Love, Carry My Bags

by Everett, C. R.

  “Welcome home, Oh Pale One,” I said, happy and still on a high from brisk book sales—the proceeds from which I had just plunked down on a home for Mother. Thank God for happenstance.

  Sitting near each other at a book signing, I had said to Stephen King, “I’ve never read any of your books. I’m not into horror.” He looked at me wondering why then, was I speaking to him. I hesitated, then went on, “But I respect your talent.” An awkward silence followed. What an idiotic thing to say.

  “What are you into?” he asked, rescuing my lost dignity. “What do you write?”

  “I write about personal tragedy.” Another awkward moment.

  Smiling, he said, “That is scary.”

  As it dawned on me, I said, “Maybe I am into horror.”

  That fortuitous encounter was indirectly responsible for my being able to put Mother in the home. A retirement village, rather. She wanted to go. It was a nice home, much nicer than her own house, and, at eighty-three she no longer had to mow her own lawn.

  “So, how was the trip?” I asked Glenn who remained fixed at the table during my musing, looking as if the life had been sucked out of him. David rubbed against Glenn’s leg. Glenn appeared not to notice.

  “I’d like to build our house on Whidbey,” he said, staring through the wall. “I thought about it the whole trip home.”

  “What are you talking about? That was supposed to be for retirement,” I said, confused. “What happened up there?”

  “The day I got in, they found a fuel leak. QA said it was nothing to worry about. I said it was something to worry about.” Glenn sighed. “It got ugly. The quality supervisor said that if I didn’t sign off on the airplane, it might cost him his job, they might miss delivery. I said ‘That’s a risk I’m willing to take.’ ”

  “So, they didn’t inspect properly,” I said.

  “No, they didn’t—just like every other time they didn’t,” Glenn said, his disgust apparent.

  “So what happened?”

  “They defueled the airplane, took it apart, sealed up the fuel tanks and reassembled it.”

  “So then it was good to go,” I said, expecting the problem had been resolved.

  “It should have been.” Glenn exhaled loudly, then began to cough as if clearing a tickle in his throat.

  “You need some water?” I asked. He nodded, then took a drink, but didn’t look relieved.

  “I asked to review the inspection records. QA explained that they were short staffed, so they didn’t inspect all the control points, just the ‘important’ ones.” Glenn leaned back in his chair and said, “They didn’t even follow their own procedure!”

  “Was it okay then, anyway?” I asked, knowing the answer.

  “No. They fueled it back up the morning of delivery.” Glenn was sweating as he went on, as if re-living a bad dream. “When I crawled around under its belly I noticed some marring on the surface, so I looked closer. QA said, ‘You don’t need to worry about that.’ And I said, ‘I will worry about it. Open that panel.’ ”

  Glenn took another drink. I gave him my undivided attention, sensing this was a more upsetting story than the usual ones.

  “They said, ‘We can’t open that panel. If we do, we’ll break the seal. We’ll miss delivery.’ I said, ‘You have to, it’s leaking,’ and they tried to play it off as condensation.”

  David jumped onto the table and bumped Glenn’s hand with his head, causing him to spill. Rather than curse the cat like normal, Glenn picked David up and cuddled him in his lap, then continued while I fetched a dishcloth.

  “I said, ‘That is no god damn condensation, smell it.’ QA said, ‘There’s nothing wrong, we’ve signed off. This airplane is out of here today—do you know how many millions are riding on making this delivery?’ I said, ‘I don’t care if it’s billions. Do you know whose life, whose lives, are riding on this delivery?’ ”

  Glenn went on, clearly agitated. “Just then I glanced over at Kemp’s desk, the pilot, where he had a picture of his wife and kid and all I could think about was you and the girls, and me having to play God because QA wouldn’t make the tough call.” Glenn’s eyes welled up as he spoke. I sat next to him, anxious about what he might say next.

  “Do you know how infuriating it can be when the facts are so obvious and someone is so pigheaded they make your life miserable over it?” he asked.

  “Yes, I do.” I answered his rhetorical question without his notice as he plowed on, vocalizing his trauma.

  “QA wouldn’t ground that plane. I had to do it, and it’s not my job! Do you know how far up the chain of command this went?” he said, highly excited. “Remember that crash investigation I worked on a while back? Higher than that.”

  My eyes grew large as I imagined Glenn’s stress, sure I would have crumbled under that weight.

  “So when they finally backed the panel off, fuel started pouring out. It should have been dry.” Glenn looked pleased and proud of himself that he’d made the hard call, yet shaken. “If they’d have started that thing up, it would have blown.” His voice cracked as he recalled.

  “You saved Kemp’s life,” I said, reaching for a fresh Kleenex, barely able to utter the words.

  “And the airplane, and QA’s ass . . .” Glenn looked exhausted.

  What if Glenn hadn’t been there?

  “You know what touched me the most?” Glenn asked. “Kemp had been there watching the whole time. He saw Ron yelling at me, cursing his head off, pressuring me about the money. And when it was over, when he saw the fuel that would have blown with a mere spark, come through that bay, he said, ‘Thank you.’ Choked me up so bad; I had to turn the other way.” Glenn teared up again. “I couldn’t answer. I could only think, what if I’d have let him go?”

  “But you didn’t. You did the right thing,” I said, giving him a hug, coming to appreciate that his stubbornness, adamancy, and bullheadedness, which had weighed heavily on me at home, had saved a man’s life, a woman’s husband, and a child’s father. It was then that I was most proud of Glenn. I actually liked him.

  “They missed the delivery. It was a huge award fee—gone. You’ll see it in the stock price.” Glenn simulated the noise of something falling off a cliff and then exploding. “Some of the managers blamed me for missing the delivery—the ones whose bonuses were riding on it.”

  “Couldn’t they see that it was a bomb waiting to explode?” I asked, shocked that they wouldn’t.

  “No, they said I was ‘overcautious and bossing people around like always’—trying to make a name for myself—trying to look good by dragging Ron down.” Glenn explained, “Ron’s been with the company thirty-five years, one of the good ol’ boys.” He shook his head, sighing. “Most of them knew each other from way back when and wouldn’t believe he’d let something like that go.”

  “So they took Ron’s opinion over yours because they questioned your motives.”

  “Yup,” Glenn said, punctuating the harsh truth, feeling he’d been treated unfairly and had contributed nothing to his undeserved situation.

  “There were witnesses. Wouldn’t they say anything?” I asked, sensing an injustice.

  “Nope.”

  “Why not? Won’t anybody stand up and do the right thing?” I asked, amazed that in this day and age it was even a situation.

  “It’s a ‘you-scratch-my-back, I’ll-scratch-yours’ world out there. Remember when the supervisor covered for those idiots who wouldn’t read the blueprints? . . . Payback time,” he said, disturbed and angry. “Plus all of their asses would be in the wringer. Now it’s just mine.”

  “Isn’t that a bit shortsighted on their part?”

  “They don’t care. They’re just biding their time until retirement.”

  “But what about the company? Don’t they care where their pension’s coming from or about the stockholders or their children or grandchildren?” I asked, becoming infuriated. “I mean, if something major happened . . . there may not be an XB.”

>   “I know. You don’t have to get mad at me,” he said. “I’ve been screamed at enough.”

  “I wasn’t mad at you. I’m sorry,” I said, regaining composure. “It’s just—what if it happens again?”

  “Well, I don’t know because I won’t be there,” Glenn said, somewhat smug. “I quit. I just don’t care anymore.”

  “You what?” I asked, shocked. We had been together so long that I knew when he was mad and said he didn’t care, it meant that he hurt deeply and cared more than ever. “You quit and you come home saying you want to build on Whidbey Island and move? How is that going to happen? What about the kids? Leave their friends? My job?”

  “I was ‘encouraged’ to quit. Management didn’t want me there anymore—said I was a ‘liability.’ So we worked a deal,” Glenn said, this time smiling.

  “They gave you hush money?” I asked, beside myself.

  “I got a nice severance,” Glenn corrected. “Life’s too short to put up with that kind of shit anyway.”

  “And my job? The kids?”

  “Your book’s going well,” he said. “I have to read it, by the way. Between that and my severance, we’ll be fine. The kids will adjust. You moved around in high school, and you did ok. Probably better than me, and I stayed where I was.”

  With my head swirling and beginning to pound, I said, “I’ll have to think about this.”

  * * *

  When Glenn picked up my novel, I warned, “Some of it may hit close to home, and some is going to hit home so hard it hurts, but . . . give it a chance; read it to the end, and then tell me what you think.” My open book was in his hands. I agonized as Glenn pored over my work, frequently consulting a dictionary at his side.

  “Why do you keep looking things up in the dictionary?” I asked, knowing that the readability stats ranked my work at the fourth-grade level.

  “You used some hard words,” he said, looking up the word ‘severe.’ “I had to get out the dictionary to understand this thing, but since you’re so amazing and cranked out a real book, I wanted to be sure and get it read.” Glenn cleared his throat. “I could never write like this. I’m jealous.” He squeezed my hand. His smile told me that even though he was jealous, he was also proud of me.

  “Is that why I’ve never seen you read a book?” I asked, sitting down next to him. “Because you can’t”—I paused, not believing what I was about to ask—“read? I thought you didn’t like books.”

  It was astounding to think he’d gotten by over the years not even being able to read at the fourth-grade level. How had he managed? How had he come to be at the top of his career at the top aerospace firm in the world and not read?

  “I can read, Camryn. I’m not an idiot,” he said defensively, clearing his throat again. His attitude became serious, calm. “I’ve never told you this, Camryn, but,” he said gravely, as if about to reveal a hidden family secret, “I do like books.”

  “You do?” I asked, shocked at receiving an odd, but not so earth-shattering revelation. “Then why didn’t you ever read any—until mine of course.”

  “I can’t read books,” he said.

  “You mean, you didn’t want to read books,” I said, hoping to clarify.

  “No, that’s not what I mean,” Glenn said, as if he desperately wanted me to understand. “I’ve never tested much above second-grade reading. Essentially, I can’t read books.” He seemed so peacefully accepting about it, as if it was something he couldn’t change any more than he could change the color of his eyes.

  “How did you get by? How did I not know? Why didn’t you get help?” I said, firing questioning bullets.

  “Have you ever been so frustrated with something that you just gave up?”

  I remembered many frustrating, rock-bottom moments, the moments that had become the bedrock of our marriage, and said, “Yes.”

  “Reading was never easy for me. I cried at night when I was a kid because I just didn’t get it. Kids made fun of me at school, and my folks thought I was lazy. I just gave up. It wasn’t worth it,” he said. “I was embarrassed.”

  “So why aren’t you embarrassed now?” I asked.

  “Because . . .” Glenn coughed, started to speak again, then erupted into a violent coughing fit.

  “Are you okay?” I asked as Glenn clutched at his chest, a drop of pain leaked from his eye. Panicked, I asked again, “Are you okay?”

  Glenn shook his head no. Chest heaving and mouth closed, muffling the hacking coughs, he motioned for me to bring a tissue. I grabbed a napkin from the counter, hurried back, then watched Glenn spit blood-tinged sputum into it.

  “You need to see a doctor,” I said, rushing to get Glenn’s shoes. “That’s not right.” I checked my watch. “Urgent Care should still be open.”

  Glenn stopped me. “I’ve already been.”

  “You what?”

  “I’ve already been to the doctor. I haven’t felt right for six months. Where do you think I was last Tuesday? Where do you think I was two weeks ago Friday?”

  “What are you saying? You told me you went golfing.” I was shaking inside, sure whatever Glenn was going to say would be more shocking than his secret reading disability.

  “I’m dying, Camryn,” Glenn said between residual coughs. “The reason I’m not embarrassed about my reading problem anymore is because I’m dying.”

  “Dying of what?” It was the first question of a hundred that popped out of my mouth. “What do you mean, dying? You just had this house built. It’s almost done. You insisted we move—said you wanted to retire up here, be buried up here . . .” My own words stopped me short. Be buried up here.

  “I have lung cancer. Stage four,” Glenn said, concealing any emotion that may have tried to escape.

  “You’ve known a long time,” I said, thinking back. “You said that cough was walking pneumonia, nothing to worry about because that sort of thing took a while to get over. You’ve had no treatment.” A thousand more bombarding thoughts came through. “Why didn’t you tell me? Why didn’t you get care? Why do you want to die?” I fired the questions like I was going out of my mind, freaking out, had another bomb dropped on me. I shut up, then blankly stared past him at the mantel where all my favorite things went. The musical greeting card he’d thoughtfully given me for no reason at all sat right next to a porcelain bluebird and pictures of the kids; at the time, he said, “I thought you’d like this,” as it belted out the hamster dance.

  “I don’t want to die, Camryn. I want to live. And chemo, radiation, being sick to my stomach, laid up, losing my hair, all that stuff, is no way to live—not if it’s only going to buy a couple of months, it’s not.” Calmly he said, “I’m going to live until I can’t live anymore and then one day, I’ll wake up dead.”

  Feeling the unjustness of the no-win situation, I too, knew that modern medical cancer treatments would someday be akin to Civil War bloodletting practices. I wished that day had come.

  “That’s what they told me my chances were,” Glenn said, “It’d buy me another couple of months.”

  Shocked and feeling left out, I said, “Why didn’t you tell me? Why didn’t you ask me? What about the girls?”

  “I didn’t want to burden you with my problems.” Glenn stopped to wheeze. “I’ve burdened you enough.” Glenn coughed again, nearly choking. I tensed up inside, cringing as if watching someone, un-numbed, get stitches. He patted his legs. “Come sit on my lap.” I sat down, afraid he would get hurt if I leaned against him too hard.

  “It wasn’t just your problem. It’s our problem,” I said.

  “There wasn’t anything you could do anyway. If you thought I should get the treatment, I would have said no. It’s not worth a few extra months when you’re miserable. Besides, you were so happy. Your book was going so well. You finally figured out what you wanted to be when you grew up.”

  Aerospace had been fun and exciting, always something new, reaching the ends of the earth and beyond. But books! Anything and everything
could happen with books, even the impossible. There were no limits.

  His last comment drew a slight smile on my face and an even bigger one when I punched his arm in jest. Then my tears came. “We have to tell the girls.” I wrestled an upcoming sob. “They need to know.”

  * * *

  “Is all that stuff true?” Glenn asked when he finished reading my debut. I spent three weeks on pins and needles awaiting the inevitable questions.

  “It’s a work of FICTION,” I said, thinking some questions are best unanswered. “Fundamentally Invented Characters True In Only Novels,” and left it at that.

  The truth was that it was a hodgepodge of memoir, fantasy, and imagination. Inexpensive compared to hours on a shrink’s sofa. David, listening as I wrote, was the only one who knew the truth, the whole truth . . . so help me God. I changed the names where it mattered to protect the guilty.

  “Did you love him more than me?” Glenn asked. His question startled me, but I didn’t show it; my heart began to race.

  “No.”

  There was an empty pause. David jumped into Glenn’s lap, circling three times before settling in. I reached over and scratched under David’s furry chin while considering my next words.

  “Here’s the difference,” I said, hesitating. “He made loving him easy.”

  I looked at David, who purred beneath my fingertips, then I looked up, meeting Glenn’s eyes. He looked away.

  I remembered Megan telling me I was the apex of a love triangle. Love triangle sounded so wrong. So dirty. I’d come to realize it wasn’t a flat, self-serving triangle at all, but a love tripod. Three legs—Reese, Glenn, and me. None of us was at the top. We held each other up even though the two of them had never met. The absence of any one of us would have caused our fragile sphere to fall. The same sphere which housed our precious and well-adjusted daughters, Reese’s father, Colonel Jackson Kemp and his family, and Mother. There were more.

  “I know I haven’t been easy to live with, but I’m glad you did.”

  “I’m glad I did too,” I said, reflecting on the water under the bridge, the same water I almost drown in, yet gave me life.