just like to see your life sometime. That's all. A mother's allowed to be curious."

"I have to go back in," Laura said. "I love you. Give Dad a hug. I'll call Sunday."

Robin's phone rang eleven times and went to a recording that was just the carrier's robot voice reciting the number, no name, no greeting. Beverly waited for the beep with her hand pressed flat on the table.

"Robin, it's your mother." She stopped. Everything she had written down had been written for the other two. "Your father saw a doctor. There's something wrong with his memory. It's going to get worse." She looked out the window. Kenneth had stopped raking and was standing at the end of the third row, holding an apple, turning it over in his hands. "Thanksgiving is the twenty-eighth. I know that we—I know it's a long way. I know." Her throat did something she hadn't authorized. "He asks where you are. Not always. But he asks."

She hung up.

On the legal pad she drew a line through *Mitchell* and a line through *Laura* and left *Robin* alone, uncrossed, the way you leave a light on.

Outside, Kenneth set the apple down carefully on the flat top of a fence post, as if he meant to come back for it, and picked up the rake again. Beverly watched him for a while. Then she went into his study to look for the electric bill, and found, on the corner of the desk, a business card she didn't recognize—cream stock, green lettering, *Crestline Property Group*—which she looked at for perhaps three seconds before deciding it meant nothing at all.