My Favorite Midlife Crisis by Toby Devens

genuine pleasure at the expanse before me. I was displayed in high menopause with a body ten pounds heavier than before or after. And for all the patients I counseled who were in the same state, the intractable thickening of my waist had infuriated me. The bathing suit, navy with vertical white stripes, was my effort to slim at least what the world saw. I lost those defiant last ten pounds that fall in the melting off that for me always accompanies crisis.
    Now I smiled at the photograph, admiring from a distance the feminine curves that frustrated me then. No one but my closest friends and family would recognize me in this photo. Perfect for a lark. I scanned it in. Pressed submit, reassured myself that nothing would ever come of this folly, and promptly—the way I misplaced the names of the new, unfunny crowd on Saturday Night Live now making background mayhem—forgot about it.
    ***
    My father liked to sit on a bench in Patterson Park and watch...what? I wondered if what he saw was just a jumble of fragments, shards of shifting images without meaning but with some beauty. There must have been something out there striking some chord in there, because he sighed frequently and deeply on those outings, I hoped with pleasure. This Sunday, the sun was warm, the grass smelled of scallions, kids kicked up dust with their bicycle wheels and yipped on the bumps. Maybe something broke through.
    He ate his ice cream cone like a child below the level of self-consciousness, with a wide flat tongue that I didn’t remember from his good days. Perhaps the small muscles were beginning to slacken. A slight tremor in his left hand plunged his thumb through the cone so the mint chocolate chip ice cream flooded through the hole and dripped down his shirt. I wiped his face with a napkin, dabbing at the green cream on his cheek. He grabbed my hand to stop my fussing, then turned it over, jerked it up, and planted on my palm an unexpected, sticky kiss.
    “I need some money,” he said, as I delivered him back to Sylvie.
    He said that nearly every week. He was obsessed with money, which is typical for Alzheimer’s patients. There is nothing in the literature about this, but much anecdotal material.
    Sylvie had scolded me before. “You keep giving him all this money and then he hides it who knows where and it’s lost forever. Give him play money.”
    So I’d stopped at Toys “R” Us and picked up a pack of kiddie cash for the inevitable demand and when he asked this time, I peeled off a fifty, three tens, and two fives, while Sylvie nodded approvingly at my side.
    He looked down and scowled. “What are you trying to do to me here? This is fake money. It’s a joke, right?” Very coherent. A flight into lucidity. Then, crash. “I know what you’re up to, Helen. You’ve switched money on me. You’ve got my real money hidden somewhere, right? Piling up so you can run off on me.” Spittle gathered at the corners of his mouth. Thirty years too late, he was telling my mother off. He shouted in my face, “You were born a bitch, you’ll die a bitch. May your soul be condemned to eternal damnation.” Without warning, he reared back and shoved me so hard I careened sideways into the beveled edge of a china cabinet, which carved a short, deep slice below my eyebrow. Blood gushed. I snatched the crocheted doily off his chair back and pressed hard, but my father saw and recognized the red. His face collapsed. He bawled like an infant, gulping air to fuel his sobs.
    “It’s all right, Daddy, it’s all right,” I kept repeating, trying to stanch the blood with one hand and reach out with the other. “Come on, Daddy, I’m fine. See?” I cupped his chin and tilted his head so he could see my forced smile. “It was an accident. I know you love me. You’d never hurt me on purpose.” But the only thing that comforted him was the sucking candy with a honey center Sylvie slipped into his mouth.
    When he’d quieted down, she lowered him into