The Last Adventure

"I'm ashamed to talk about it, even to you," his sister Naomi said. "But I'm so worried about what I'm going to do with him. I had to phone you to come."

When he'd received her urgent message, he imagined it concerned their father, who was seventy-four and had lived alone for six years since the death of his mother. He lived alone in an apartment a few miles from where Naomi lived with her husband and children. Several earlier conversations with his sister had suggested indirectly that his father was involved with a girl. He had avoided talking to Naomi about it in the past but now he asked' her if that was the problem.

"Not just a girl!" Naomi exclaimed. "A child! Keith, she's barely twenty years old! He met her ... ," she lowered her voice so the children playing in another room would not hear," ... in a cheap restaurant!"

"Maybe he just wanted to be served quickly," Keith said.

"Oh for God's sake, Keith, spare me your jokes! This is the most terrible crisis we have ever had with him!"

"After all, he's been living alone all these years," Keith said. "Maybe he's just feeling lonely."

"I don't know about his being lonely," she said. "He does play cards with friends sometimes! It really is terrible! I'm sure he's giving her money and she hasn't any shame about cheating an old man."

"Are you sure he's giving her money?"

"He admitted it! A few times when I tried to talk to him about the danger of what he was doing, he grew impatient and upset with me and told me openly', he was paying her rent, gas and light!"

"That means she's not living with him."

"Oh God, don't even mention that possibility! If he did anything as stupid and shocking as that I wouldn't let the children visit him again!"

"All right, Naomi," Keith tried to speak patiently. "He's seventy-four years old and he's involved with a twenty-year-old girl he met in a restaurant. The whole business is a bit unpleasant, I admit, but it seems to have been going on for some time. You mentioned it to me when I was here at Christmas. What makes it a crisis now?"

She rose from her chair and went to peer nervously into the dining room. The children had gone outside and she returned and sat down, leaning closer to speak to Keith in a shaken whisper.

"He's even thinking of marrying her."

"Don't be ridiculous." Keith said.

Keith couldn't become as upset as Naomi but he understood her concern. His father lived on a pension from the Colony Bank and his Somal Security and didn't have to touch the money he'd received from the sale of their house when his mother died. Some of that money had gone to Naomi when she and Bruce bought their house and his father had given Keith ten thousand dollars while he studied for his doctoral degree. But there had to be seventy to eighty thousand dollars still in the bank. The money belonged to his father to do with as he wished, but they had a responsibility to make sure the girl didn't cheat him out of it.

"What do you think we should do?" Keith asked.

"You should go and talk to him," Naomi said seriously. "You are his son and maybe you can follow his line of thinking. Try to make him understand that what he is doing is unwise, especially for a man his age."

He phoned his father, who seemed delighted that Keith was in town and agreed to see him at once. He left Naomi's house after promising her he would return that evening to report to her exactly what his father had said.

"You know, son," his father said quietly, "I don't want to make excuses but the whole thing came about because of loneliness. I am not blaming your sister or you. You live four hundred miles away and she has her life with Bruce and her children. But when a man is alone as he grows older, you have to understand that his days and nights are different. He doesn't have the expectations he had when he was young, or the dreams, or planning for the things he hopes to do. He wakes up in the silence of the dark room and can't help thinking that it's just another night moving him closer to death. Oh, I know, there is the center for senior citizens nearby and movies and television. But I find that gathering of old people dull and television is full of silly comedies and the movies show films that have nothing to do with the life I lived. I am grateful when you and Naomi and the children come and I enjoy holidays and birthdays. But those celebrations pass quickly and then there are empty, lonely weeks again." His father shrugged. "I said I didn't want to make excuses but I guess I just did."