The Last Odd Day

by Lynne Hinton

  He was blank by the time he got home; and because I was already accustomed to the silent nights and the cooling of cravings, and then later when my baby came and went, we knew how to manage our life together. We expected little and were therefore rarely disappointed. Once I was off the mountain and living in the home of Oliver Thomas Witherspoon, his mother and father and two younger brothers, once I gave birth to death, I realized I hadn’t a lot of hope for happiness.

  I suppose it is this choice to accept an unfulfilled life that has caused me to be surprised that most people live their whole lives in a state of disappointment. I discovered this initially at the mill, where I spent the majority of my adult life. Loading needles and tacking elastic to the tops of women’s panties, I was shocked to learn that most of the people there were expecting something more.

  The women who gathered around the tables at lunch talked openly and without shame about the poor states of their children, the lack of opportunities for them in the textile industry, and the heaviness of unfulfilled dreams. Then they’d peer over at me, while I was eating my can of pork and beans or dry bologna sandwiches, and I’d just shrug my shoulders.

  “No dreams,” I’d say, remembering the hunched shoulders and empty palms of my mother’s kin, the fading of the colors when Emma died. “Might lend itself to boring sleep, but it sure does let you get up in the morning.”

  And they’d stare at me like I had just grown pointed ears and a tail. Most of them did not know what it was like not to have dreams, least not the young ones, anyway. Of course, by the time most of them hit forty or so, divorced, bored with children who would not leave their houses, still working at the same job, they realized that they had not had a dream of their own in more than a decade. That’s about the time the lunch conversations changed from lost hope to concrete plans for medical insurance and saved-up vacation days. Those were the conversations I deemed as sensible, and joined.

  O.T. and I had planned to buy an RV and travel down to Florida, maybe up to Niagara Falls. But since I kept delaying my retirement because the boss would beg me to, by the time I was free O.T. started feeling nervous, having headaches. So that we never got to Bob’s Vacations on Wheels, and we never camped in the Everglades. Soon Sunhaven collected most of our retirement money; and I didn’t think much about our ideas for a long time.

  In fact, before O.T.’s declining health and the sudden appearance of a woman named Lilly, I hadn’t thought much about anything in a long time. Not the unrelenting spirits of my dead parents and siblings, who refused to leave the old house, or me and O.T. buying a Winnebago or the way Jolly would hold my hand, soft as rain, when he helped me down off the tractor.

  Like the stories of a silent soldier and the way a woman’s body cramps and tears during labor, some memories are simply put away deep, deep down and below, so that former things appear to have passed away and only those events at hand require attention.

  Not since I was pregnant and then not, a mother and then only a wife, had I actually remembered things or felt things or noticed things, like the way a fly sings when it’s caught in a spiderweb, the formidable strength of desire, and my father’s empty eyes, which saw everything I did not.

  I had spent so long turning away from life—refusing it, denying it, pinching and squeezing the sorrow and the pain and the possibilities—that the only emotion I could muster up when I finally met Lilly, other than the physical one of getting sick, was just the sense of being a little surprised.

  Right before fainting, I saw a burst of color and heard my name being spoken. I said out loud, “Hmmm,” like I had suddenly figured something out, nodded my head, and fell forward.

  8

  O.T. died on a Wednesday when the sing-along in the dining room down the hall from his room had just started and the nurses had all been called to a meeting downstairs. Since I knew for about a week that his time was close at hand, I had been staying all night, sleeping in the chair next to his bed, and showering in the bathroom down at the end of the hall.

  The last days of his life I, not the nursing staff, bathed and shaved him, read him stories from the paper, and gave him things to smell. Oranges and strawberries, wet grass and lavender. O.T. had always noticed and enjoyed the smell of things, so I had Maude bring me stuff from the house or the barn or pick up something from the store that I thought might bring him pleasure. My perfume, a homemade brand that was a light floral scent he had found at some boutique in Chicago when he drove to a tractor show years ago, handfuls of dirt, tea with cinnamon sticks, and clove.

  He enjoyed the aromas from outside the most, because when I held old tools or leather work gloves up to his nose, he seemed to soften and relax. I don’t know if he really knew it or not, if it meant anything to him or nothing at all, I only hoped it eased his passing, helped him see that he was only going home.

  When he did die I did not panic. I did not ring the call button on the railing of his bed. I sat beside him, having just placed a small sprig of lilac near his chin, rubbing his hand and listening to a cheerful pianist leading the group in “Bicycle Built for Two.”

  I smiled at the thought of passing to such a tune and wondered if the spirits who heard it would not come and take him until it was over, that they stood along the wall waiting, respectful, thinking it was some unknown tribal chant or worship song meant to send his soul into the next life.

  He died without any meaningful final words or astounding moment of clarity like I have heard others speak of when they tell their dead one’s story. Unlike even my mother, who died as she had lived, in sadness, or my father, who died begging for death to come, O.T. didn’t suddenly turn to me and call out my name or tighten his grip or smile or shed a tear. He simply eased into it, accepted it, welcomed it like a man who had been waiting for his lover finally to come.

  The warmth drained from his hand and the lines around his eyes and brow melted. His lips fell; and his breathing slowed and finally stopped. It was not desired or wrestled with, it was simply his time, and he acquiesced. Not a burden or an escape, it was merely death.

  I clasped his hand tightly, pausing like the ancestors until the chorus was over; then I reached up and kissed him lightly on the cheek, straightened the sheets around him, and waited for someone to find us.

  After almost half an hour, it was the housekeeper who came and bowed beside me, said a prayer delivering my husband into somebody else’s hands, and quietly and quickly left us once again to be alone. Soon, once the news was told, a few of the nurses came, the administrator, and a chaplain; but none of them, just like O.T., had very much to say.

  When I was asked by Mrs. Fredericks, the director of Sunhaven, about relatives to contact, I said politely and confidently that I would call his two brothers, Dick and Jolly, from home. She leaned toward me, placed her hand on my shoulder, and gave me a sympathetic squeeze. I returned to his room to wait for the funeral home personnel, and that’s when a nursing assistant, one I had not known or noticed, tiptoed into the room and handed me a little piece of paper, torn from a notebook, with a name and number of someone, she said, who would want to know.

  9

  I met her in the parking lot while the hearse was pulling away. Sunhaven was more than an hour and a half from where she lived, but she arrived before I had finished filling out the forms and packing up O.T.’s things.

  She got out of her car, crossed herself like I had seen the Catholics do, and walked in my direction, slowly and easily, like she was worried that she was moving too fast. But in only the second it took to see her approach, her gait, her frame, so clearly her father’s child, I remember thinking, rationally and calmly, Everything now is different.

  Just as she came near me, the wind whipping her scarf from around her neck, a ribbon of pink flying past, my stomach knotted, my head spun, and I began to feel dizzy. I reached out to steady myself, searching for the railing that I thought was behind me or the bench I remembered being near the door; and she caught me just as I started to fal
l.

  “Jean,” she said and lowered me to the steps while I responded with a low and gentle hum.

  A nurse hurried out and the two of them walked me to the family room. I drank sips of cola and kept a cool cloth across my brow. I ate a few crackers and said I wanted to go home. She stood near the door and watched.

  The nursing home director put me in the passenger’s side of her gold and white sedan and drove me to my house. I kept my eyes closed the entire way. It would be two days before I saw her again, before we finally spoke.

  Lilly Maria Lucetti was born June 2, 1960, in Durham General Hospital, out in the hallway because she would not wait to come. She was a late spring baby. She is dark complexioned, olive-skinned, like a woman from Italy or France or somewhere on the Mediterranean.

  She lived with her mother and her grandparents until she was ten. Then her mother, who never married, and Lilly moved out to a little house farther in the woods and just down the road from her parents. There was a lot of love and laughter, the days more sweet than sorry; and she considers her early years to have been serene.

  She has large, oval eyes, like a delighted child; and she’s as skinny as a teenager. She’s held lots of jobs, predominantly public service positions; but she seems to feel most comfortable in a day care center where the children are allowed to play outside as long as they want and listen to music while they take their naps.

  She finished high school in Chatham County, an average student, and completed two years at the university. Her educational possibilities were promising until she left when she was twenty to travel with a boy she thought would love her forever.

  She met him in a park, both having planned to feed the birds and enjoy a late morning. They shared an egg sandwich she had brought and a six-pack of beer he had in his car.

  He was bored with school, interested in what lay beyond, she said, with a roll of her eyes. So they left North Carolina and went west and west and west until they landed at the Pacific Ocean, saw the seals at Cliffside, and moved in with a friend who let them stay for free until they were able to find a place of their own.

  Roger, the young man who swept her away from her studies, her home, and her common sense, left her in San Francisco, where the fog settles in like a family member and the streets are busy all the time. She was working in a shoe store then, persuading women that she could find them just the right shoe that could make their legs appear longer and their feet smaller. She liked the job only because she said that the tips of her fingers always smelled like leather and reminded her of the hides and skins her grandfather soaked and tanned in the barn behind their house.

  She stayed there, satisfied, she said, by herself, living in an apartment that was smaller than a closet, until she woke up one morning and couldn’t remember the colors of fall or how a crocus bloomed in the snow, timid and yellow.

  She missed the seasons, she said, the changes in the trees, the clarity at the edges of the sky, and the shapes of snowflakes. So she packed what she could and mailed it all to her mother’s home, gave away the rest, sold her Yamaha scooter, and took a bus eastward to North Carolina.

  Her mother met her at the Trailways station, eyes filled with tears. And Lilly’s been in Durham working in retail or day care ever since she left California. Until now.

  Her mother, she said, was glad to see her. Cleaned her room, redecorated it from something that belonged to a hippie adolescent to something that would be lived in by a young professional. She bought candles and picture frames and situated them nicely on the new Bassett light oak chest of drawers she bought at a furniture market showroom sale. She slept on a waterbed, and she often dreamed that she was sailing across distant but always calm seas.

  Lilly said that her space in her mother’s home was lovely, blue and mauve, like the feeling of dusk. She felt right about being there, welcomed, and unashamed for having left. And they lived together, mother and daughter, like roommates, like friends, for sixteen years. She left Durham only after her mother died.

  When we finally talked, the day before O.T.’s service, sitting together in the parlor of Mackay’s Funeral Home, she said that she left her hometown because she thought that Durham was just too full of death. Every road a reminder of a trip, an ordinary thoroughfare that calls up memories of her mother, the places where they traveled for groceries or dinner or just to get out of the house.

  She said that even though she is beginning her middle-aged years, she might like to return to college, finish her degree, and teach. She claimed that she favors the thought of her own room in a long line of rooms at a school, her name on the door, and bulletin boards that she can change every few months to celebrate a new cycle of time.

  When she told me of her plans, I thought they sounded fine, that it appeared to be a good thing for her to return to school, that it seemed like something that would make her happy. I didn’t, however, comment on what she was telling me because in spite of the appearance of my goodwill, I was still trying to find a place in my mind where all of this could settle.

  I was simply trying to figure out who we were to each other, whether or not it was even possible that I could accept her in the midst of such awkward and forced circumstances, whether simply knowing that she existed was already more information than I could handle.

  When I did finally respond to all she had shared, all the reports she had given me, I asked her only how it was to have all of her family dead, to be without a mother and a father, thinking that this was something we had in common.

  She was quiet for a moment and then answered, thoughtfully, decidedly.

  “I have sat with so much grief,” she said, “that I feel like I have acquired a new angle on life, that I have finally figured out the unprofessed secret that most folks never fully grasp.” And here she paused again.

  “Life happens in a moment,” she pronounced as the funeral home personnel walked around us, trying to appear sympathetic and unobtrusive.

  “Love is, at first, always a surprise, and the good things never last so they need to be savored.” She continues as if she had been asked this before, as if she had already planned an answer.

  “I understand now that life is quick and unpredictable, so that you need to pay attention to everything that happens because it is somehow intended to shape who you are.”

  I just listened as she went on to say that she believes in something beyond this existence, beyond this life, because otherwise, “our brief stays on earth,” she said, as we sat in tall overstuffed chairs, “are such a flash on the screen of time that they would mean nothing.”

  Another family came in the front door. We both turned toward them.

  “There must be another place,” she added, “beyond this one, for all the dead souls to go.”

  I dropped my eyes away from the other grieving family members and faced the far wall.

  She, of course, had not yet been told about my parents, the baby brother I never met, or my sister. She certainly had not heard the story of Emma. And as she talked on, so doubtlessly, about her thoughts and ideas of life and the hereafter, I wondered what she would do in a house where dead ones would not pass. I wondered if she could make them move on because she was convinced there was another world waiting for them or if she would stay awhile, living with them, like I did, until her own breath smelled of theirs. I almost asked how she could let love slip away so easily.

  But I didn’t ask such a question because I knew how it would sound. I knew that no matter how carefully I phrased it, no matter how I accented it with a touch on her arm or a slight, honest smile, it would come out spiteful and poisonous; it would seem like an attack.

  And though I was certainly thrown off balance by her presence, dealing with this new knowledge of the betrayal of my husband, trying to sort through a death and now an unexpected life, I knew that she didn’t deserve the consequences of all that I was feeling. None of this was her fault, her responsibility, or her doing.

  We sat together in the funer
al home near the body of a man whose life had touched both of ours, and I realized that she was not there to do me harm. She came to see my husband, her father, without the intention of ruining our marriage or causing trouble. I don’t believe there was ever a single thought of malice in her head or in her heart.

  She simply wanted to see the man her mother loved, tell him that he had never been forgotten, and show him how she was not abandoned or afraid. She thought she owed that to herself, to her mother, and to the father who never knew he had a daughter and who might just want to know.

  In spite of how difficult it was taking in all of this information, trying to let this young woman be a part of my husband’s death, inviting her to speak freely of her life, I knew there was no way that she should be the target of my anger or disappointment. She, after all, had her own losses to suffer.

  Lilly was not the reason for any of my grief or pain. She was only trying to discover her place, only trying to understand from where it was she came, only trying to find peace for herself.

  I had nothing to gain from being rude or unwelcoming to O.T.’s daughter. She was not the cause for the break in my marriage. She bore no answers to my many questions. She was no different than I. We both were simply seeking solutions for the great mysteries of our lives.

  10

  Widow is such a lubberly label. Used like a medical condition or an exposition for unsavory behavior, it creates an illusion, a false image in people’s minds that they suddenly think they know all about you. “Oh,” they’ll say, with just the right amount of familiarity and sympathy, “that explains everything.”

  At first it enraged me, then it merely irritated me, but now resolved, I simply use it to my full advantage. “I won’t be able to get that library book back on time,” I’ll confess to the librarian, “because I’m a widow.” And just like that I’m given an extension so that I can read the book at a speed I’m comfortable with.