by Billy Coffey
And on she went. And on and on. That lady screamed at me like Hitler behind a podium. And as was usually the case with people who yelled hysterically at me, I started to tune her out. Started thinking about who this woman was and what she was trying to say exactly and when she would stop. About where our society was headed and why people had to be so doggone prideful and mean.
“…and don’t you ever think otherwise, do you understand me?” she said.
I had neither the desire nor the inclination to tell her that I did not understand because I hadn’t heard a word she said. So I just stood there and watched her glare, waiting for another puny retort. So, too, did the crowd, all of whom were no doubt mentally hedging bets on what would happen next.
But by then I was convinced she would stand there and lecture me until the Rapture if she had to. I was tired. Tired of holding that door open and tired of being in the city. I just wanted to go back over the mountains to Mattingly where the normal folk lived.
I took a deep breath and said as humbly as I could, “Ma’am, I am truly sorry for offending you. I didn’t mean it. You’re right. You can handle this quite well on your own.”
She started to say something else, but the door closed and cut her off. I looked to where the Old Man stood. No one was there.
There was disappointment on the faces of the men in the small crowd, either because they wanted to see me wait her out or because they wanted to see her slap me. The faces of the women were mixed. They knew all along there could really be no winner.
I glanced back inside. The woman was still high above me on her soapbox, mouthing words that were surely meant to undermine both my honor and gender. No one, though, seemed interested anymore. Satisfied that she had just won a monumental battle for women’s rights, she adjusted herself, turned around, and pushed the door open with her hip.
And then she tripped. It was not the sort of slow-motion tumble you’d expect, either. This was quick, almost instantaneous, as if irony had sprouted arms and decided to clothesline her. Coffee and pretzel and purse and unmentionables scattered in all directions. She hit the concrete with a loud thud.
There was silence all around.
The woman sat momentarily confused in a heap of freshly stained Gap T-shirts and a rather attractive nightgown. I barely managed to keep a straight face.
“You should help her up,” the Old Man said from beside me. “Jesus would help her up. It’d be a turn-the-other-cheek kind of thing.”
I shook my head no at first, then sighed and took a step toward her. Laser beams shot from her eyes and bore into my head.
“However,” the Old Man clarified, “you’re not Jesus.”
I agreed. And from the look of things none of the other folks still milling about were Jesus, either, because no one moved.
The woman jerked herself up and then shot back down. She gathered the merchandise that had spilled around her, shoving her purse into a shopping bag and her pretzel into the now-empty coffee cup. She rubbed her sweatshirt in a futile attempt to erase the coffee stain, which managed only to weave it more into the material. Then she darted away like an Olympic walker.
The crowd began to disperse, some heading to the parking lot and others into the mall. One man opened the door for his wife, who laughed as she walked through.
“Well,” the Old Man said, “I guess we’ve done all the damage we can do here. What say we head home?”
“Oh, so now you’re giving me advice. Where were you a little bit ago? You could’ve warned me she’d go nuts.”
He shrugged as we made our way to my truck. “My job isn’t to keep you out of trouble, Andy. It’s to point out things you’re going to need someday. Speaking of which, you’d better hang onto that hat. That was one of them. Besides, you did the right thing.”
“I really don’t think I’m gonna need that,” I said. “Did you see her? She was mad just because I was a guy.”
“Oh, I don’t think so,” he said. “Maybe. Then again, maybe she’s had some rough dealings with men before. Or maybe she’s just a college kid who wants to prove she can survive on her own. She might have done the same thing if there was a woman holding that door instead of you. You’re seldom privy to the stories behind the actions, Andy.”
“Seemed to me that she was just naturally mean.”
“Remember when Cain killed Abel and then God asked him where his brother was? Cain said, ‘I don’t know. Am I my brother’s keeper?’ That’s the first question the Bible ever records a human asking. I think there’s something to that.”
I unlocked the door and climbed in. The Old Man was already in the passenger seat.
“So are we?” I asked. “I mean, we’re all about the individual. We’re free to pretty much do whatever we want so long as we don’t break any laws. Our lives are our own. So how much responsibility do we have toward one another? A lot? None? As I recall, God never answered that question.”
“Sure He did.” He cleared his throat and raised a finger. “‘As I have loved you, so you must love one another.’”
“Oh come on,” I said. “I have to love that woman? Because if I do, you can forget it. And I am mostly sure that whatever feelings she has for me can definitely not be characterized as loving.”
“But you did love her,” he said. “You tried to help. The sort of love you’re supposed to have for others is love that’s a verb, not a noun. It’s a love that does something rather than is something. Remember that. That’ll come in handy, too. And there’s one more thing.”
“What’s that?” I asked him.
“Sometimes love isn’t just caring for others. Sometimes it’s allowing yourself to be cared for, too.”
19
My Brother’s Keeper
Knock knock,” Kim said from the doorway.
Elizabeth and I both looked up and smiled.
“Hey there, Kimmie. You still here at this hour?”
“Seven to seven, Big Guy. It’s the life of an underappreciated nurse. Just checking to make sure you’re feeling okay.”
“Oh,” I said, “I’m just enjoying the benefits of your fine staff.”
Kim looked toward Elizabeth and smiled. “Good,” she said.
“Anything we can do for you?” I asked her.
“You mean other than getting some sleep? Because you should try. I know you’ve pretty much been in and out for a few days, but your body still needs to heal itself. Best way to do that is with rest.”
“Yes’m,” I said. “But there’s healing on the outside, and there’s healing on the inside. Right now I’m concentrating on the latter.”
I cut a glance at Elizabeth, who didn’t even bother to cover her face and hide her smile.
“Well, I know better than to try and convince Andy Sommerville of anything he’s not interested in being convinced of,” Kim said. “Any pain or discomfort?” she asked.
“My face is itching a little,” I told her.
“Thought it might be. I talked to the doctor on call a few hours ago. He said if it got too bad I could change the bandages for you. Maybe we should plan on that in a little while?”
“Sounds perfect. How about you?” I asked. “Any pain or discomfort? You know, from the…” I made another finger telephone and held it to my ear.
Kim stole a look at her shoes and pursed her lips, signs I took as reminding herself that a good nurse never involves her patients in her own personal problems. But that was a minor technicality in my particular case. The truth was that if there were a gas station counter and not a hospital bed between us, Kim would be spilling her guts like any other customer. Because Andy Sommerville was the guy people talked to about themselves, if for no other reason than the fact that they knew he didn’t have anyone else to tell what he’d been told.
She measured her words, realizing that while talking with me was fine, talking to me was another thing altogether in those circumstances. We were not on opposite sides of the cash register on a sleepy morning in Mattingly
; we were in a hospital, and she was charged with my care. Kim wanted to talk but couldn’t, so she compromised by trying to say a lot with a little.
“Boys have always been after me,” she said. “I’d be a fool if I said I didn’t like that. But sometimes I think God made me to just be by myself, you know? Not everyone has to chase someone else’s idea of a fairy tale. I mean, you’ve never been married, right, Andy? And you’re just as happy as you can be.”
Elizabeth snickered into her fist but low enough for only me to hear it. I tried not looking at her. I did, anyway. The snicker had little to do with it.
“There’s a lot Owen can offer, I guess,” Kim said. “Least, that’s what Mom says. But I don’t want to be getting something and having to trade off a part of me in the process. Does that make sense?”
“It does,” I said.
That was all the validation Kim needed, because she stopped looking at her toes and her mouth relaxed into a smile. She nodded and said, “Alrighty then, I’ll let you get back to your healin’.”
“Purely professional, I swear,” I said, cutting another look at Elizabeth. The two of us chuckled as Kim left.
“That was nice of you,” Elizabeth said. “Listening to her like that. It’s quite a gift.”
“Guess you’re just rubbing off. Kimmie’s taken care of me. The least I can do is try and do a little of that for her.”
“That’s been a difficult lesson for you to learn, hasn’t it? Allowing yourself to be cared for?” She leaned forward to reveal what didn’t turn out to be a shocking secret. “I know you’re feeling more than an itchy face.”
“Lots of people here are worse off than I am,” I said. “I can handle it.” As if to reiterate that point, the sound of Mr. Alexander’s coughs came from the hallway. They settled into a long and pitiful moan.
“Can you?” she asked.
“I think a healthy sense of self-reliance is a good thing for a person to have.”
“For you though, right? Because you’re more than willing to offer help to someone else. Everything you’ve told me so far has told me that. You’ve just shown me that. You’re not closed off from the world, Andy. You’re just not a part of it.”
“All I wanted to do was be a friend to Kim, who is a nice lady.” I realized at that point that I still held the baseball cap in my hand. “And as for her,” I said, holding the hat up and then setting it down into the box, “I just wanted to hold the door for someone who needed it. Where’s the crime in that?”
“There isn’t any,” she said. “But I think you missed something there. Who knows, maybe she was just a mean lady. But maybe the Old Man was right. Maybe she was just struggling with something, whether it was something that was happening then or something that happened before. People’s stories make them do unloving things sometimes.”
“I was brought up to believe a man should stand on his own two feet,” I said.
“But you don’t. You don’t, Andy. You might not need friends and you might not need a wife, but you need the Old Man.”
“Needed,” I corrected.
Elizabeth mea culpa’d by showing me the palms of her hands, then lowered them to turn the ball cap upside down and fill the inside with Santa’s letter and Rudolph’s pine needles, Mother Thelma’s cross, and Willa’s card. The other objects she placed inside were Ms. Massachusetts’s fingernail and the golf tee, ones we’d yet to discuss. “Do you know what I’ve noticed in these stories you’ve told me?” she asked. “You like him. You really do. He’s the closest thing to a family or a friend that you have. You open up to him but not to anyone else. Probably because you don’t think there’s anything to lose. But when you’re done remembering and you’re back here, all that goes away. What did he do to you, Andy?”
I stared out of the wide windows along the far wall. The city unfolded beyond them, sprawling out like spiderwebs. Tiny pinpricks of light pocked the night sky in a celestial dance toward morning. And there, hung in the black like a beacon of hope and taunting, sat the Big Dipper and the
(second star from the handle, Andy. That's where God’s answered prayers come from)
memory of seeing that star wink just before my answer came.
“He wasn’t there,” I whispered.
Elizabeth was silent.
“I trusted him, and he let me down.”
“How can an angel let you down?” she asked.
“What?”
“You told me he was an angel. An answered prayer. Angels cannot let people down, Andy. They’re not people. So you have a choice to make. Either the Old Man really is an angel and his not being there was a part of some bigger plan, or he’s just a collection of neurons in your brain that didn’t fire when you thought they should.”
“You tell me how it is that this had to happen to me.” I pointed to my bandages and then held up my right hand to show her the pus oozing from beneath the tape and gauze. “You tell me what kind of bigger plan would involve this. And worse.”
“What ‘worse,’ Andy?”
“He killed Eric.”
“Who did?”
“The Old Man.”
Elizabeth leaned closer to me.
“Who’s Eric, Andy? Who is Eric and what happened to him?”
Tears welled in my eyes and my lips began to quiver. The memories came back, but not in the fractured and sporadic images you see in the movies. I remembered everything. Everything from the knife to the fire to the blood. Eric on the floor, reaching for me…
“I can’t, Elizabeth,” I said. “Please don’t make me. Please don’t.”
Elizabeth wrapped me in her arms. Her long ponytail spilled over me to form a shelter from the truth she was determined to pry from my heart.
“Hush now,” she told me.
“Please don’t make me,” I said again.
“Listen to me, Andy,” she said, pulling me closer into her. “You feel like you’re being buried. I know that. You feel like you’ve been abandoned by the person and the God you’ve clung to your entire life. But you haven’t. You have to believe that. You have to believe that no matter how you feel and no matter how much you think otherwise, you are exactly where you need to be. You are not being buried, Andy Sommerville. You are being planted.”
Her sleeve soaked the tears dripping from my eyes, and I collapsed into it under the weight of my own regrets. This was not how things were supposed to be. This was not how my life was supposed to unfold.
She let go and settled me back into my pillow so she could look into my eyes.
“There is something to what’s in that box, Andy. I know it doesn’t seem to be anything to you, but there is no randomness with God. Everything means something. It doesn’t matter if it’s as small as a pickle in a Christmas tree or as big as what put you in this hospital bed. I need you to believe that.”
“I need to believe that too,” I said.
“Good.”
Elizabeth leaned back into her chair and took a deep breath.
“Why did this have to happen to me?” I said. “Was it because of my prayer? Was the Old Man right when he said he was as much a curse as a blessing?”
“No, of course not. I think he was just trying to say that you’ll always carry a certain sadness. But it’s a holy sadness. A good sadness. I really think so. You just have to learn to see things a little differently.”
“Again,” I added. “I’ve already learned to see things differently once.”
“You have?”
I nodded and reached back into the hat and retrieved a sliver of fingernail, still glistening in a bright and gaudy red. “Don’t worry,” I said. “It’s fake, and the owner is safe. I guess she’s safe, anyway.”
“I’ll admit I’ve been wondering about that one,” Elizabeth said. “The Old Man told you to keep someone’s fingernail?”
“It’s fake,” I said, thinking that somehow made everything sensible. “Besides, that was the only thing left by the time it was all over with.”
> “By the time what was all over with?”
“Well, you know how I said folks get along fine in Mattingly? That’s true enough, but that doesn’t mean there isn’t a little something lurking underneath in some people. One of those people is Michael Potter.”
“Is he a friend of yours?” she asked.
“No, not really. Maybe. I don’t know. Just a customer. Big guy—six and a half feet tall, maybe three hundred pounds. A monster, but nice. To me, anyway. He stops by Saturday mornings in his beat-up Caddy for gas and a fluid check. Every Saturday, never fails. Always tips me five bucks for my trouble.”
“He does seem nice,” Elizabeth said. “Is the fingernail his?”
I said “No,” which I followed with another snort. “No way. That fingernail belongs to Ms. Massachusetts.”
20
The Fingernail
Michael pulled up to his customary gas pump that Saturday morning around seven. I watched him from the counter and finished my coffee and the newspaper. It would be another minute—maybe two—before he actually managed to hoist himself out of his car. Michael was never one to do much of anything quickly, what with that infernal gravity always fighting him.
“Got a customer out there,” the Old Man called from his booth. He hadn’t been there all morning—hadn’t been around much at all of late. The serious look in his eyes told me this was not a social call.
“Still got a bit before he gets himself situated,” I said. I traded the bad news on the front page for the good news on the sports page.
“Maybe better get on out there anyways.”
I did, though that action was preceded by a heavy sigh that was normally reserved for teenage boys who’d just been told by their fathers to go out and cut the grass. I had managed to put on my happy face by the time I reached the double doors though, and I said “Mornin’, Michael” like I was surprised by his visit.