Half the Guilt
By Betty Stanton
Julia walks into the nursing home like she’s entering a wound. The building hums with bleach and coughs and television static. The air is too warm, and her shirt clings to her lower back with sweat. In her fist, the address she’d followed to find this place crumples like paper skin.
Fuck you, Janie, she thinks at her sister. Fuck you for putting him here without telling me.
“I’m looking for Charles Mahetti.”
The woman at the desk doesn’t turn at first. The television screen flickers—a football game blaring through a crack in the plastic. The Cowboys are up by a field goal. Julia wonders if her husband is watching the same game. If the kettle’s still on the stove. Why she ever told him not to come with her.
“Are you family?” the woman asks, still watching the TV.
“I’m his daughter.”
“You’re not the one that came last month.”
“No. That was probably my sister.”
“Ah. Two sisters. Half the guilt, right?” The nurse grins as if she thinks her joke was clever. “Anyway, down the right hall. Room 140.” Julia turns, but the woman calls out again. “Take his mail. It’s been piling up.”
A plastic bin is pushed toward her—magazines, mostly. MAD Magazine. Cat Fancy. Laurel and Hardy Digest. The covers are crinkled, the edges soft. Cat Fancy makes her remember her father’s cat. The giant white thing that kept trying to eat the Christmas tree. What had Janie done with the cat?
“Likes his magazines, eh?” the nurse asks, smirking. Julia doesn’t respond. She takes the mail. She walks the hallway. Her shoes squeak on the waxed tile while her stomach curls and uncurls like a fist.
The room is white. Too white. The kind of white that hisses when you look at it too long. The bed takes up most of the space, and the man inside it—her father—is so small she doesn’t see him at first. Just skin and bone now, just breath and sheets and the smell of plastic.
He’s sleeping. She exhales.
Her body softens and relaxes just enough to feel ashamed of it. She hadn’t wanted to see him like this. Didn’t want to know her sister had been right. It wasn’t the job that kept her from visiting. It wasn’t the kids. It was this.
The body on the bed is not the man who made her laugh so hard her ribs ached. Not the man who called death a punchline. The man who could make fun of the withdrawal from Vietnam, and the bullet meant for Reagan, and the failure of his own marriage.
He asked her: “Julie, why did the dead baby cross the road?”
“That’s a stupid joke, Dad.”
“It’s only stupid because you don’t know the answer.”
“Fine. What is it?”
“Because it was taped to the chicken.”
She had tried so hard not to laugh. That joke was a razor wrapped in a balloon animal. His face—serious, almost scared—watched hers to see if it landed, and her cheeks had gone red with the pressure of holding laughter back.
When she was young and poetic she had once called his humor the secret of his overcharged soul. Back when she still used words like “soul.”
She sets the magazines on the nightstand. Her elbow knocks something loose—paper drifting to the floor like a feather. It’s not a note. Just a page ripped from a travel magazine. A turquoise sea marked with a jagged red triangle. “A Place to Conquer Fear,” the caption reads, but beneath that, in trembling blue ink: a place feared to conquer. Her father’s handwriting. Loopy, fragile, half-disappearing at the end.
A joke. A stupid joke.
Her heart stutters against her ribs like a moth.
She picks up the paper and places it back on the table, gently this time, as if it were glass.
Outside, the hallway buzzes. A nurse laughs too loudly down the corridor. Someone coughs from deep in their lungs.
Inside, Julia stays still. Her father does not wake.
She stands a little longer, her hands open at her sides like someone waiting to be chosen.
***
The cat bit Jane again this morning. This is the third time this week. and always when she’s trying to feed him—those delicate, stupid pills that dissolve if your fingers get damp. She wraps them in tuna. It never works. The bite is shallow this time. Just a break in the skin, just enough to sting.
She presses a paper towel to it and doesn’t wince. Bleeds through it anyway.
Her father is watching a different channel today. Golf, with the sound turned up so loud the announcer’s voice buzzes in her teeth.
“Hi, Daddy,” she says, louder than she wants. He doesn’t look.
She checks the drawer. No magazines. She’s stopped bringing them. He doesn’t read anymore. Doesn’t even pretend to. Last week he thought she was his cousin. The week before, he asked if his wife was still alive.
He meant his ex-wife. Jane didn’t correct him.
She moves the cup closer to his hand. Brushes his knuckles with her own. His skin is cold and thin, almost translucent.
Julia came, apparently. A few days ago. The nurse mentioned it casually, as if it were routine.
“Your sister’s nice,” she said, which could mean anything. Jane said nothing.
She remembers the way Julia used to laugh at his jokes, throw her whole body into them, make it seem like the world had cracked open and let the joy pour out. Jane had been the quiet one. The practical one.
Still is.
She’s the one who handled the paperwork. Called the ambulance. Got the power of attorney. Explained to their father what a DNR meant, twice.
After the visit, she drives to the grocery store and sits in the car for a long time before going in. Her hand still smells faintly of antiseptic. The cat’s bite is beginning to throb. The radio is playing a song she doesn’t recognize, something soft and stupid. She changes the station twice. Lands on a preacher shouting about forgiveness.
Jane turns it off.
At home, the cat waits on the windowsill, tail twitching. She feeds him. He doesn’t bite this time.
She wipes the counter with a bleach rag, stands at the sink, and stares at her reflection in the window. It's dark enough outside now that she can see herself. One eye is red. Not from crying. From exhaustion, maybe. From age.
She turns off the light.
THE END
Author Bio: Betty Stanton (she/her) is a Pushcart-nominated writer who lives and works in Tulsa, Oklahoma. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in various journals and collections and has been included in various anthologies. She received her MFA from The University of Texas - El Paso and holds a doctorate in Educational Leadership. She is currently on the editorial board of Ivo Review. @fadingbetty.bsky.social