The Caretaker
Stains in a notebook, part 3
Found the throughline
For all humankind
If given the time
They’ll blow up or walk on the moon
It’s just what they do
—Bright Eyes, “Just Once in the World” (here and throughout)
Wednesday, February 18, 2026
He’s standing in his underwear at the top of the stairs yelling “NO IFS ANDS OR BUTS!”
He’s loading his things into a moving truck.
He comes back to pick us up every other weekend.
He drives us to his apartment in the city.
He takes us to the supermarket and we fill the cart with total trash.
He notices in the parking lot one day that we are two boys instead of three, so he goes back inside and finds the middle one by the cereal.
He takes us on vacations: one in a camper van, another in tents in Colorado, some others just in Holiday Inns, where we barely leave the room. In one of those rooms, he orders ribs from Larry’s Ribs and when they answer the phone he says, “Hi, is this Larry?” I can’t hear the voice at the other end but I suspect it doesn’t laugh.
He buys a house near hers so he can be closer to us.
He buys a Dodge Caravan.
He drives us in the Dodge Caravan on our Sunday-morning paper routes every other weekend. When all the papers are delivered, he proceeds to the McDonald’s drive-through.
He orders however many Sausage McMuffins we ask for and one large black coffee.
He drinks his coffee and reads the paper at the kitchen table while we eat and eventually make a break for the TV.
He lets us bring our new puppy to his house, as long as we make sure it stays on a blanket on the floor, somehow.
He blows a fuse and makes us stand in the yard with the puppy after it walks off the blanket when no one’s looking and pees on the white Stainmaster carpet.
He cools off eventually but we’re already well afraid so we call her and she comes over in a fury and takes us back to her house.
Earlier, not too long after the divorce, she falls madly in love with a man who soon thereafter gets diagnosed with cancer. The man comes to our house in the subdivision and we go to his house on the farm and we all have a few birthdays and he grows progressively ill and starts to die. We travel to visit his mom and stepdad in Texas. He wants to say goodbye to his mom because he knows he’s dying, but things go sideways with his stepdad fast. Arguments ensue. Fights ensue. Things are thrown. Our mom takes a large book to the head, and then we make our early exit with the man at our lead. After he dies, the house starts to smell of cigarette smoke and sadness and “Desperado” plays long into the night.
Mom remarries many years later but makes no bones about it: the man whom she loved and who died all those years ago was the love of her life. My stepdad knows and accepts this.
Dad remarries when we’re still of high-school age.
He gets drunk at the wedding and tells my brothers that he knows that I don’t love him anymore.
Mom stands in her kitchen one day shortly after and tells me that my brothers told her that my dad told them that I don’t love him anymore.
She says, “You only get one dad.”
He comes to her house one day a few years later, walks into the same kitchen. He’s there because she’s out of town, and so the school called him to tell him instead of her that I was being suspended for the rest of the year and wouldn’t be allowed to attend my graduation ceremony, on account of the threats to human lives that I’d made. After the school calls him and tells him, they hand the phone to me, and in his rage he makes a few threats not unlike my own. When he shows up still fuming in the kitchen, I remind him of this dichotomy and say, in effect, see, we’re the same, and instead of putting me in my place he just gets real quiet.
For personal gain
On Thanksgiving Day
I joined the parade
I stood at the top of the float
And threw out a roseWatched a blast from the past
Indigenous dance
Started to laugh
And then I just started to cry
This world is waving goodbyeSo cut a rug, let’s throw a party
Birthday cards for everyone
Swallow hard and say you’re sorry
Just admit what you have done
Thursday, February 19, 2026
He moves back to the city now that we’re older.
He meets my eldest brother and me for lunch every so often now that we’ve both moved to the city, too. (The middle one’s moved out west.)
He ages gradually and calms down considerably.
He gets increasingly emotional in casual conversations, though he never actually says a word about whatever it is that he’s feeling.
He might have been right about what he’d said before, about me not loving him anymore, but I do again now.
Dad travels with my stepmom to visit me in London while I’m living there erroneously for a year.
Mom travels with my stepdad to visit me in London while I’m living there erroneously for a year.
We do everything twice like this and have all my life and I eventually get tired of it and tell them that they’re going to have to learn how to stomach being in the same place at the same time if they want to keep doing things with me. I feel bad about this years later because I see how selfish it was of me. But not them. They feel bad about it right away because they see how selfish it had been of them for much longer. They get over it. I do too.
He gets into it with his only brother at some point, for no good reason, and they don’t talk for years.
His brother gets diagnosed with pancreatic cancer and is told that he doesn’t have much time left.
They meet at their childhood home and talk and hug.
His brother dies a short time later, much sooner than expected.
He goes to the church for the wake with his wife and my brothers and me and with the might of his grief he shakes the whole pew.
His mom, my grandma, dies a couple years later, while I’m off either chasing or running from demons in Cambodia. Her parents would have arrived in the US from Italy a few years before she was born, which was just before the end of the First World War. And there I am on the day of her funeral in Siem Reap doing God knows what. I make it back to the US for a short visit a few months later, while the middle one’s in town with his daughter, and then we all go to the grave together. 1918–2017. Incredible.
He flies 9,000 miles with my stepmom for my wedding a few years later, as do my mom and stepdad and both of my brothers. The plan is to have the wedding in the town where my soon-to-be wife and I live, and then fly to the beach a couple days later. Everything goes as planned the night of the wedding, but things begin to unravel slowly thereafter, and in the end everyone goes home early because a coronavirus has started sweeping the land.
He flies to Mexico with my stepmom a couple years later to meet me and my wife there, as do my mom and stepdad and my oldest brother and his girlfriend and the middle one and his wife and their two kids. We’re all in Mexico because the US won’t give my wife a tourist visa to enter its vast expanse of freedom and spiritual decay.
Dad needs more handholding than he used to, but I don’t think much of it. He keeps getting older and the world keeps moving on and on and on.
He and my stepmom fly back out to where my wife and I live to attend our housewarming, as do my mom and stepdad. The latter couple stays in our house, sleeps in our bed, while we sleep on a floor mattress in another room. The former, we put up in a hotel in the city center. When we drop them off there, I point out the ATM just around the corner. Later, we learn that he got lost for an hour or so while searching for it in the ruthless afternoon heat. Thankfully, a man on a motorcycle who didn’t speak his language understood his predicament enough to know which hotel he was staying at and drive him back to it.
He needs help ordering dinner at the European restaurant we take everyone to. The menu is all in English, and all Western food, and each item on it is described in detail, but it’s as though he’s never heard of any of it. I tell him what to order and he orders it. When we’re finished eating, he wonders aloud why the restaurant has all the little soldier figurines on all the empty tables, and it takes a little more work than it should to convince him that those are just salt and pepper shakers.
He tells me that he doesn’t think he booked his hotel room in the next city on our itinerary. We check. He didn’t. We get this sorted out, and it finally, fully, unequivocally registers that it is now my turn to take the wheel.
So if it’s time, let’s go together
I will be your ballast now
Let’s sail into that stormy weather
No matter how it turns out
Friday, February 20, 2026
He gets kinder and more forgetful, more forgetful and more confused, more confused and more loving.
I stay with him and my stepmom for about a week on my first trip back to the US in seven years, over Christmas 2024.
He consults the notes he leaves for himself on his phone when he wants to remember things. He calls his phone his brain. When he finds the notes he’s looking for—most of which are stored among his phone’s contacts; most of which, that is, are notes associated with people and containing the things he wants to remember about those people—he starts reading them aloud. He will often read them through to the end while seeming to have forgotten why he’d started looking at them to begin with.
He does the same thing with the weather. He’ll find some reason to check it and then start reading the daily forecast for days and days until being met with some reason or directive to stop.
He tracks his daily steps devoutly, daily, hourly. He stops walking outside, opts instead for walking in circles around the house, says it’s more convenient that way, says he can stay nearer to the TV, coffee, and bathroom that way. He gets notifications to alert him how many steps he still needs to take before the end of each hour to reach his hourly goal. He shares updates on his hourly step goals with whoever’s around to hear him, hourly.
He starts forgetting words like TV, coffee, and bathroom.
He dismisses suggestions to walk outside, to read, to write, or to do anything that might serve to exercise his mind and body more than walking in circles around the house and watching TV.
He sees ads on TV for Prevagen and starts taking Prevagen.
His appointment at the memory center falls through after a several-month wait because there was a scheduling error of some sort. He doesn’t seem to care and jokes that he can’t remember why he’d even thought to go there in the first place.
Our video calls decrease in frequency from once every two weeks or so to about once a month. He is no longer the one who thinks to schedule them, and he seems happy with our newfound monthly cadence. He and my stepmom always sit at the same place at the table when we talk. On one of our calls, he asks me if I know why my mom divorced him. I pause in a kind of shock and then answer only, “No. I don’t.” I guess just to spare him and my stepmom both that particular trip down memory lane.
I tell my mom about this on a call soon after and she asks me, “Do you know?” And I suddenly realize that I don’t. Not really. Not exactly. Not as much as I always thought I did.
She tells me.
I incandesce.
I don’t say anything. We don’t have the video turned on, so she can’t see me. I just sit and seethe and wait. “All right,” I say eventually. “Now I know. Thanks for telling me.”
I remember him yelling in his underwear. I remember him loading the moving truck. I let it go. He’s not him anymore. And that little thing making its first memories at the base of the stairs and on the monkey bars near the moving truck isn’t me anymore, either.
His birthday’s in a few months. He’s going to be 79. He seems content. Dare I say happy. Altogether unburdened by whatever’s eating his brain. My stepmom, God bless her, is an absolute angel and loves and suffers him like only an angel could. “Your relationship with your dad,” my stepdad tells me one day, from experience, from his relationship with his, “will be rooted more in your feelings now, and less in your thoughts.” More about what’s still in our hearts and less about what’s slipping from our skulls. I think about that sometimes. I think about it a lot, actually. And I think it’s just beautiful.
I look just like him. People say that all the time. Not that I need them to. I see it. I feel it, too. Everything I see in him is alive somehow in me as well. When I was younger I always felt that we were opposites. And in many ways we were. It is entirely foreign to me when I hear people talk about how their father was their role model. Not me. My role models throughout my youth were the frontmen in the bands that I loved, men who were typically about 10–15 years older than me, and who seemed to me to be wild and rebellious and free. I aspired to be the same, and I had a pretty good run at being two out of the three (but “freedom, oh freedom, well, that’s just some people talkin’”—and all that). I once bought him a birthday or Father’s Day card that said something about how different we were and how that’s okay, and I can still hear him saying with a restrained hurt in his voice, “We’re more alike than you think.” He knew already. And maybe he’s always known. In any case, I think he’s long known that one day I would know, too. And now I do. It’s not just him, either. My mom, my brothers, my stepparents, my grandparents, my wife, my friends and extended family here and gone. They are all with me and in me and coursing through me at all times.
If it ever occurred
Just once in the world
A love as absurd as ours
I would scream what we lost
From the mountaintop
Saturday, February 22, 2059
They speak. They hear. They know. They howl to and through me. They exist in my fading fundament. And I in their subastral image. I remember almost nothing but feel almost everything. I am the gossamer of clarity that radiates in the eye of my confusion. I live on a mountain in a foreign land. We have a small house for my wife and me and another for paying passersby. I maintain the property. I fix this and that. I walk daily on the trail nearby and work my way up to a run on the days that I can. I watch old films that travel through time on the waves and lights of digital technologies. I read books that I can’t understand and others that I do all right with. I stain notebooks with words that no one will ever read. I have boxes of them sitting in waiting. After I fill them, I burn them. In the mornings, I sit with coffee and pen and paper at a table outside that I built with much younger hands. I’m sitting at it now. You could call it writing, but I call it rousing the dead, stirring the souls of the mortally wounded, offering them possession of my heart and soul. They speak. They hear. They know. They howl to and through me. They call me the caretaker.
This really moving, Max. The frank honesty and vulnerability to share all that. To look at yourself and your father and all that such a relationship contains, and to then put it on paper — that was really something.