They May Not Mean To, but They Do: A Novel Read Online Free PDF

Freddie had once said to her, and she had said, “Yes. That is the goal, at least.”
    As soon as she got to New York she would call her parents’ various doctors. She would organize all their medications in little plastic boxes labeled with the days of the week. She would order a lamp with a high-wattage bulb for reading, a telephone with big buttons and an extra-loud ring. She would put all their bank accounts online and arrange for deposits and payments to be made automatically. She would set up Spotify and program it to endlessly play Frank Sinatra.
    She said these things to herself to make herself feel better, but she knew what would really happen. Neither her father nor her mother would be able to decide which doctor she should speak to or find their phone numbers. The medications she organized would be the ones they no longer took. There would be no place to plug in the new lamps with their bright lightbulbs, every outlet in the apartment, and there weren’t many, sporting frayed extension cords already overloaded. They would change the appointments she did manage to arrange for them without telling her. Every television in the apartment, and there were too many, would not work. The radio would play only static, loudly. And then there was the computer.
    “Why did you even talk to someone who called out of the blue and said he was from Microsoft?” she would ask her mother.
    “Because he said he was from Microsoft.”
    “Mom, Microsoft doesn’t call people like that to say your computer has a virus. They never call anyone. They don’t even answer calls. It doesn’t work like that.”
    “They said it was urgent.”
    It wasn’t Joy’s fault that an entirely new paradigm of communication and commerce had developed in her later years. Molly would say, “Okay, Mom. No harm done. As long as you didn’t give them any information.”
    “Of course not! Just my name. I think just my name. Oh god, what if I gave them something else? Like my credit card number?”
    “Did you?”
    “I don’t know. How can I remember everything like that? He asked me so many questions.”
    And her mother, her inspiring, unflappable, competent, hardworking, distinguished mother, would berate herself, berate the modern world, then sigh helplessly. “I don’t know why Microsoft called in the first place,” she would say. “I really don’t.”
    Molly sat in the taxi from the airport anticipating Central Park, heavy and loamy and full of autumn. As Manhattan came into view, she experienced what she always felt on approaching the city from JFK: a mixture of excitement and calm, a sense of totality; of perfect, living, vibrant, chaotic peace. She opened the cab’s bleary window and breathed in the lights and the skyscrapers, the sky lit from below, the river.
    The taxi driver popped the trunk and pulled her bag out for her. Before she could grab it, the doorman was already rolling it beneath the canopy to the door. When Molly was growing up here, the doormen were such a normal, essential part of her life. She had never really gotten used to living without doormen. They always knew where your parents were, when they’d be home, if the dog had been walked, if your brother had friends with him—an early alert system for family life. If you lost your keys, they let you into the apartment. They handed you packages. They told you the mailman had come when you were waiting for college acceptances and refusals. When she was little she had loved their uniforms with their names stitched on the chest, their smart hats like policemen’s hats, but unlike a policeman, they picked you up and swung you through the air and lent you a quarter if you needed it for candy. She’d known some of them, the older ones, for what seemed like her whole life.
    “Hi! Hi! It’s so good to be here!” she said, then realized she did not actually know this particular doorman and had greeted him too warmly. He did look familiar, perhaps because of a strong