The Big Finish
In The Big Finish by Brooke Fossey (Berkley), we meet Duffy Sinclair, a wisecracking, curmudgeonly 88-year-old living at Centennial Assisted Living, and his best friend and roommate, Carl Upton. Duffy’s full of mischief, but straight-laced Carl keeps his bent for troublemaking at bay — for the most part. When Carl’s granddaughter Josie tumbles through their bedroom window looking for a place to crash, Duffy is roped into hiding her from trouble.
Duffy and Josie are an unlikely pair, and as reluctant as Duffy is to help — and as difficult as it will be to keep her a secret from Centennial staff — he sees something in her of his younger self and the mistakes he himself has made. What follows is a warm-hearted tale of friendship set among a crazy cast of characters with lots of hilarious goings-on. Along the way, Duffy finds a new lease on life and a sense of meaning, despite himself.
As the publisher aptly describes it, The Big Finish is “an unflinching look at growing old, living large and loving big.”
Thanks to our partnership with Penguin Publishing Group, BookTrib is thrilled to provide this excerpt of the novel for our readers. You’ll soon see why this is a perfect pick for your next book club read!
—∞—
The morning started like always, with Nurse Nora rapping on my door, and me hollering at Carl to get his sorry ass out of bed so we didn’t miss breakfast. And then there was Nora again, with her coffee breath and her hum of gospel songs, helping me stand and pulling up my trousers and shushing me and winking at me and telling me to let sleeping dogs lie, and Why can’t you be nicer, Mr. Duffy, and me telling her if I were both nice and handsome, people wouldn’t want to be friends with me.
And then, sure as the sunrise, Nora smiled despite herself, because I have that effect on people, and said, “Who went and told you that you’re handsome?”
“A man simply knows these things,” I said, sliding my shoes on, using her shoulder as leverage. “Hey, Carl, did you hear Nora calling you a dog?”
“I heard her call you ugly.” Carl’s walker squeaked on the green linoleum floor as he made his way around his bed, smoothing the wrinkles out of the covers. “She’s right too. I’ve said before that I can’t tell the difference between you and Margaret Thatcher, but I think you take it as a compliment.”
“I do,” I said. “Old Maggie had bigger balls than me.”
“Who doesn’t?” Carl said, snickering at his own little joke.
Oh, how I loved our daily spar. There was no better way to sharpen the knives and start the day. “Those are fighting words, sir. If the lady of the house wasn’t here, I’d set you straight.”
“Boys,” Nora reprimanded, or rather, as I called her, my Nora — my beautiful honey-skinned, big-breasted, long-nailed, hard-nosed Nora. She was a songbird built like a spark plug, like any good nurse should be.
She said, “The scrambled eggs go cold fast, and I know it’s gonna take you a good ten minutes to get down that hall —”
“We move faster than that,” I said.
“Mm‑hmm. Not if you squeeze in your social hour on the way.” She ran a hand over my cowlick and floated over to Carl to dust off his shoulders, where he kept a never-ending collection of dandruff.
“You are simply the best, Nora,” he said, chin tucked so she didn’t miss a spot. “Do you want to take another one of my books? Or maybe some saltines? I saved them from yesterday.”
“What’ve I been telling you, Mr. Carl? If you keep on giving things away, you’re gonna go broke.” She knelt to Velcro his shoes, then wiped her hands on her pants and stood. “Listen now. I’ll be seeing you boys down there. I’m gonna help Mrs. Zimmerman bathe this morning.”
Carl let out a low catcalling whistle while I pretended to gag.
“You’re awful,” Nora said to me on her way out, which was true.
I turned to Carl and regarded him, with his spindly legs and his cardigan hanging on him like he was a little kid who had borrowed the sweater from his old man. “Why on earth are you whistling? You have something going with Mrs. Zimmerman I don’t know about?”
Carl fidgeted some, then fixed his watery eyes on me. They were set deep, no lashes; he always looked half-surprised.
“Well?” I said.
“Of course not, and you shouldn’t make fun of her like that.”
I waved off the suggestion and set about closing all the half-open dresser drawers. In the meantime, I could feel Carl’s gaze boring into my back. He was trying to force his sense of decorum onto me, because he knew my tasteless impersonation of Mrs. Zimmerman was brewing. He never did like when I pretended to have a bout of dementia, which required me to holler obscenities in my falsetto while following him around like he was my long-lost love.
After slamming the last drawer shut, I turned to find Carl’s face pinched up in worry. Like he thought I might eternally doom myself if I didn’t behave.
“Relax already,” I said. “I won’t clown around today.”
“Thank you.”
“But perhaps you shouldn’t have started it with your whistling.”
“You’re right,” he said. “No more jokes at her expense.”
“Fine.”
“Especially since she has no idea where she is most days,” he added, as if I hadn’t already obliged him.
“Right.”
“Have you heard her yelling out her daughter’s name?”
“Yep.”
“She sounds possessed. It’s such a shame.”
“It is.”
“She has no clue what’s about to happen to her either. Imagine what it would be like if she realized that she’s headed to —”
“Christ, Carl,” I said. “Would you shut the hell up?”
Silence followed, cold and injured.
For a second, I regretted being an ass, but the moment passed, like it does. And anyway, he’d made the mistake, not me. He knew better. He knew we never talked about what it meant to be put out to pasture. Not that or being put in a box.
Yes, Mrs. Zimmerman was on the tail end of her thirty-day notice, and, yes, she was fixing to be dumped at that infernal nursing home I refuse to name, and, yes, I felt bad for her. But I sure as hell didn’t want to make it part of my morning chin-wag.
I preferred sleeping tonight in lieu of staring at the ceiling, imagining the wasteland beyond this place. Remembering the little peek my uncle had given me while rotting away in his piss-smelling bed. It would take me days to recover from the thought, to shove it back into its dark corner, where it would bide its time, waiting for the next opportunity to eat its way out and keep me wide-eyed and wrestling with my sheets in the middle of the goddamn night.
So, no, we would not discuss Mrs. Zimmerman’s fate. Living it would do.
Carl straightened up. Cleared his throat. “Shall we go eat?”
“As if you need to ask,” I said, relieved.
Together, we turned to the door and prepared to meet our constituents for breakfast. And this is not an overstatement. Carl and I, we were the benevolent rulers of Centennial, crowned because we were able-bodied for the most part, intellectually sound, and, as I point out to my Nora whenever I see her, movie-star handsome.
Never mind that Carl’s face was back-end ugly when he didn’t have his dentures in; he always remembered them, and that’s what was important. And truthfully, between the two of us, Carl preferred to be the brains in the background while I served as the bullhorn. Which is how come I wanted him to get his ass into gear. Our people needed to hear from us, lest they think us dead.
I motioned impatiently for him to go in front of me, on account of him having a tendency to throw his walker into my heels if I didn’t keep pace. He motioned back, equally annoyed, then made his way by.
In between his walker squeaking on the linoleum and me saying, “Any day now,” there came a rapping on the outside of our bedroom window — an inquiring tap, tap, tap. Jorge, probably. The lawn care man. He and I had a long-standing relationship through that window — pounded hellos in either direction, exchanged waves between my newspaper and his weed whacker, and occasionally if I was bored, a handwritten Gracias, which I taped up for him to read. As for right now, I was closer to the door than not, so we’d have to catch up some other time.
But that knocking came again, and this time it was not Jorge-like at all. It was harder, sharper. It left the air quivering and stopped me in my slow tracks. I tugged on Carl’s shirttail and pointed to where the mini-blinds were drawn.
As Carl fumbled his walker back around, the window’s sash squealed against the sill. Metal on metal. Carl cringed and cupped his hearing aids. I started toward the noise but froze when somebody’s shadow overtook the whisker-thin slices of sun wrapping our bedroom walls.
Carl slowly dropped his hands from his ears and looked at me, mouthing, Who’s that? I shook my head and put my pointer finger to my lips. We waited, listening. Everything went dead quiet, except for a sparrow calling through the open window.
And then, all at once, the dusty aluminum blinds went off like live wires. They clanked and rocked and flapped, and from under this ruckus came a foot — one bare pink-toenailed foot with a sole black as tar. Another foot entered to match, followed by legs with turnip-looking knees. And then more: smooth thighs, cutoff jeans, a cocktail apron, a bare belly, a cropped shirt, a neck, and a mess of straight black hair. So came a girl, no more than twenty years old, slithering from the opening as if the window had birthed her.
Once through, she landed like a sack of taters, though everything else she brought in scattered like marbles. She must’ve been punch-drunk from the fall too, because without even looking up, she got on all fours to chase down her bits and bobs and shove them back into her apron pockets. She stopped only when she reached for a half-eaten candy bar lying near the toe of my shoe. Her gaze crept up my leg and eventually landed on my face. I stared back, mainly at the shiner that had swollen one of her eyes shut.
“Shit,” she croaked.
“The hell?” I said, having found my voice.
“I’ll get Nora,” Carl stammered.
She struggled to her feet. “Nonononono. Don’t do that.”
It sounded like something between a plea and an order, and it confused Carl enough that he paused.
“Go,” I said to him, exasperated. “We’re getting robbed.”
He started moving again.
“Whoa, whoa. Hold up,” she said. “I’m not robbing you. This is just a little misunderstanding. I thought the room was empty.”
“Don’t you move,” I warned her.
“Chill.” She had her hands up, her good eye on me, her chin cocked like I was the crazy one. “I’m not trying to jack anything from you guys. Promise. I’m just looking for somebody —”
“Of course you are.”
“— named Carl.”
I paused. Cupped an ear, even though I’d heard her just fine.
“Say again?”
Carl, who’d made it to the doorway, stopped with his back to us and pivoted only his head.
“Carl Thomas Upton,” she said.
Without looking away from her, I crept my hand toward the emergency call button hanging around my neck. I’d forgotten about it because I spent so much time pretending I didn’t have one, though I’d make an exception for this. I was just about to press it too, when Carl shifted in my periphery, inching his walker back into the room and easing the door shut.
During the next heartbeat, I rewound the morning, trying to understand how exactly a young barmaid had landed here with Carl’s given name on her lips. For whatever morbid reason, it occurred to me that maybe Death didn’t come on a pale-ass horse, waving a scythe around. Maybe instead, he arrived like this, looking like her.
“He’s Carl Thomas Upton,” I blurted with a finger point, because ratting him out right then made a whole lot of sense.
The girl tensed. My hands turned to fists, ready for anything. We all spent some time looking at one another.
Finally, she said, “For real?”
Carl’s lips parted, and he stuttered out something. Might’ve been a yes, though if so, it was loaded with enough doubt you’d think he was lying.
“No way,” she said, just above a whisper and mostly to herself, before stepping forward, arms open to him. “I’m Josie.”
He recoiled. “Who?”
She stopped midstride, dropped her hands, and made a funny punched‑in‑the-gut sort of noise. “It’s me … Josie.”
“Josie?” Carl turned his walker around, folded down the built‑in seat, and sat to look at her.
I waited for something more from either one of them. Nothing came.
“Well?” I blustered. “The hell?”
“I’m his granddaughter,” she said, like I should’ve already known this.
“Nice try.” I smiled shrewdly. “But Carl and Jenny never had any kids. Did you, Carl? Tell her.”
His eyes flickered before glazing back over. To the uninformed, he looked a tad vacant. I knew he was thinking through things, albeit a little slower than me.
From The Big Finish, from Berkley, used by permission. Visit the Penguin Random House website for more on the book and how to purchase.
