Like all boys he liked movies. He expressed no preference for the after-dinner feature, but not for lack of interest, to our relief. It was easiest to set him before the TV and increasingly difficult to engage him any other way.

During the films he would chut and vroom over the sound effects. What had started as a joke on the grandiosity of today’s cinema became habit. He pewed after gunshots and moaned along the despairing violin. Fighting of any kind got the restless leg going, so we abandoned the more heated dramas and kept action features strictly John Wayne, whose familiarity remedied any otherwise upsetting stimulus.

He never chutted over John Wayne.

The other noises helped him through what suspense we hadn’t vetted while we sterilized the kitchen and watched him in case of restless leg. It was essential we work quietly, or the unexpected chink of a goblet into the cupboard would agitate him, and our cinematic calculation would have been wasted. But fuck it if the leg interrupted our washdown. We entertained too many people to safely neglect it: the night nurse, the day nurse, the cleaning crew, the physical therapist, the next night’s nurse. All in twelve hours. It was a painstaking orchestration of overlapping entrances and exits, this—

harem, one of them joked, to which I would return a generous laugh because we needed these women, much as they might annoy us or embarrass us with our own ineptitude, our fear of neglectfulness. If he enjoyed their company, we made them at home because we were but a day job that at any moment they could swap or drop, gashing our closely guarded schedule and leaving him unnecessarily confused over the broken routine.

Not that I dared say it, but we could have recovered from Connie’s absence. She told me one day that God had called her to ease the last leg of her patients’ journeys, and that she hopped from household to household happily fulfilling this divine office. I supposed we were blessed to have employed the agent of Christ’s compassion, so if she had effectively called my father a pending bullet on her holy resume, to me and in front of him, who was I to judge?

Not that he heard her profession, or would have remembered it.

Connie made extravagant, mostly excusable gestures. She sang along with his Groban CDs, cut coupons from our newspaper, exclaimed with a kiss of her fingers Mum-ma mía! at restaurant advertisements. We said not a word. But her tardiness and smoke breaks warranted a frank chat every so often. She could hum the hell out of Kenny G, so long as she kept her vigil. She had her cell handy anytime she went outside, but he didn’t know her number, let alone to push the talk button after dialing.

She was enthusiastic, however, and volunteered extra hours when asked. She was also white, a native English speaker, automatically easier for him to understand and reconcile into his house than the women from Haiti, Ghana and Korea, women whom he enjoyed and treated well yet never suggested taking to lunch at the Club. But, as everyone knew, you put up and shut up with the patient. He had it worse, in the general sense, and would only have it worsening.

Connie took him out frequently, enticing him somehow to places he would have vetoed with us. She reported upon their return one day that they had lunched at La Catalina off Route 128. Mexican?! we cried, exchanging a glance. It was a much scoffed-at anecdote that he had once sniffed at my mother’s lasagna and declared, I don’t eat ethnic food. Hence twenty-five years of plain chicken, plain pasta and greens boiled yellow. Perhaps God really had anointed Connie. But some of her trips raised the eyebrow, such as one ill-advised Barnes and Noble run, when she purchased Saving Private Ryan. We dropped the film at the library and pretended to have misplaced it.

Come home one afternoon to find Fifty Shades on the TV.

Now, ordering soft porn on the employer’s dime and proceeding to watch it with him might have ruffled a less generous daughter, though I considered certain pathways of logic in Connie to be dead-ended or denatured. Honestly, who was caregiving whom?

Still, she had gotten something right. They were halfway through the runtime, and he appeared to be following—amused! No spots of drool on his shirt, no signs of resigning bored or frustrated to sleep. Oddly her choice of film made a successful afternoon.

Connie turned a triumphant grin at me.

She took great pride her food, too. He gave her little to work with, given his preference for raw fruit and cold cuts, but she arranged his plate in geometric shapes and made a show of submitting it for everyone’s praise.

Then there was the famous cake. Two cakes, actually, a mishmash of her own invention for which he stunned us by saying thank you.

He never said thank you.

That got Connie going. She strutted her bowl toward his chair. Her masterpiece jiggled as she went, arms outstretched as if supplicating the forces of mischief and mercy to ungrip her. She had smoothed Cool Whip over the top and laid a wobbly spiral of Hershey kisses in it, as if the cut-up chunks of chocolate and vanilla cake layered with chocolate and vanilla pudding weren’t enough to send a diabetic eighty-year-old to the hospice center of his nightmares.

The chunks and dollops smeared with gravity down the bowl’s crystal sides as with great ceremony she stuck it between him and the Bruins game—a ballsy obstruction on her part—and teased him that the whole thing was his dessert.

He said nothing. He looked nothing. In addition to restless leg he sometimes got masked face, which stunted any emotiveness and resulted in a blank slack of unrecognition. But, if I knew him, he felt a combination of miffed, tickled and overwhelmed. If she had caught him on a more lucid day he might have indulged her, Whoa, and continued watching the Bruins over the fast-sinking Hersheys.

Of course the day came when Connie’s services were no longer needed and she winged out of our lives with her last paycheck. Then all was still and empty, and we could sit as long as we liked after dinner, eyes closed amid the silence, wondering if we were monsters for the relief.