Read The End of the Book for Free Online

and options and had no choice but to agree to my offer to stay at Dhara’s and my apartment for a couple weeks or a couple months or for however long it took us to make a permanent plan.
    I left the Prius with the attendant and took the elevator up to thirty-seven. When I arrived at our apartment, Dhara was already getting ready for dinner. She stood at the bedroom mirror in a creamy silk slip, blow-drying her hair.
    â€œHappy anniversary,” I said. “You’re looking awfully nice.”
    â€œI’m in my underwear.”
    â€œSo you are—have I told you how much I missed you?”
    I went to embrace her, but she stuck out her hair dryer like Barbarella’s space gun. “I missed you, too, but maybe later. You look like you hopped off a garbage truck.”
    I had dust streaks on my waffle shirt, a week’s growth of beard, and still smelled of golden retriever. “Fair enough.” I gave her a quick kiss and ducked into the shower.
    By the time I’d washed away the grime of moving my father’s life into boxes and out the door of the only house he’d ever own, Dhara had already shimmied into the black Diane von Furstenberg dress I had bought her for Christmas. Or, rather, the four-hundred-dollar dress she saw in a boutique window on our way to lunch in Wicker Park and that I bought, wrapped, and presented to her with her family as witnesses. I knew that at the end of the month her checking account would pay the credit-card bill, but Dhara had always wanted me to give the appearance of breadwinner. So I picked up the tab with my card, though it was all for show—she made the higher salary, had worked steadily since seventh grade, had a business degree, and had invested well, even protecting most of her assets through the current crisis, unlike me, with my debts and my personal albatross otherwise known as Professor Roland Clary.
    â€œHow did it go?” Dhara asked. “What did you decide to do with him?”
    I continued to buy time. “I’m still making calls. But at least I got him to move most of his junk into storage.”
    â€œWho have you called?” Dhara wrapped the hair-dryer cord around the handle and put it away.
    â€œNursing homes. Those kinds of places. But they’re criminally expensive.”
    â€œAre your brothers pitching in?”
    â€œNot much.” I’d phoned them the other day. Michael offered a hundred bucks a month. Eric claimed he couldn’t afford half that, even if he wanted to. Both agreed that whatever they contributed, our father didn’t deserve it.
    â€œIt’s not fair how they stick you with everything,” Dhara said with irritation.
    I wasn’t quick to defend my brothers. They lived in New York and Boston, so I saw them once a year at most, and we rarely made more than a nominal effort. Our father was our only link, one we too often forgot. But I couldn’t forget him at the moment, not when he was moving into this very apartment a couple days, a week, too soon from now.
    â€œWhy is this your responsibility? You’re the youngest. You’re supposed to get a free pass.” Dhara swept her hair into a ponytail, then pinned it up in a bun.
    â€œIt’s the same old story. They live far away and have too many kids.” Michael had three and Eric four. They both married only children and got to breeding in their twenties, to compensate for lonely childhoods. Their kids slept two to a room; space was so tight at Eric’s apartment that he turned a closet into a bedroom for his youngest boy, who slept on a tiny mattress and decorated the walls with decals of spaceships and planets. My brothers were priced out of the East Coast, on a public defender’s and assistant principal’s salary, and neither had any room at the inn. So it was all on me, and Dhara knew this, but that didn’t stop her from asking Why?
    â€œSo I heard there might be a vacancy at corporate