World of Pondside (eBook)

Thursday, October 10
6:30 a.m.

It was pretty sad when you had to go outside to warm up, Foster thought. In October, no less. You’d think the geezers were already dead for how cold they kept the place. “I’m taking a break,” he announced to Jenny, the breakfast and lunch cook. They were the only two in the kitchen at this hour. “It’s like a meat locker in here.”

“If you put some meat on your skinny little butt,” Jenny said, “you might not feel the cold so bad.”

Foster was supposed to come up with something clever to say in response. Normally, Jenny Williams was one of the few people on staff that he could talk to. This morning Foster was too pissed and too sad to talk to anyone. He’d thought it was a mistake when he first saw it: Robert Kallman on the “pureed” list.

“What the hell is this?” Foster had asked Jenny.

She’d looked up, with a frown, from the great stainless steel pot she was filling with uncooked oatmeal. Jenny didn’t like cussing. She said it was a way to let the devil sprinkle a little poison into the course of human events. (That was the way she always put it, Declaration of Independence style.) She looked at the spreadsheet taped to the wall next to the “All Employees Must Wash Their Hands” poster over the sink. “You appear to be looking at the diet list,” Jenny said. She resumed pouring oatmeal into the pot.

“It says Robert’s on pureed. Robert Kallman.”

“That’s new,” Jenny said lightly, as if it wasn’t a death sentence or anything.

“He’s mechanical soft,” Foster argued. He knew this for a fact. Clearing supper tables last night, he had to wait, as usual, while Robert cleaned his plate. Spaghetti and meatballs, garlic bread (no crust), coleslaw, the works. Robert had eaten it all. Some staffers complained about Robert taking the whole day and half the night to finish eating, but Foster didn’t mind waiting for him. Whenever he could, Foster took a break from clearing and sat down to eat dessert with the man. Robert Kallman had an impressive career in the military before he got hit with ALS. He had been all over the world: Germany, Iraq, Afghanistan, Japan, China. Plus, he knew everything there was to know about computers. He had created the game, for God’s sake. The World of Pondside.

“He had mechanical soft at supper last night,” Foster said. “I was there.”

Mechanical soft was one giant step above pureed. On mechanical soft, there was plenty a person could eat: pasta, meatloaf, all kinds of cooked vegetables and fruit, eggs, hash, mashed potatoes, ice cream, even pie. Eating was the one thing Robert had left. He’d been diagnosed in his midthirties, and in the decade or so since then, ALS had crippled his hands and arms, wasted his leg muscles, weakened his neck and back until he needed specially designed cushions and supports to keep upright in his wheelchair. It had muddied his speech so that only a listener as dedicated as Foster could understand him. But his left hand could still grip a fork or fat-handled spoon and bring it slowly to his mouth. He could dump it with a turn of his wrist onto his tongue, and then chew, chew, and chew, and trickiest of all, swallow it, swallow it hard, the right muscles sending the food down the right hole, getting it down and then remembering how to open up and take a breath. Just thinking about it made Foster’s jaws and throat ache, but, like Robert said, what else did he have to do?

Pureed, on the other hand, meant eating nothing thicker than what you could suck up with a straw. At Pondside, that meant a plateful of normal food run through the food processor. Foster had seen the dinner “chef” puree a salad and send it out: iceberg lettuce turned to green slush.

Jenny reached for a wooden spoon. She raised an eyebrow in Foster’s direction. “What were you doing here at supper last night and now you’re here this morning? You been working twelve-hour shifts again?”

“Wait a minute,” Foster said, suddenly all too certain that he had figured it out. “It’s Thursday.” Speech therapy came through on Wednesdays. “You think they reevaluated him? Knocked him down to pureed?” The bastards, Foster thought.

“He should’ve got pureed at supper then,” Jenny said. “Somebody slipped up.”

Foster pulled the paper kitchen cap off his head in disgust. His hair sprang free.

He stopped at his locker to pick up a cigarette on his way outside. Employees were strictly forbidden to carry a pack in any visible pocket. He punched the four digits plus pound sign on the pad beside the heavy glass door, waited for the click, and threw himself gratefully outside into thick warm air, currents of it you could almost see snaking into the building behind him, like the arrows that mark a storm front rolling across a TV weather map.

Outside it was just getting light, the trees and the cornfield and the Heartland Trucking warehouse emerging from the darkness beyond the parking lot, frogs trilling their last-chance love songs down by the pond. Pondside Manor had the look of a medium-priced motel: three redbrick and fake-stone wings guarded by a phalanx of stunted evergreens, with an atrium wrapped in windows up front. It sprawled on its own frozen lake of concrete in the middle of the kind of nowhere that exists at the edge of most midsized towns in the Midwest, where you might spy a horse or two nibbling some grass in the shadow of a giant billboard or discover an old fishing pond hosting its ducks and bluegills behind the box stores that line the highway. Foster crossed the concrete, tacking through a smattering of employee cars. He kept his eyes on the prize that lay at the edge of the parking lot: a wooden bench under a tree overlooking the pond. He could see only one end of the bench as he approached; most of it was hidden by a border of variously successful spirea bushes that made a broken line around the parking lot.

At this hour, so close to the shift change, Foster expected the bench would be unoccupied, the sand-filled bucket beside it overflowing with butts. He was close enough to stub his toe on the bucket before he noticed the tendril of fresh white smoke rising from the hidden end of the bench.

“Hey!” he said.

“Hey, Foster,” a husky voice replied. It was Tori, the first-shift RN. She didn’t turn her head right away to look at him, but kept scowling down at the pond, her arms folded over her scrubs—it was light enough now for Foster to make out the teddy bear print—and her crossed leg bouncing on top of the leg that was jiggling up and down underneath it. Foster had never seen Tori sitting—or for that matter, standing—still. When she finally looked up at him, simultaneously blowing out a stream of smoke, she tipped her head toward the end of the bench—an invitation to sit. The loose topknot of her blond ponytail bobbed sideways, seconding the motion.

Foster sat. “What’re you doing here so early?” He flipped his dumb phone open and shut. It was 6:32. Her shift didn’t start until 7:00.

“I have charts to finish from yesterday.” She sucked on her cigarette, held it, pursed her lips to exhale noisily. “Don’t tell.”

Foster breathed in the smoke that wafted toward his end of the bench and remembered harder times, before his latest employment at Pondside Manor, when he used to stretch out his cigarette money by positioning himself downwind of people on their smoke breaks. Usually, he didn’t like to think about the fact that he was breathing in what had been inside somebody else’s lungs. With Tori, he didn’t mind that so much. He thought about asking her if she knew why Robert Kallman’s diet got downgraded, but that seemed like too low a note to start her day on. Of course, now that he’d thought of that, he couldn’t think of anything else to say. He inhaled one last secondhand breath and reached for the Camel in his pocket, surveying the pond.

“What do you think that is, down there?” he said.

He pointed to the end of the short wooden pier a farmer up the road maintained on the pond for fishing purposes. A couple of the old guys used it when they could get somebody to take them down there. Wheelchairs needed help getting over the bump where the boards met the shore. A curve of silver emerged from and returned to the water at the end of the pier. He could tell it was something that didn’t belong there.

Tori looked where he pointed. “Is it a bicycle?” She stood up to have a better look. “Didn’t yours get stolen from the rack?”

“Not lately,” Foster said, and he stood up, too.

It was that time of the morning, right before the sun showed its true colors, when the stillness got whipped up into a distinct breeze. The leaves over their heads rustled and the pond suddenly scalloped into little waves. The frogs fell silent. Ducks bobbed into view from the reeds behind the pier. One of them stopped and plunged its head into the water and its tail into the air, the way ducks do, as if to have a look at the rest of whatever was out there, the part that was underwater. When the duck popped up again, the silver half circle behind it suddenly became to Foster’s eyes what it had been all along.

He crushed his unlit cigarette in his fist.

Tori said, “My God.”

Then they both took off at a run, Tori pulling out her phone and racing across the parking lot to the building, while Foster stumbled down the steep hill to the...