“Love you, Mommy,” Maddy said, wishing more than anything that her mommy would open her eyes and say it back. And she wished her mommy could jump out of bed and be happy again and healthy. But mommy couldn’t, not even after three surgeries, not even when the best doctors in the country had been flown in to save her from the cancer.
There were some things money couldn’t buy.
3
John Burke
Izard County, Arkansas
Sitting in his kitchen on one of his mismatched chairs resting on cracked and faded greenish linoleum and sweating like a fuck-all pig, with only a crappy, old ceiling fan ticking overhead, John Burke tried again to add the numbers so that he could get them to come out the same. So far he’d fed the numbers into his ancient sixth-grade Texas Instruments calculator three times and somehow had come up with three different totals.
He was on the verge of chucking that ole’ Texas piece of shit at the wall, but he held back knowing if he did, he’d be fucked into summing up the math on a piece of paper; something he was none too good at.
“Lab work: forty-eight hunnert. Let’s see…bi-opsy, shit, seven thousand each, and there was, let’s see, six of those. The first hospital stay…fuck-all, twenty-one thousand…” The figures blurred as the tears started again. He took a swig of his beer, his third of that early morning. What did he care when he started to drink? What did he care if Mrs. Lafayette saw the can when she came to collect Jaimee? He didn’t care one stinking bit.
After a deep breath he went on, “One copper and teak casket: f-for-forty-one hunnert. Fuckin’ side-by-side plots…”
Jaimee walked into the room clucking her tongue like a mother hen. “Daidy, you ain’t supposed to be cussing none. Momma said so.” She had assumed all the motherly duties a six-year-old could attend to, which wasn’t much beyond picking up some and making her own cereal. She could also stick bologna and cheese on bread, only her daddy hadn’t gone to the store except to get beer and cough medicine. Sometime he went swig for swig, with a can in one hand and a bottle of nasty red syrup in the other, but still he would hack up strange looking hunks of who knew what.
John shuddered, wracked by another coughing spell. He was sure he was going to throw-up afterward due to the violence of the act, but he didn’t and when the fit passed he took a drink of beer with a shaking hand. “She ain’t here no more so I guess it don’t matter none.”
“We promised her,” Jaimee reminded him. “We both made blood oaths to take care of each other.”
That had been a year and half ago, and Jaimee who was having trouble even recalling what her mother looked like, remembered that oath like it was yesterday. So did John. It was why he was adding those hated numbers despite the cough that had sprung up and wouldn’t leave and the pain in his joints that felt as though his bones were rubbing together. There was something very wrong with him and he was afraid. The one doctor’s visit he'd had only made matters worse. Amy’s old Doc had poked and prodded and listened and whatnot, all with a grim set to his lips. It wasn’t good. No sir.
Amy Lynn Burke’s cancer had been a doozey, but she had been a fighter. She’d gone toe-to-toe with that fuck-all champ—eight rounds of chemo that left her bald and wasted like one them poor Jews in Germany. Then they took a lobe from her right lung and then a few months later, one from the left. There were also the lymph nodes the doctors popped out of her, like fuck-all grey, lumpy boogers. They tried radioactive pellets and when that failed they resorted to laser beams.
Amy Lynn was a fighter to the end and she could honestly say she had won a moral victory. Even when they lowered her into the dirt in that goddamned expensive teak casket that would never-ever see the light of day again, people were singing her praises. Look how brave she had fought. Look at the courage she displayed. She was a right paragon of motherhood and wifely virtue to the bitter end. She was a fuck-all saint, a woman to be adulated and emulated.
And look at John Burke, that turd of a husband she left behind.
Sure, Amy had died, but she didn’t lose her battle with cancer, John did. Her medical bills and hospital stays and pills and treatments had bankrupted them—and then she got sick again. They lost their home, their cars, their everything. John worked two jobs to pay for the fuck-all rinky-dink little place that was just a step up from a mobile home, and he wasn’t no white-collar turd who sat his ass at a desk all day. No, he was a mechanic by day and a stock boy by night. He worked like a man, just as he always had.
It hadn’t been enough and slowly their possessions had been taken from them and eventually, like a friggin’ third grader, he found himself riding a fuck-all ten-speed to work because there were always new bills. Jaimee went about in cast-offs and sometimes John went without eating for days on end, all so Amy could be “brave” in the face of cancer.
She was the martyr and he was the unshaven, bleary-eyed goon who went about all the livelong day with dirt under his nails and grease stains on his Goodwill rejects.
It was an honest to God relief when she finally died. That’s what he felt when he saw her monitor finally flat line. There were no tears or sorrow or grief. John never mourned, not that anyone could tell. He left the hospital by the front doors, got on his ten-speed and rode home. Once in the quiet of his living room he drank beer and watched The Young and the Restless with his feet propped up on the arm of the couch, and all he could feel was this great sense of relief, of liberation.
By the time Jaimee was dropped off by the sitter that day he had drunk all the beer in the house and was watching Oprah and not understanding the draw whatsoever. “Why do women like this shit?” he’d asked her.
“Daidy!” she had cried. She had an accent as thick as his and when she said ‘Daddy’ it almost rhymed with lady. “Momma’s gonna be real mad with you when I tell her you been cussing again.”
“About that,” he said. “I got some bad news. Momma died this morning.”
Jaimee was just like her momma and took the news like a trooper. Oh yes, everyone marveled at how brave this little four-year-old was. Look how she fought back the tears and look how pretty she was in her little sundress that John had dyed black. With her pale blonde hair and her pert nose she was the spitting image of Amy Lynn. Everyone just gushed and marveled at her. They remarked about her toughness and her spirit. They said: Look at her strong jaw as she places them flowers on her momma’s grave. And look at that low father of hers out drinking away his paychecks.
This wasn’t strictly true, however gossip was always better than fact. He had indeed begun drinking with the regularity of a Swiss watch, but he always made sure Jaimee was properly fed, that is when he remembered to stop by the grocery store. And he paid a local woman to sit for her and take her shopping for clothes. And he made sure she went to school and had friends.
He loved Jaimee just as much as he had loved her momma. Though no one could tell from his reaction to Amy Lynn’s death. He had loved his wife so much it had felt like torture. Her pain had been his pain every fuck-all step of the way.
Now he had to decide if he would allow Jaimee to be tortured just as he had been. His cough had started with a November cold and four months later it was only getting worse. It had been the same for his wife in the beginning and with each passing day he grew more certain that he had what she had. The symptoms were the same: a cough that wouldn’t leave, frequent sickness, pain in the shoulders and back.
The big difference was that he was afraid of going to the doctors, not in the sense that he was a chicken, but in the sense he would have to face up to the shitty truth: he had lung cancer.
“I won’t cuss no more,” John told his daughter. “Or I’ll try not to as long as I can get this fuc…I mean this ole calculator working.”
“Don’t use that one, Daidy. The seven sticks. I seen it. You should use momma’s coupon calculator. Remember that little one she always brung to the market?”
“Oh yeah,” John said, picturing his wife. Once upon a time, Amy Lynn could hold he
r shop list in one hand, her calculator in the other, balance a baby under one arm and fetch cantaloupes with the other, all the while guiding a left-veering cart with nothing but her breasts.
As Jaimee got her breakfast and fixed up her lunch, John went to fetch the calculator from Amy Lynn’s coupon drawer.
The drawer hadn’t been opened in three years. John didn’t want to think about the neat stacks of cut out slips that were ordered, first by date of expiration and then again by desirability of the offer. He didn't want to remember how much time Amy Lynn had put into making sure she got the very best deals for her family. Quick as he could, he grabbed the little calculator with its vinyl cover and shut the drawer again, as if afraid that some spirit of Amy’s would come wafting out of the drawer to berate him.
The great saint Amy Lynn would not approve of what he was planning.
He went back to the table and ten minutes and one more beer later he had his sums jotted in his childlike penmanship on a single piece of lined paper.
“What’s that, Daidy?” Jaimee asked, before picking up her bowl and slurping down the Captain Crunch flavored milk that sat at the bottom.
“Nuttin’,” he answered, suddenly embarrassed. He threw a forearm across the two columns. “Just some figgers. Budget stuff, money and the like.”
The column on the left was a list of his assets. There were two items jotted on that list: an eleven-year-old Toyota Corolla, the one thing he had splurged on since Amy’s death, and a savings account with a total of $107,254 in it. In a moment of pure ESP or precognizance or just plain maternal instinct, Amy Lynn, after a week with her strange new cough, had upped her life insurance to a quarter of a million dollars. The hundred grand was all he had left after paying the remainder of her hospital bills and her funeral expenses and that goddamned teak coffin.
Despite being church-mouse poor, he hadn't barely touched none of it.
The column on the right was a long list of bills he could expect to have to pay once he was diagnosed with the fuck-all cancer that was eating up his lungs and turning them black. When this was subtracted from the hundred grand, what was left was a depressingly large negative number.
“Fuck-all,” he whispered, feeling the need to cough. He didn’t, he was so tired of coughing. He just breathed through the nasty phlegm making a gurgling sound deep within his chest.
“Daidy, Mrs. La-fayette is here,” Jaimee said in an urgent tone. Her blue eyes went to the beer cans. She wanted them out of sight when Mrs. Lafayette came to take her on to school, but John didn’t bother to hide them. What was the use? He was already regarded as a good-for-nothing bum by the high-class rednecks of Izard County. What did he care what they thought?
He was dying and no amount of so-called “bravery” on his part would change anyone’s minds about what a fuck-all good-for-nothin' he was. And even if he could change people’s minds about him, he wasn’t going to put Jaimee through the same hell he had gone through. And he certainly wasn’t going to leave her destitute.
As soon as Mrs. Lafayette unleashed her last look of disgust his way and left, John got into his battered Corolla and went to Mac’s Easy-Pawn and for the first time ever he wasn’t going to drop something off.
He was shopping for a gun.
4
Stephanie Glowitz
Newark, New Jersey
Since she was so tall the flimsy hospital gown came to rest just above her knees and though she frequently wore tiny miniskirts that her mother considered scandalous, Stephanie Glowitz felt embarrassingly exposed sitting up on the exam table.
In nervous agitation she kept tugging at the hem and flattening the wrinkles so that the gown lay smoothly on her thighs.
“It’s going to be ok,” her mom assured. Winnie Glowitz was a rock. She patted Stephanie’s leg with a palm as dry and soft as talc.
“Yeah, it is. I know it. I feel good. No, I feel great; better than I have in years. And I think I look better, too. You know the sexy checker at the supermarket? Yesterday, when I ran to get your hair color, he was all like dammmn, girl.”
The combination of chemo and radiation therapy had been the most horrid experience of her life. She had felt like killing herself almost on a daily basis, but it did have one plus: she’d lost a ton of weight and was fitting into clothes she hadn’t been able to squeeze her fat ass into since high school.
Winnie made a face like she had smelled something odd. “That checker is a gay, dear. Everyone knows that. But it doesn’t take away from the fact that you are looking so much better. I just wish your hair would grow back faster. Why aren’t you wearing the wig? That fuzzy cap is…childish. You’re twenty-eight not five. It just doesn’t suit you.”
“I kinda want to feel like a child,” Steph replied, touching the soft acorn cap. It was pink in color and angora-soft. “All this was like a real big deal. I don’t know how to explain it other than to tell you it feels like I’m reborn, you know? Like now I get this do-over. Like I get my life back but with a fresh start. I feel young again."
“I guess I can understand that.” Winnie stared up at her daughter feeling a warmth of pride in her bosom. “Really, you do look younger with that cap. If your dad was alive he’d swear you were his little Bubbles again.”
Stephanie choked and put a finger to her lips. “Don’t ever say the B word out loud. You know how long it took me to lose that nickname?” The truth was that it took until she was a freshman at Vanderbilt where she traded in the nickname Bubbles for the name Stone City, though people tended to call her Stoney for short.
The reminder of her nickname, the newer one, not the sweet one her dad used to call her, had her jonesing for a joint again and her foot started to shake. That was the only positive to being on chemo—she was able to smoke all the weed she wanted and no one would say shit about it. Not even her mother. Whenever Winnie would catch Steph “self-medicating” her lips would get tight and her smile would turn crooked but she never said shit.
“Oh man, this wait is killing me,” Stephanie said, her thumb subconsciously coming to her mouth. She started to nibble at the edge of the nail. “I mean, how long does it take to look at a CAT scan and say: clear, next.”
“It’s going to be ok,” Winnie said a second time. “There were a lot of people in the waiting room, remember? Dr. Wilson is a great oncologist. He probably has just a ton of people to get through before…”
A knock at the door stopped her. She looked up at Steph and their eyes met—they were both suddenly afraid. The knock hadn’t been Dr. Wilson’s usual peppy knuckle rap. This knock had been two low taps.
“C-Come in,” Steph said, her voice cracking.
Dr. Samuel Wilson was tall and dapper. His usual smile radiated from his deep brown face with confidence and showed a real pleasure in living life. His smile just then held a strong suggestion of pity.
Stephanie started shaking her head from side-to-side. “No. Uh-uh. I f-feel good. I feel great, ok?”
“Is it that obvious on my face?” he asked coming forward, not to listen to her heart with his stethoscope, or to take her temperature, but to hold her hands. “I’m sorry, but the first cycle of chemo wasn’t successful.”
Winnie stood up. Her eyes roved all around the room and could not find a single thing to settle on. They bounced from floor to ceiling to Wilson's shiny shoes. “Then we do another. Isn’t that what you said? If the first didn’t take we do a second round.”
Dr. Wilson nodded but there was a hesitancy in the movement. “Yes and no. Unfortunately…unfortunately your daughter’s cancer is no longer in the limited stage. It’s progressed to the extensive stage, meaning we have found tumors, very small ones in the pleura and in her left lung.”
Stephanie’s eyes were doing the opposite of her mom’s, she was staring at a button on Dr. Wilson’s suit. It was round, grey, and wholly ordinary, but in some fashion it seemed to be hypnotizing her. “Pluera,” she said and didn’t know why she did.
“It’s the memb
rane that encases the lungs,” he explained. “When we find cancer there, it’s a sure sign of it progressing to the next stage. I suggest we do a more thorough screening to find out exactly where the cancer has spread.”
“Ok,” Stephanie said. Her jonesing to get high was gone. In its place was a feeling of doom. “How long?”
“I’m sorry, I don’t understand. How long is the test or how long until we can schedule it?”
“How long do I have?” Out of nowhere tears rushed from her eyes. “To live.”
“That’s not easy to say,” he said, with a grimace. “It depends mostly on your genes. Most people don’t realize this, but genetic predisposition is the main factor not only in getting cancer but also in fighting it. Your father’s colon cancer advanced far quicker than the average and you, you’re not even a smoker and yet you have lung cancer.”
“She smokes pot!” her mother exclaimed. It came out like a combination of an excuse and an accusation. “If she promised to stop right now and never did it again would that help?”
Stephanie began to shake her head; her eyes still focused on that nothing of a button. “Marijuana isn’t a carcinogen, mom. It’s natural.”
“I wish that was true,” Dr. Wilson said. “The latest studies suggest that both tobacco and cannabis smoke contain the same cancer-causing compounds and, depending on what part of the plant is smoked, marijuana can contain more of these harmful ingredients.”
“So she should stop, right?” Winnie asked.
The doctor puffed up his cheeks and gently blew out a long breath. “The doctor in me really wants you to stop, however the realist thinks that it won’t make much difference at this point.”
“How long do I have?” Stephanie asked again, her voice barely a whisper.
“It depends on…”
“How long!” she cried.
“Patients diagnosed with extensive stage small cell lung cancer have a median survival rate of six to twelve months. Possibly, with more chemo and radiation therapy, we can extend that.”
The Apocalypse Crusade (Book 1): War of the Undead Day One Page 4