“Yeah, but a girl who likes you will like you--”
“No matter what,” Mike said, “I know, I know. But when you stink like old grease, it’s hard to get them to come near you long enough to find out.”
“No, I’m proud of you either way,” his dad said. “But I really am proud of you with this real estate thing. I didn’t even know you were into that sort of thing.”
Mike shrugged.
“If I hadn’t got fired and needed a job and couldn’t find one, I probably never would have thought about it.”
“All things happen for a reason.”
Mike wondered what the reason was behind his mother’s cancer, because he sure as hell didn’t see an upside coming from it.
They arrived at the hospital and went inside. On the walk to the elevator, Mike asked his dad, “Is there anything I need to prepare for before I go in there?”
“She doesn’t look good,” his dad replied. “She’s lost a lot of weight and she looks tired all the time. I’m talking like she’s been up for a week straight kind of tired. But she’s your mother even if she doesn’t look like her anymore.”
“Okay,” Mike said.
They rode the elevator up to his mother’s floor, then turned and walked down a long, sterile corridor decorated with anonymous paintings and an unremarkable carpet. Filtered air blew from the vents as they passed them. Down the hall sat a woman in a wheelchair, staring out a window at the Arizona sun.
Well, she doesn’t look that bad, really, Mike thought, but then his father said, “Over here,” and detoured left toward a closed door. Mike followed and stopped behind his father. “Ready?” his dad asked.
Mike nodded, but thought, Not even almost.
He watched the tired expression on his dad’s face brighten and clear as if a switch had been thrown, then he went into the room full of cheer and hope, saying, “Guess who I found wandering lost down the highway. I thought I’d bring him over, clean him up and give him a meal before sending him on his way with a twenty and a new pair of shoes.”
Mike came in, trying to put on the same brave face, but feeling his failure as soon as he laid eyes on his mother, who didn’t just look sick or tired, like his father had said, but looked as if she had been wasting away exponentially, and literally could slip away at any moment.
Jesus, Mom was what he wanted to say, but he stopped himself and instead said, “Hey, Mom. How are you feeling?”
That was stupid, he thought; how does she look like she’s feeling?
“Not too bad right now,” she said.
“Good,” he said. “I’m glad. Can I get you anything?”
She shook her head and Mike came over to stand next to her and took her hand.
“You should have told me sooner, you know.”
She moved her head slightly side to side and said, “There wasn’t anything you could have done.”
“Except be here for you.”
“I know you’ve got your own stuff going on, too,” she said, “I didn’t want you to put your whole life on hold. For a while we thought I might beat it. It wouldn’t have been fair to you.”
“Let me decide what’s fair to me and what’s not. You’re my mother, I should have been here.”
She closed her eyes in a sort of acquiescent nod and tried to smile.
He squeezed her hand and she gave a grimace and he released it quickly and said, “Sorry about that.”
“It’s okay,” she said.
He let go of her hand and sat down in the chair next to her bed. His dad sat in another chair against the wall at the foot of the bed.
They sat quietly for an hour while his mother dozed off. A nurse came in at one point and took her vitals, then left. After she had settled into a deep, peaceful sleep, Mike’s dad asked, “You wanna come downstairs and get something to eat? Or we can go back to the house and have a proper meal.”
“You sure about that?”
“I’m a better cook than I used to be.”
“No,” Mike said, “I mean about leaving her here.”
“She’ll be fine,” his dad said. “It’s only about a fifteen minute drive anyway. We’ll be back long before she wakes up.”
“Okay. I wouldn’t mind a shower.”
They drove to his parents’ house, a place he’d never been, having never visited them since the move, and was shown to the guest room. He tossed his suitcase on the bed, a tall, firm queen size with a desert themed blanket, then took out a change of clothes. He dug around in the suitcase pocket, reaching deep, then unzipping it all the way and looking inside, but it appeared he forgot to grab his phone charger before walking out the door.
He wondered if his parents had a spare, then he remembered his father still used an old flip phone, so no, they probably didn’t.
Well, he didn’t plan to be on it much while he was here, anyway, so he turned it off and left it on the dresser. He would send the guys a text later and see how things were coming on the house and whether Andrew or Gary were back yet. For now he had more important things to concentrate on.
He took his change of clothes into the bathroom and got into the shower where he washed off the last several hours of travel and kept thinking how wonderful it would feel to fall asleep. But he couldn’t yet; he wanted to get back to the hospital as soon as he could. From the first glimpse of his mother, it was obvious he’d better spend as much time with her as he could while there was still time to spend.
The hot shower did nothing to wake him up, though, but he did come out of it feeling better. He dried off, dressed, then went out to the kitchen where his father had made hamburgers for an early dinner. The patties were handmade, while the fries he served were definitely from a bag in the freezer, but Mike ate two helpings of everything in under fifteen minutes while complimenting the house, then said, “Should we be getting back soon?”
“We’ll head out in a second,” his dad said. “Just let me put this stuff in the dishwasher and get it started, then we’ll go. We won’t be there long, though; visiting hours will be over in a few hours.”
They were climbing into the car five minutes later. The drive to the hospital was quiet as Mike watched Arizona fly past out the window. Then it was back to the hospital and up the elevator. He noticed the woman staring out the window in her wheelchair was still sitting in the same place, then they turned into his mother’s room.
His dad had been right, she was still sleeping when they walked in. She roused ten minutes later, though, and smiled when she saw her son was still there.
“I was afraid I might have dreamed you earlier,” she said.
“I’m right here,” he said.
They sat there together until visiting hours were over, talking about old times, embarrassing things Mike had done as a kid. There was the time when Mike had been in the seventh grade and had spent the night hanging out with his friend Bobby, sneaking their first beers from Bobby’s mother. It hadn’t taken much for Mike to get his first buzz and before they knew it the evening had gotten away from them and Mike had to get home.
Bobby came with him and as soon as they walked in Mike’s mother asked, “Why do you smell like beer?”
Mike had frozen up, in no way at all prepared to tell her the truth, but he had no lie ready; he hadn’t realized he reeked of the stuff. Thank God for quick-thinking Bobby who stepped in and explained it.
“We were over at my brother’s house and he spilled some on Mike’s shirt.”
“Oh,” Mike’s mother said. “Well, go change, you smell.”
Hearing this story, Mike’s mother became suddenly alert and she looked at her son and said, “You rotten brat! I didn’t know you were lying about that!”
“I never told you about that later?” Mike said.
“No, you never told me that.”
“Really? I could have swore we talked about it years ago. Oh. Well, yeah, I didn’t get beer spilled on me, I was drinking it. If it helps at all, I got so scared when I came home that n
ight, I didn’t touch the stuff again until I graduated high school. I had it in my head that if I took even one drink, you’d smell it on me and I’d get busted. So it kind of worked out for the best.”
“Except my twelve-year-old son was stealing beer. I’ve failed as a mother.”
“You didn’t fail as a mother, I was twelve. I did lots of things you didn’t know about. Some of which I’m now realizing you still don’t know about, so we’ll talk about something else.”
“We could talk about the can opening and the biscuits,” Mike’s dad offered.
“See,” Mike said, “this is how I know God hates me.”
“God, I forgot about the biscuits,” his mother said.
“Keep on forgetting about them,” Mike said.
“Too late,” his dad said.
“Alright, I’m walking home. Back to Missouri,” Mike said.
“So you tried to open a tube of biscuits with the can opener,” his dad said. “So what, you were seventeen.”
“Exactly,” Mike said. “Seventeen and I didn’t know how to open biscuits?”
“You were a very sheltered boy,” his mother added.
“I was boozing at twelve,” Mike said. “I wasn’t that sheltered.”
They all laughed, and it did Mike good to see his mother looking almost happy, despite her wasted appearance and the number of tubes going into her body.
By the time Mike and his dad left for the night, his mother had slipped into another sleep, this time with a slight smile on her face.
They went back to the house and Mike finally got to get into that bed he’d been thinking of all day. He didn’t even think about asking the guys how the house was coming along.
When Mike woke up the next day, his first thought was what a good time he’d had with his parents the night before, and he let that feeling give him a sense of hope that, as bad as things looked right now, everyone might come through okay.
His mother was receiving excellent care and treatment, his father said. If there was even the smallest chance she would survive this, they would find it.
He climbed out of bed, put on a new set of clothes from the suitcase, then dug out his toothbrush and went into the bathroom to piss and brush his teeth. Then he came out to the kitchen and found his dad sitting quietly at the table. A cup of coffee sat in front of him but it looked untouched. His dad’s cell phone lay closed on the table next to the coffee mug. Dad had his face in his hands and Mike thought at first he was still trying to wake himself up. Then he noticed the slight movement in his dad’s shoulders.
“What’s up?” he asked, trying to get his dad’s attention. He poured himself a cup of coffee, added powdered cream and sugar, then sat down across the table. “You awake?” he asked when his father hadn’t answered yet. Then, “Dad?”
His father looked up finally and Mike saw how red and swollen his old man’s eyes were and he suddenly didn’t want to know what was wrong.
“She held on just long enough,” his dad said. “She went happy at least. I got the call about an hour ago.”
“Shit, dad, no, that’s not right,” Mike said, feeling the sudden overwhelming rush of emotion he hadn’t realized was buried there. Surely this was a feeling most people didn’t realize they carried within them, he thought. Because he couldn’t imagine being able to function on a daily basis knowing this potential for heartbreak was hidden somewhere deep inside.
“We just saw her last night,” he said, feeling the tears welling, then spilling over. “She was laughing and smiling, it can’t be over that quick.”
“It can,” his dad said. “I think she really was just waiting for you to show up, Mikey. She went happy.”
Mike sat by and listened as his father made funeral arrangements. He thought at first they might send her back to Missouri and have her buried there, but his dad told him Arizona was home now and this was where they’d planned to spend the rest of their lives. His parents had planned for this months ago, knowing it was coming sooner rather than later, and everything had already been set in place, down to what she would wear and which coffin to bury her in.
Mike felt as if he were passing his day in a fugue state, feeling helpless as his father went through the motions of saying goodbye to his wife with all the seeming emotionless of a cardboard cutout of his father. He knew the old man was just doing what he’d already prepared for, and that when the time was right, when all of the business of burying Mike’s mother was out of the way, his father would grieve then. But for now, he had a job to do.
Mike envied his father’s approach and wondered how one developed that particular no-nonsense, down-to-business trait because he knew he sure as hell didn’t have it. Everything came to him through a haze of tears and frustration replaced occasionally by a numb sense of time passing.
His father talked and moved and made things happen and before Mike knew it, it was the next day and he was dressing for the viewing and riding in his father’s car to the funeral home where he met people he’d never seen before, would never have seen otherwise, his mother’s friends in Arizona, evidence of a life Mike hadn’t been a part of. He shook hands and accepted hugs of condolence from strangers and all the while Mike could only think, But she was smiling and laughing.
As the evening wore on, Mike withdrew and found himself sitting to the side, not talking to anyone, just watching his mother at the front of the room, like some demented centerpiece at a dinner party. People milled about, made small talk, told old stories and generally kept themselves busy doing anything but acknowledging the corpse in the room. They made their way up front first, said their goodbyes, but then they turned away, found someone in the crowd to talk to, and spent the rest of the night pretending like this was just any other after-dinner party.
He wanted to yell at them all to get out, to go away and leave them alone, but instead he just sat there and tried to be invisible.
His father checked on him several times and Mike always gave the same reply.
“I’m fine. Thanks. I just want to sit here.”
After more hours than Mike thought were necessary for such a thing, the people began to drift away and out the door. Mike and his father were the last two to leave.
He looked around some time later and wondered if he’d lost a day, or just hadn’t remembered falling asleep, because he was dressed in a pair of jeans and one of his father’s shirts and the funeral was underway. He sat next to his father who had tears streaming down his face while some man Mike didn’t know, and whom Mike was pretty sure hadn’t know his mother, talked about what a caring and loving wife and mother she was, like he knew what he was talking about.
He felt an anger inside him at the audacity of this person to pretend he’d understood a thing about the woman lying in the casket before them.
One of his parents’ neighbors, a woman his dad told him had been close friends with Mike’s mother, read a few Bible verses, then sat down and was followed by a man his father claimed was one of her doctors who wanted to say a few words about her bravery, and then his dad was talking, but Mike wondered how that was possible when he hadn’t even seen the man stand up. He gave the eulogy of a grieving husband and Mike was glad he hadn’t been asked to speak because he was having enough trouble just piecing together the events of the last several hours.
When it was over, Mike rode in the family car with his father, just the two of them, to the cemetery where his mother was placed over the hole, to be lowered in after everyone left. There was prayer and more tears from almost everyone in attendance and then they were back at his parents’ house having sandwiches and crackers while most of the attendees repeated the condolences and recollections of the night before, or the night before the night before, Mike couldn’t remember which.
By the time everyone finally cleared out, Mike hauled himself up to the guest room and climbed under the sheet, buried his head in the pillow and let himself fall asleep to the hum of the central air unit and the otherwise silent house
. He woke up once some time later to use the bathroom and get a drink of water, and thought he heard his father in the bedroom, crying, either in his sleep or still lying awake.
Which didn’t matter. He turned out the light and left his father to do what he needed to do.
In the morning, he made arrangements to leave the next day, then spent the rest of the day keeping his father company. He wasn’t necessarily in a hurry to leave, but he didn’t know what good he would be sticking around. There were obviously plenty of people here his father could lean on if needed, and like it or not, Mike had a life to get back to. He was of no more use here.
Chapter Eleven
On the morning of his last day in Phoenix, Mike had several hours to kill--his flight didn’t leave until one--so he grabbed his phone for the first time in several days and sat on the couch, scrolling through the pictures he had taken of the Irving house. He hadn’t taken any “during” pictures, which he regretted and would change on the next project, but at least he’d taken the “before” pictures, which would go on a website when they had one.
He thought about how things looked the last time he’d been there and he wondered how much more they had done while he’d been gone. He thought about calling and checking in, but they hadn’t bothered to call with updates, so he’d leave it alone. He hadn’t even bothered to let them know when his mother died, so there were no condolence texts to go through, either. He had decided when it happened to wait until he got back to tell them how things went here. With Brian’s parents, then Michelle, and finally Paul, Mike decided they’d had their fill of funerals for the foreseeable future.
He was scrolling through the photos when his father walked past and asked what he was looking at. Mike told him, then handed the phone over so his dad could see what Mike had spent so much of his time doing.
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