by Janis Owens
Mama silenced me with one look and a finger to the face (which was all she had to do; around our house, Daddy was the one who had to raise his voice) then turned back to Sim, asked in a small curious voice, “Well, Sim? What did you say about Gabriel that made her so upset?”
I think the reason I remember this part so clearly is that even then it struck me funny that she called him that: Gabriel. Something in the way she said it—drawn out, three syllables—made me understand just that quickly that Mama knew him. She knew Uncle Gabe. She had a history with him. She called him Ga-bri-el.
But I didn’t ponder it too much, for Sim was trying his best to wiggle out of this thing, lying like a dog, telling Mama: “I doan remember,” and me: “Shut up, you little snot!”
Because I was back in action, jumping on my toes, shouting, “Do, too! He said Grannie wouldn’t let him come home and she does! Liar-liar-pants-on-fire!”
Sim actually went for me then and might have landed a few licks, except that Mama got between us and sent us to our rooms, and as far as I can remember, that was about the end of it. There was no more discussion, no more spitting and shouting, though Simon was so mad he wouldn’t look at me for a whole week, much less speak, and even got Missy on his side about it.
“You really are a blabbermouth,” she told me that night with this look of just absolute disgust.
I simply couldn’t understand what all the fuss was about, but have never been able to withstand Sim and Missy when they gang up on me. After that, I backed off the subject of the precious Uncle Gabe and never mentioned him again to anyone. He just became a taboo subject, like Uncle Ira’s conviction or Uncle Case’s drinking or Mama’s vampire things, one that you took a wide berth around if you could help it, which wasn’t too much of a strain, as I had plenty of other things to occupy me those days.
For that was not only the year that Lori and Curtis married, but shortly thereafter, Ryan was born and I finally demonstrated a skill that made me invaluable in any Southern family: I could calm a baby. The reason it proved so valuable is that though Lori seemed to have learned the mechanics of how to make a baby, nobody ever taught her the means of caring for one, especially not a preemie like Ryan, who had all these allergies to formula and plastic diapers, even to Lori’s milk. He was always screaming from some rash or another, and between Lori and Curtis’s first year of college, and various part-time jobs, they had a hard pull, always arguing over money and begging me to baby-sit. I never minded because they did pay (a little) and always let Kenneth come, too, and by summer, we had a standing date every Friday night.
I must say I looked forward to it, for in true redneck fashion, though Lori and Curtis could barely make their trailer or their hospital payments, they had managed to finance a big-screen TV and a huge satellite system that got HBO, MTV, the works. Since Mama hadn’t quite gotten around to sniffing out this channel of corruption, Kenneth and me were able to watch whatever we wanted, a real education, I can grant you that, and one that went a long ways toward making me lose my disgust for the baby-making process, though I really preferred the war movies to the skin ones. I mean, on the weeks Kenneth got to pick, we’d watch Halloween, or Porky’s, or the like. On my weeks it’d be Rambo or Platoon, though our favorite show, hands down, was Miami Vice.
We watched it every week, knew all the characters, wished we had the wherewithal to grow out a five-o’clock shadow like Don Johnson—and to tell you the truth, that’s really what I remember most about that last summer Daddy was alive. Sometimes I’ll hear a song on the radio—one of Madonna’s early hits, or the theme song of Miami Vice—and for a moment, will just sit there, transfixed, and remember it so clearly: living at home with Mama and Daddy, Sim in baseball, Missy still carless, stuck at home with her entourage of four thousand girlfriends. I can almost hear their laughter around the pool, am magically transported back to the summer of 1987, to this clear-cut, carefree world where Daddy’s still alive, seldom home, but momentarily expected, so close I can almost smell his cologne.
I used to live for such moments, used to channel-surf MTV, waiting for the right video that could take me back, though I never do anymore. The rebound is just too fast, too bitter. Now days I’d just as soon forget I ever had a childhood. I mean, it was happy and loving and fun, but it just passed too fast, too casually, came to too abrupt an end the last week in September, when Daddy finally gave in to Mama’s nagging and made plans to have surgery and get rid of his gallstones once and for all. For that’s what the doctor had finally pinpointed as the cause of his nightly bellyaches: routine gallstones, the kind you had to have surgically removed, with a couple of nights’ stay in the hospital.
None of us were particularly worried, for compared to the drama of Curtis and Lori’s troubles, Daddy’s stuff seemed so middle-aged and routine. There was nothing life-and-death about it at all, no family squabbles or tears or threats of divorce, Daddy just making an appointment with a surgeon friend of Aunt Candace’s and going to the hospital that morning like he was having a tooth pulled. Mama went with him, and after a lot of begging on our part, decided that we were old enough to stay home by ourselves, though she must have had a change of heart once she got to the hospital, for she sent Carlym (our Youth Pastor at Welcome) to pick us up the next morning and take us to Grannie’s. Try as we might, we couldn’t talk him out of it, and when we went to see Daddy at the hospital that night, Missy told him all about it.
“Mama treats us like babies,” she said indignantly, though Daddy just looked at her sadly.
“You are babies,” he said, though he didn’t argue it too much, just called Grannie and told her that we could go home if we wanted, that he’d be discharged Saturday, or maybe Monday morning.
I was vaguely (very vaguely) aware that this wasn’t part of the master plan—that he was only supposed to have stayed in the hospital for two, maybe three days, but didn’t think much of it, as Miss Susan insisted that I spend the weekend with them, even took us over to Tallahassee to see Top Gun, which, at the time, I thought was just the coolest movie in the universe. Me and Kenneth stayed up all night talking about it, plotting to see it again when Sim and Kemp went on Monday—and that’s really how I spent the last evening of my childhood, with no inkling it was about to all come to an end.
The only possible hint I remember of anything being out of the ordinary was when Miss Susan was dropping me off at the house the next morning, when we came across a half-dozen cars parked in the drive, more than there should have been on a Saturday. I didn’t know what was up, just gathered my backpack and went inside to the living room that was full of people, not just Sim and Missy and Mama, but Aunt Candace and Uncle Ed, even our preacher Brother Sloan, all of them drinking coffee and chatting, very casual.
Daddy was there, too, just home from the hospital, still wearing the shiny new pajama-and-robe set Mama had brought him for his operation that for the first time in his life, made him look like the millionaire he was. He smiled when he saw me, and waved me over for a kiss, then sent me to the kitchen in search of something to eat while Mama walked Miss Susan to her car, which always took a little time because Mama always insisted on reimbursing her for having me over because she really couldn’t afford it, and Miss Susan always puts up a fight.
I’d made my way back to the living room, Pop-Tart in hand, was sitting on the edge of the coffee table telling Daddy and Brother Sloan about Top Gun and how cool it was, when Mama finally made it back inside and sat down next to Daddy, and he took a breath and told us he had cancer.
“Of where?” I asked, as Kenneth’s Uncle Lou had once had cancer, too, of the lung, though he’d had part of it removed and was doing fine now, coming down in a few months for Christmas.
But Daddy’s cancer wasn’t the same kind. His was harder to pronounce and harder to explain, Aunt Candace jumping in and trying to give the technical details, though the whole process was complicated by the fact that Missy started crying, and Sim did, too. I was the only one who
didn’t quite get it, remember just sitting there, munching a Pop-Tart, wondering why they were making such a deal over it, kind of annoyed by all their blubbering, afraid it would upset Mama. It made me even quicker to reassure everyone that I was okay, that I was fine, which, in fact, I was. I mean, I was more interested than scared; kind of pumped up and excited, as if Daddy had announced that we were going on a big vacation out west—to, say, the Grand Canyon or Las Vegas. Somewhere you heard other people went, saw their snapshots and videos, but had never actually gone yourself.
I don’t know why it struck me that way, for it was clear that everyone else was just flipped out and grieved and devastated, Aunt Candace having us pray like she always did, telling us to have faith in God, that nothing was impossible to those who believe. She went on to talk about faith and healing, told us straight up that if we had faith Daddy would be healed (which is what charismatics are big on), though Brother Sloan was too Baptist to let that pass unchallenged and jumped in and started talking about the Lord knowing best and not my will but Thy will be done (which is what the Baptists are big on).
Back and forth they went in this polite little scripture-quoting war that didn’t convince anyone of anything, though it did kind of defuse all the tears and emotion, helped Sim and Missy get a grip on themselves. By the time they all left, everything was back to normal, Missy catching a ride to town with Brother Sloan for softball practice, Daddy lying on the couch in his new pajamas and watching TV since it was baseball season, and what with TBS, Atlanta played all the time.
They weren’t any dang good back then, but that didn’t bother Daddy, who was a Braves fan from a way back and followed every play, the day turning hot, then muggy, Mama opening all the French doors for the breeze. She even let Kenneth come over to swim, and we had a good time, rigged up a swing from the eaves of the apartment that we used to swing off into the deep end of the pool.
Every once in a while Daddy would hobble to the French door and stand there in his new robe and watch us, warn us not to let go too soon or we’d crash to the marble. We’d wave and reassure him, and he’d go back inside to his game, so that what had started out as such an earth-shaking morning had once again flattened out into just another routine late-summer afternoon, and to tell you the truth, that’s the way it went, all the way to the end.
There was no more hysteria or tears, no gruesome operations or amputations or radiation: just Daddy at home with Mama, getting thinner and grayer by the week, their bedroom soon the hub of the household, Mama’s vanity cluttered with brown bottles and vials of alcohol and pharmacy bottles full of white pills. By Halloween, the whole house smelled of Lysol, though Mama put out her jack-o’-lantern like usual and a Tupperware bowl of Snickers bars that Kenneth and I ended up eating, for the local kids would just as soon spend the night in a funeral home as to brave our front yard on the spookiest night of the year.
But Mama didn’t seem to mind. In fact, she seemed fairly content in those days, easily slipping back into her old vampire ways, hardly eating or sleeping so she could stay by Daddy’s side, occasionally taking him to town, to the doctors or lawyers, though by Thanksgiving, he was too weak to take the stairs, and they mostly just stayed in bed. That’s where I’d find them every day when I came home from school, both of them looking up when I came in with these faces of great and glowing love, as if I’d been gone for forty years.
I’d kick off my shoes and lie there on the foot of the bed and tell them about my day, happy as a dog to have their undivided attention, especially Daddy, who was usually too busy to sit around the house and make small talk. With Sim and Missy, he spent those last few months hammering them about their futures—where they’d go to college and who they’d marry and what they’d do for a living. But he never went into all that stuff with me, just told me that I was smart as anyone; that I’d do well in life, dyslexia or not, because I was a hard worker, and had faith and good sense, attributes that Daddy valued above all the books and schooling in the world.
And sometimes, there toward the end, he’d tell me about his brother Gabe.
He did it so carefully that even then I understood there was still a mystery here, if for no other reason than he never talked about him when Mama was around, but when she was making a run to the drugstore, or downstairs cooking supper.
“Why doesn’t he ever come home to see Grannie?” I remember asking him, for that was one thing about Uncle Gabe that still annoyed me, him abandoning Grannie.
In reply, Daddy was thoughtful, choosing his words carefully. “Well, baby, Mama and Gabe, they’re just too much alike for their own good—hardheads, both of them, the Hardheads of the World. And Gabe’s kind of a strange personality. Not bad strange, you understand. Just—diffrent. But I want you to get to know him, give him a chance. He’ll come back, one day. He’d have come already, if I’d have let him.”
“Why won’t you let him?” I asked, as something in his words recalled Sim’s speculation long ago (could it only be the summer before?) that Grannie wouldn’t let Uncle Gabe come home.
For a long moment, Daddy didn’t answer, then sighed. “Well, he’d cry too much for one thing, and it’d kill him, too, seeing me this way.” He paused again, as if unable to find the right words, then settled for the obvious. “Anyway, I want him to remember me like I was. Not like this.”
Because by then—by December—he really was kind of pathetic looking, and the heck of it was, it happened so fast. I mean, one week, he was thin and sallow, but still himself, then boom, a week later he was this puffy-eyed skeleton who had to go back to the hospital for yet another operation, a routine procedure, Aunt Candace called it, though they wouldn’t let me see him afterward. This really steamed me, for Sim got to go by that day after school while I had to ride the bus home like usual, then hang around the house by myself, with no one to talk to and nothing to do.
I got so bored that I finally went out and watered Mama’s roses, was wrestling with the hose when I heard the phone ringing inside, dim and hollow under the trees. I threw down the hose and charged inside, thinking it was Mama; that she’d had a change of heart and was calling to tell me she’d sent Carlym over to pick me up.
But when I answered, a distant, unfamiliar voice asked to speak to Daddy; said he was his brother. Now, I believe I’ve mentioned that I’m kind of slow on the uptake, and even then, I didn’t connect him with the Mystery Genius and told him plainly, “He ain’t here.”
“Well, shit,” he breathed, and I must say I was little shocked at his language, though he rolled along without turning a hair. “Can I leave a message?”
I just stared at the phone in my hand, for it had suddenly occurred to me who I was speaking with so casually: the Mysterious Uncle Gabe. It was kind of intriguing, talking to him in person, and I put the phone back to my ear and carefully offered: “He’s at the hospital. I don’t know when he’ll be back. They won’t let me see him.”
I don’t know why I unbent enough to confess such a thing to a stranger, but there is something about Gabe, some priestly aura, that makes him easy to confide in. And anyway, like Missy and Sim are always saying, I really am a blabbermouth. I mean, if spilling my guts gets me my way, then spill I will, and indeed, Uncle Gabe took the bait nicely, his voice suddenly not so pressing and impatient. “Well, he probably doesn’t want you to see him like this,” he explained. “He’s got ascites.”
Which, of course, meant nothing to me. “What’s thet?” I asked.
“Ah, fluid in the peritoneal cavity. It can be pretty nasty.”
He sounded just like Aunt Candace, who was so weird about me going to the hospital, as if seeing my own father in a hospital gown, hooked to an IV, would warp my mind or something, turn me into a serial killer. It was truly the stupidest thing I’d ever heard in my life and I told him plainly, “Well, I ain’t going up there to ask him to the prom. I just want to see him. Simon got to.”
I braced myself for a volley of excuse and argument and explanation,
but there was just a small silence on the line, then a quiet: “Well, I’ll mention it when I call the hospital.”
I remember thinking it so strange that he’d given in so easily, for around our house, you have to fight to the death for every inch in an argument, and here he was, immediately taking my side. Just that quickly, I recognized him as an ally, and was very grateful, told him in a fast rush of gratitude: “Yeah, and tell ’em—tell ’em I’m fine. That I won’t cry, I swear to God.”
Which was the other reason Aunt Candace didn’t want me to go: she was afraid I’d flip out and start bawling and upset Daddy—and why she was afraid of that, I’ll never know, because Missy and Sim were the crybabies who tuned up the day he told us about the cancer. I was the strong one. I hadn’t cried yet and didn’t intend to, and somehow, my unseen uncle seemed to perceive my strength, for he added in that quiet, level voice: “Well. It was nice talking to you. You must be Clayton.”
“Yeah.” I smiled. “Clayton Michael Catts, Missy’s little brother. You don’t know me,” I added, in case he was trying in vain to put a face to my name.
For a moment, there was another silence on the line, then he offered in that same quiet voice: “Well. Maybe we can remedy that sometime soon. You take care of yourself, Clayton Michael Catts. Tell your sister I said hey.”
And that was it. He just hung up, leaving me alone in the hallway, the open door letting in a brilliant slant of late-afternoon sun that brought to life the shining oak floor, turning it to gold at my feet. After a moment, I quietly replaced the phone on the cradle and went outside and finished my watering, and I’ll be just perfectly honest here, though it galls me to admit it: that even though I didn’t go around running my mouth like Missy, but pretty much kept our conversation to myself—just like that, just that quickly, I was as carried away and besotted and infatuated with Uncle Gabe as she.