Suburban Renewal (That Business Between Us Book 3)

by Pamela Morsi

  But what if you don't get a whole lifetime? I wanted to ask him. Could there ever be any compensation for that?

  I guess it could be said that some of Mike's pain was compensated by the fun he had with his friends. After a lifetime of being a closet homosexual in a small conservative town, Mike had suddenly been "outed," and now his friends from Tulsa showed up in Lumkee to visit. What the town might have thought of that, I don't know. But they were an interesting group. I'd never had any dealings with gay men in my life. And my inclination was just to treat them as if they were straight.

  That mostly worked. But some of them were so... girly...that it just felt more natural to talk to them like women. So, I just went with that.

  For the most part, I didn't know what they thought of me. I assumed I stood out as the straight guy. But apparently not. One evening, when the house was literally crowded with people, I was fixing drinks in the kitchen when Josh, a big, beefy cowboy type asked me if I was Mike's partner. I think my jaw must have dropped to the floor, I was too surprised by the question to answer.

  “Oh, for heaven's sake, they are not lovers," Daryl, a close friend of Mike's, told the guy. “He and Mike are brothers."

  I regained my composure enough that I could have pointed out that Mike was actually my brother-in-law. But somehow I felt no need to make the correction.

  Local people dropped by from time to time as well. The pastor, some of his mom's friends, occasionally somebody Mike knew from the Chamber of Commerce or the Optimists Club.

  Surprisingly the most faithful visitor was Cherry Dale. They had been friends for years. She would come and talk to him. Tell him the stupidest jokes and entertain him with all the gossip from the gym. It was on one of those days when I heard more things than I expected.

  I'd been in and out of the house doing the lawn. I'd come in the kitchen door and had sat down at the breakfast nook. I hadn't meant to eavesdrop, it just happened.

  Mike was saying, "So I want you to know that the money I've loaned you all gets wiped out in the will

  You'll own the gym free and clear and nobody will be able to touch it."

  "Mike, I don't know why you've always been so good to me," Cherry Dale answered.

  He laughed. "You're the only girl who ever volunteered to cure me."

  She laughed. "I'm so embarrassed. What an idiot you must have thought I was."

  "I didn't think you were an idiot," Mike said. "I thought you were a nice person who was attracted to me and didn't understand why I wasn't attracted back. You know, you're the only person in this town that knew I was gay. I never trusted anyone else."

  "I can't believe you trusted me," Cherry Dale said.

  "Well, I was right. You never told anyone."

  "I told Floyd," she said. "Probably the worst person in town. That's who I told."

  "I don't blame you for that," Mike said. "Floyd--well Floyd is like your personal brand of AIDS. He's a painful, sickening source of misery in your life. A plague that you never wanted but can't blame anyone else for."

  "And something I'll probably die of," she added.

  She said it as a joke. There were always lots of jokes. But there was nothing funny about Mike's battle with AIDS.

  He took more medication than we had room for on the kitchen counter. He counted them once.

  "One hundred and fourteen per month," Mike told me. "As a pharmacist, I expected to count a building full of pills in a lifetime. I just didn't think I'd be expected to swallow them."

  Some days, swallowing was the biggest challenge he could face.

  It was easy to tell why the Africans called AIDS Slim Disease. Mike's weight went down to 134 pounds. On his wide-shouldered, six-foot-two frame, he was like a walking skeleton.

  I was determined to feed him to try to keep up his strength. He never felt much like eating. Part of that was fatigue, he was just too tired to make the effort. The medicines altered his ability to taste anything. And his mouth was full of thrush, a yeast infection that actually made eating painful.

  I had never been all that spectacular in the kitchen. I wasn't even one of those guys who liked to throw steaks on the grill. But when you can see the flesh falling off another person's body, well, you just know that you've to do more than heat up a can of soup and grill a cheese sandwich in the toaster.

  I began trying to fix healthy, tasty meals. I talked to Edna and Corrie. I tried to recall some of the special things that Gram had sometimes cooked for me. I borrowed recipe books from the library.

  Mike cheered my efforts, though often he didn't eat much of them. I knew I was getting better when everybody seemed to be interested in my leftovers. Even Nate, on his compulsory one-afternoon-a-week visit, spent most of his time raiding the fridge.

  On a cold autumn day, I stood in the kitchen surrounded by cookbooks, trying to think of something special. It needed to be fairly soft, Mike could hardly chew. Meat loaf? No, that was too bland. It needed to be a little bit spicy, so he could taste it. Spaghetti? Too messy. He'd never be able to feed himself that and it was so demeaning when I fed him. Then, from far in the back of my brain, I remembered a warm spring day, a beautiful wife and a hotel on the move.

  Tamales? Tamales.

  My mouth watered as I thought of the taste that I remembered.

  I went through all the cookbooks looking for a recipe. I couldn't find one. Finally, I called Miss Pruitt at the library.

  “I’ll see what I can find," she told me, and, true to her nature, she called me back in twenty minutes.

  There were lots of different recipes. I went by and got copies of them all and sort of scrambled them together in a workable way. Several of the ingredients were not in my cabinets. Masa flour. Hojas. Anchos.

  I didn't try to fix them that day. But the idea was born. I called around to specialized groceries until I found one that had masa flour and anchos and that promised to get me some hojas. The next time I took Mike to the doctor we stopped by and got the stuff.

  "You're going to have to help me with this," I warned him. 'Tamales are not a one-person creation."

  He agreed to help. I made up the tamale filling by itself a day early. Then I helped Mike get comfortable in the breakfast nook. I mixed the masa flour and spices with the lard. I used warm beef broth to keep it all from gumming together in a big glob. It had to be cohesive enough to hold together without being so sticky it stayed on our hands.

  We'd just started experimenting with the masa paste, smearing it on the corn-shuck hojas. Corrie, Edna and Lauren showed up to help us. We all sat around the table together trying to do it. When all else failed, I read the directions aloud.

  "Tear down a wet hoja to the width of your hand. Place it in your palm making sure the smooth side is facing up and the tapered end is pointing in the same direction as your fingertip.”

  Everybody looked down at their hands, trying to get the corn shuck going in the right direction.

  The spoonful of masa paste had to cover the hoja completely with no holes, but still be spread thinly enough not to overwhelm the filling.

  The giggling and finger-pointing almost got out of hand before it was decided that Edna and Lauren were not up to the challenge and were promoted to being filling fillers.

  With more than our share of stupid mistakes, we finally got the tamales rolled up and into the pressure cooker.

  "No wonder we buy these in cans," Edna said. "By the time they're cooked it will be nearly midnight."

  "Then we'll eat them tomorrow," Mike said.

  And we did. For breakfast. He and I couldn't wait and I dished them up in lieu of scrambled eggs or oatmeal.

  "Sam, these are great," Mike told me. "I think this is the best thing I've ever eaten in my life."

  "Once I week," I vowed. "I don't care how time- consuming and complicated these are. I'm going to make a batch once a week."

  I kept my word on that.

  Thursday became tamale day. I devoted the entire waking hours of Thursday to the proj
ect. Mike began to look forward to it. People dropped in to help out. We made bigger and bigger batches to share.

  When Mike's friend Daryl tasted them, he was very complimentary.

  "I've got to take some of these back to the city," he told me. "They are simply awesome."

  Like the ladies from the San Antonio church, I wrapped them by the dozen in aluminum foil and put them in brown paper bags for delivery. I took them to the pastor, both mine and the Maynards'. I dropped some off at the firehouse and to the ladies at the library. I'd leave several bags at the Maynard home. They not only ate them, but Edna served them at her parties. I even took some by Cherry Dale's place, since I knew how much Nate loved them.

  When I stopped by with my ration for the drugstore, Doc thanked me and then motioned me to come to the back.

  “I need a favor from you," he said.

  Once we got into the harsh light of the back room, I could see his expression was very grave.

  "What's happened?" I asked him.

  "Nothing," he said. "Nothing has happened." He handed me a wide-mouthed, plastic-topped brown medicine bottle. The familiar Maynard Drugstore label was blank except for the name Mike.

  "What are these?"

  "Pills. Mike asked me for them," Doc said. He hesitated as if reluctant to say anything more.

  "The doctor didn't order anything new," I told him, confused.

  "They're schedule-two drugs, not one of his prescriptions."

  I looked for dosage directions on the label. It was blank.

  "Mike asked me for these," Doc repeated. "I've had them here in this bottle for almost a month and haven't been able to give them to him."

  "I don't understand."

  "He said that he wanted something..." Doc's lower lip began to tremble. He bit down on it, but that didn't help much. "Mike said that if it got too bad, he wanted something to be able to end it. That if it came to that, he wanted..."

  The trembling shuddered into a sob. Doc Maynard suddenly looked a thousand years old. I took the bottle out of his hand and embraced him.

  "Don't think about it again," I said. "I'll see that Mike gets these. That will be his choice, one way or another. Just let it go, Doc. We love him and we've done all we can. Now we do what we think is right and not ever look back on it again."

  17

  Corrie

  1992

  As Mike lingered painfully on through spring, his condition grew more and more grave. He developed endocarditis and the doctors told us he'd never be able to fight off the infection. Somehow he did. He suffered a bout with pneumocystis pneumonia, they warned us that it was highly unlikely that he would recover, but he did.

  All through those first months of the year, we lived in daily expectation of my brother's last breath. We were ready for it. He was ready for it. But his life dragged on and on in obvious suffering.

  I was sitting the final exam of Russian History: 1917 to the Present when my pager began to vibrate. I glanced down and saw Mike's home number. Sam knew I was in the middle of a test. He would only call if it was an emergency. I knew my brother was dead. My beloved brother, who had been my closest buddy, my hero. I'd wanted to be with him when he died. I'd wanted to be holding his hand when he stepped into the next world. But, as always, I'd been out doing my own thing, pursuing my own goals, seeking my own life. My brother was dead. I'd missed his last moment and there was nothing I could do about it.

  Guilty, grieving, I wanted to just sign the test paper and hand it in. But I got a grip on myself. Nobody would be helped by me wasting time and money failing a class. Mike had been proud of me. He was proud of my determination to take control of my own life, to go after what I wanted. I gathered my composure, took a deep breath and finished the exam.

  As soon as I handed it in, I hurried to the block of pay phones out in the commons. I was crying now, thinking of Mike, as I dialed his number.

  "He's gone," Sam said simply.

  "I'll be right there" was my only reply.

  The next two days remain a blur in my mind. Friends and family filled Mike's house. There seemed not to be any place to retreat to from the noise and the conversation. Arrangements for the funeral had already been made by Mike himself. He'd picked the order of service, the music, the friends to speak. He told the Reverend Shue that it was one of the few perks of knowing you're going to die young—getting a hip send-off.

  I don't know if hip would have been the correct word to describe the funeral. It certainly had its hip moments.

  The pallbearers were all in tuxes with matching cummerbunds. There was original music, some of it strange, almost free form. A black woman with dreadlocks played a medley of Broadway hits on the xylophone. An old-fashioned barbershop quartet sang a very unique rendition of "I'll Be a Sunbeam for Jesus."

  For the scripture reading, instead of the comfort of the Psalms or the hopefulness of the New Testament, Mike had chosen a passage from Job.

  In lieu of eulogies, there were poetry readings. Most of the poems were about Mike. Others were about AIDS. Some of the verses were brimming with good humor. Others welling with sadness.

  One young man got up to read and his words were so angry and in-your-face I was startled. It was like an indictment of all the friends and family who were not homosexuals. Protectively, I looked over at my parents. My mother was looking straight ahead, her expression was completely blank. She wasn't hearing anything. Dad had his head bent, discreetly crying into his handkerchief.

  Of course, the service moved on, through more music, more poems, more prayers. Still, it was the poem of the young man that stayed with me.

  At the cemetery, I shook hand after hand of people I'd known all my life and people I'd never seen before. They all were touched by Mike's life in some way.

  Under the bright green awning, I was claustrophobic. As if he sensed what I was feeling, Sam took my hand. I thought of how many times when I was little and afraid that Mike had done the very same thing.

  The gravesite was so covered in flowers that if I squinted, I could almost imagine that no casket was even there. But I didn't have the luxury of such a fantasy. Mike was gone. Mom and Dad would be depending upon me.

  When the last prayer was spoken and the final admonition to turn to dust was made, we headed for the long black limo. The funeral director drove us back to Mike's house, which was immediately filled with flowers.

  The family formed an impromptu reception line as neighbors, visitors and consolers of every sort made a path to the door.

  I shook hand after hand, often of people I didn't know.

  “Thank you, so much."

  “You are so kind."

  "I'm sure Mike would have appreciated you being here."

  My own responses began to sound automatic and insincere even to my own ears.

  In a long line of men I'd never met, I looked up and saw a familiar face. The sight was as welcome as a life preserver to a drowning victim.

  "Dr. Muldrew," I said, surprised.

  He ignored my offered hand and wrapped me in a big, generous hug. "Corrie, I'm so sorry for your loss," he said.

  "Thank you," I answered. Then at the risk of being rude to people waiting to talk to me, I asked to speak to him privately.

  We moved away from the front entry, through the house and out the sliding glass door to the little brick patio. The day was as gray and overcast as my mood, but the shoots of green in the lawn and on tire trees weren't quite the dull colorlessness that I felt.

  We sat down across from each other at the picnic table.

  "When I said I wanted to run into you on another occasion, this wasn't it," I told him.

  He nodded and gave me a little smile.

  "I've been here several times to see Mike," he told me. "I've met your husband. He's a nice guy. I like him."

  "Me, too," I said.

  "How are you doing?" he asked.

  "I don't know," I admitted. "I feel mostly numb. It's strange how you know this is going to happen,
you expect it to happen, you're waiting for it to happen, and when it does, it just feels like a terrible surprise."

  "I want to reassure you," he said. "That although I'm sure you'll quite naturally feel tremendous sadness and grief for a while, don't worry that you'll fall back into that dark place you were in before. We're just beginning to understand the physiological components of psychological distress. But statistically, you're not a lot more vulnerable than anyone else."

  "Oh," I said, a little bit startled. "I hadn't even thought about the possibility of getting depressed again."

  "That's good," he told me. "It's very positive to just keep moving forward. But if you begin to feel like you're relapsing, give me a call. We can get you back into treatment, back on the medication very quickly."

  "Okay, sure."

  "That wasn't what you wanted to ask me?"

  "No, it wasn't," I told him. "I really wanted to find out about the young man who read that poem, the one about our 'straight' jacket."

  "Ah," Dr. Muldrew said, nodding. "Cliff." He hesitated as if collecting his thoughts. "Cliff is an angry guy," he said finally. "I'm sorry if what he said hurt you."

  "It did hurt," I admitted. "More than that, I really didn't understand it. Everybody who was here, everybody who supported Mike during his illness and showed up at his funeral...we all loved Mike...gay or straight, we all loved him."

  Dr. Muldrew agreed. "But sometimes love itself can be a burden. It can hold us back."

  I glanced at him skeptically. "I'm not sure I believe that," I told him.

  "Did you ever wonder why Mike didn't have a partner?" he asked. "Why he didn't have one permanent man in his life?"

  "I guess I never thought about it," I said. "He never mentioned anyone. Whenever I'd asked him about his love life, even before I knew he was gay, he always said that there was nobody special."

  "Because there wasn't," Dr. Muldrew said. "Mike could never commit to anyone because he felt as if it was unfair to do so while he was in the closet. He was in the closet because he loved you and your parents. And he thought that admitting that he was gay would be a terrible disappointment to his family. So, he played it straight even if he wasn't. And he cheated himself out of the kind of intimate relationship that every human being deserves to enjoy."