Buckle

The kitchen cupboards were the last to be sorted out. My father gaped at the size of the throwaway pile in the front hall. “Would I do this to you?”

I was nearly done with the books. The Salvation Army was going to make a killing. “What’s on TV?” I asked him.

He smiled at the idea and returned to the television, now louder than ever in the empty living room. At the next change in programming, he wandered back in, holding open the blue leather photo album I had thrown out that morning. A crowd of sepia swimmers fanned out in front of a beach umbrella, my mother’s family. Dad’s fingers touched each of the faces.

“I don’t know even one of these people.”

“Neither do I. May as well let it go.” I closed the cover and put the album next to a trove of plastic containers.

“Good idea.”

He grabbed my wrist and stared me down. A glimpse of his old self. “Douglas!” He tightened his grip and pulled me close. We have the same name, so this move always carries extra urgency. “What?”

“Grandad’s buckle. In your excavations, it should have turned up. Has it shown itself?”

The buckle, with its red-black carnelian set on a bronze plate, had last been seen around Grandad’s waist at his funeral. I shook my head.

Over the next hour, he asked about it three more times.

“I’ll let you know if I see it.” My policy was not to challenge fixations, but to wait for them to dissipate.

But Dad spent the afternoon hunting for it, skulking through every room. “We need to find that buckle.”

Dad’s house had been bought by a couple who promised not to knock it down, though the architect with them one morning spent more time looking at the land than the layout. I convinced him to sell by promising him a spot in one of the places I managed for Paul, apartment buildings for business people flying through. There was one in an old deco building on Golding Avenue that came with a doorman. It hadn’t been occupied in months. A supermarket around the corner and me a few blocks away.

At the closing, my father was too vague to pick up a pen. The buyers and brokers looked the other way and let me sign his/our name. It saved the hassle of declaring him unfit.

The concept of him living on his own was a con, of course, to be revealed slowly. The proceeds from the sale would buy a share at a retirement place I had already picked out that was close enough to the city that I could get there without too much trouble. Plus, it had staged care. He wouldn’t know the difference. But Green Cedars didn’t have a room available when moving day came, so I packed two suitcases and brought Dad to stay with me.

He glared at the lumpy paint job in the front hall and the dim yellow light in the stairwell, but he was too tired to complain. While I unlocked the door to my apartment, he fingered the straps of the suitcases. They had been with him and my mother on a hundred car trips and, once, to Spain.

Holding the door open, I poked him. “Your new home.”

He paused with each step inside. I pushed past him with one of the suitcases to turn on the lights and lead the way.

The spare room had been modified for his benefit. I had him sit next to me on the sofa bed while I went through the suitcases for his fake-wood-grain digital clock radio. I put it in his hand like it was a gift.

“My clock,” he said.

I plugged it in, set the time, and put it on the bookshelf I had cleared for him. He gave a halfway smile but kept watching my hands, as if he was waiting for me to unpack the rest of his house.

“Where’s...