by Cathy Lamb
“Why do you need an allowance, Mom?”
“That’s what I said!” She was so indignant. “He gave me a credit card to use as I saw fit, and now he’s telling me I can’t use it as I see fit because, he said, I spent too much. The only things I ever bought were the essentials.”
“Essentials” meant new clothing and jewelry, to my mother. “I meant, Mom, why do you need an allowance at all? Why aren’t you working? You could make your own money. You could be independent.” My mother didn’t work. Ever. She leeched from husband to husband. Her rich parents had not instilled a work ethic in her. She told me when I was a girl, “Daddy knew how to take care of the women in his family.”
“I don’t have time to work, Natalie,” she said, aghast at the prospect. “I help out on Dell’s ranch.”
That was not remotely true. I was getting tired. I had woken up this morning, had breakfast, gone to my therapy classes, then started working on my necklaces. I loved my art, I did. Making jewelry was soothing to me, creative. And now the Spoiled Devil had arrived, sucking my energy out like a hose.
“He’s limiting me. I feel controlled. Condescended to.”
“What is the amount that he’s limiting you to?”
“Two thousand a month.”
I almost choked. “Two thousand? You pay bills with that, too, right? Food?”
She was offended, her lips a straight line. “No. You must be joking. Dell pays the bills. This is my personal money.”
“And two thousand is not enough?” Was she serious?
She sat up ramrod straight in her chair. “Natalie. Please. I do not dress like you. As a leader in the community, I must dress the part.”
“He’s a rancher. No one expects you to wear designer clothes out in the fields.”
“I don’t go out in the fields. That’s for the hired hands. Truly, Natalie.” She held out her hands, her nails manicured and painted. “Do these hands look like they could do anything, ever, in a field?”
It was a long morning.
* * *
Before my mother left, she hugged me. It was a long hug. Then she cupped my face with her hands and the mask fell, the arrogance and the obnoxiousness. “I love you, Natalie.”
“I know, Mom.”
“It’s hard for me to come here, to see you.”
“I know, Mom.”
“It’s a long drive, too.”
“Very long.”
“And I have to do it all by myself.”
“Difficult.”
Yes, coming to see me was hard for her. She’s not a wise, compassionate woman who works within the messier parts of life. She doesn’t like any upset, any trouble, any stress. Her life must revolve around her. She’s not well versed at sticking around when life gets troublesome or difficult. That’s why she left her first husband, my dad. It was hard to be the wife of a roofer. He didn’t make enough money to indulge her, and his life could not revolve around her bottomless ego and her shallowness.
“I’m glad you’re better.” She hugged me again, then whispered, “But wear some makeup, dear. At your age, you need it.”
* * *
I was trying so hard to remember the morning of my crash. In the middle of occupational therapy, in the practice kitchen, I remembered yelling at Zack in my pink lace robe. It was something about a lie. It was something about a man named . . . Devon.
Then I had that vision of my grandma pushing me again . . . which was just ridiculous.
Grandma Dixie became my mother after my own left. We were always close. I worked with her in her mechanic’s shop and learned all about cars. I went to her home regularly to visit, and make pies with her, especially apple pie.
She taught me how to play poker, shoot guns and bows and arrows, and how to defend myself. She taught me about life and compassion and how to change oil and flat tires. She taught me to appreciate the slick speed of a sports car and a dented, reliable truck and how to work hard.
Grandma Dixie loved me and when she died when I was sixteen I was heartbroken.
We buried her in the family plot, right next to her parents, and I planted bulbs on her grave. Sometimes, when I’m home, I’ll bake her apple pie, bring it up, and eat it while I talk to her.
I have never stopped missing her, and when I see her antique, ornate, crystal perfume bottles and open the stoppers, I can catch her rose scent . . . and sometimes, I swear, her laugh.
Which made me think of that elusive fight with Zack again and then staring right at Grandma Dixie’s perfume bottles in our home and thinking that she would know what to do. . . .What happened that morning?
* * *
My dad came to visit again. “I’m still making necklaces, Dad.”
His face lit up. “Let’s see ’em.”
I showed him a few. I had given a bunch away to other patients. “Want to make a few together?” He did. Soldier came over and saluted and asked my dad if he knew how to knit. “I lost my blue yarn, but then Frog Lady said it was under the couch.”
My dad asked him to show him how to knit, and Soldier did. It was touching to see Soldier and my dad knitting together.
Architect came over and drew my dad a house with modern lines. “Does she like me?” he whispered to my dad, holding his hand close to his chest as he pointed at me.
“I’m sure of it, son,” my dad reassured him. “You seem like a smart fellow, so why wouldn’t she?” That pleased Architect. He added smiley faces to the front of my dad’s house.
Frog Lady made my dad a clay frog with a beard. “You are handsome,” she said to him. “Do you study species?”
It was a nice afternoon with my dad and my new banged-up friends. I had to lie down after that, my head hurting, my words not coming out right, still slurring.
“I love you, Hummingbird.”
“Love you, too.”
* * *
My dad fell off a roof when I was seventeen.
He broke four vertebrae in his back. He was not a risk-taker, and he’d been tied to the chimney, but he fell on a slippery, shingled roof and landed wrong.
He had an operation and was in the hospital for three weeks.
When he came home, he could hardly move, the pain excruciating. He refused to take painkillers after he left the hospital. His best friend had gotten addicted and overdosed. He would not be that man, so my dad took over-the-counter meds only, which did not work.
But my dad’s accident soon sent us off the deep end. He had managed to save about three months of living expenses. My beloved grandma had died the year before from emphysema. My dad made sure she was able to stay in her gracious, elegant (expensive) care home until the end. He refinanced his home to do so.
But with his back injury, he couldn’t work. He could barely stand.
I had a part-time job at a bakery in town, but I didn’t work for a month because I spent all my time after school with him at the hospital. By his bedside, I made the rock jewelry. Sometimes Chick and Justine would come and make the rock jewelry with me.
The second month, when he was home, I didn’t work at the bakery, either, because he needed help when I got home from school. I also took care of the animals and then picked the apples from our orchard to sell at the farmers’ market on Saturday along with the rock jewelry. You could buy necklaces at our stand, and apples. His condition worsened. He had an emergency operation and was in the hospital for a week.
I took over the checkbook and paid the bills and knew we couldn’t go on forever. The third month, I went back to work at the bakery, part time, as my dad was able to get out of bed. The fourth month he was able to walk around, but getting on a roof would have been impossible. He could no longer climb; he could no longer work that hard. He could stand only for short periods of time. Determined to make money, he worked on his fountains and windchimes and sold them to the nursery in town.
We were in for another blow, though. Premium Health Insurance Company sent a letter saying they would not pay for my dad’s hospit
al stays, operations, or treatment. Hadn’t he read the fine print of his contract? They wouldn’t cover his injuries because he should have been covered by workman’s comp. Or a union. Or a separate policy.
We don’t cover falls off roofs. Duh. Sorry. This is on you, buddy.
This, after my dad had been paying monthly premiums since he had me. My dad hired Jilly Tebow, an attorney in town. Jilly used to work in a high-voltage firm in San Francisco. She retired her multimillionaire-self and moved to our town to be closer to outdoor activities. She married a farmer and learned how to drive a tractor. She loved a hot fight. Thrived off of it.
Jilly smothered Premium Health Insurance in legal letters and threats.
But Premium told Jilly that in addition to not having the “correct” policy, my dad hadn’t gone to an “approved” hospital, when he was carried in to a local hospital after falling off a roof, only semiconscious from the pain, by his employees. They didn’t cover medical care at that hospital, out in eastern Oregon. He should have instructed his coworkers to take him to St. Mary’s, in Portland, five hours away, though, again, he was semiconscious and not speaking. Jilly smothered them in more legal letters and threats.
Then Premium said that, in addition, my dad had chosen doctors who were not under his “assigned and agreed-upon ‘umbrella’ of medical personnel,” while in the emergency room after he fell off the roof. The doctors who later did both operations also were not under his “assigned and agreed-upon ‘umbrella’ of medical personnel.” And, please note, they had never approved his second operation in the first place, which was clearly unnecessary.
In addition, his follow-up appointments were also “unnecessary,” as if after an operation for broken vertebrae, he never should have seen a doctor again. Even so, they would not be paying for any part of his care, as it was “unfortunate” that my dad had not read the full legal contract, which he signed, that their lawyers had written up in a format that is incomprehensible to anyone who is not a long-term lawyer and also brilliant at deciphering code for “We suck as an insurance company and we will make you pay us your monthly premiums and then we will abandon you when you have a medical emergency.”
Next, Premium Health Insurance officially dropped him altogether. “In addition . . . we regret to inform you that your insurance policy with us is now cancelled. . . .”
Jilly filed a lawsuit.
In the meantime, as that lawsuit ground on, my dad couldn’t get on a new health insurance plan because now he had a preexisting condition. I, also, was not covered. We struggled. I worked at the bakery, I went to school, and I sold my rock jewelry and our apples at the Saturday market in town. I paid for our phone, our electricity, our water. I paid as much as I could toward the mortgage. Luckily, we were on the receiving end of endless meals/ deer meat from our friends in town. They didn’t know how bad it was for us—my dad would never have shared that—but the meals meant our food bill went way down.
My dad was humiliated, stretched out and aching in bed, his face white, his body rigid in pain, the second operation a dismal failure. My dad had always provided. He had always bought me school clothes and a new coat each year, and shorts and T-shirts for summer. He made sure I had boots and tennis shoes. He bought me Christmas and birthday presents, a mix of what I needed and what I wanted. Nothing lavish. He took care of me, and now the tables were flipped.
“I’m proud of you, Natalie,” he told me, his voice strained with pain. “But I am sorry.”
“Don’t be sorry, Dad. Please.” I hugged him. His head bent in defeat, but only for a minute. The man was a fighter.
On the day we had twelve dollars in our account, the house payment only partially paid, our medical bills completely unpaid, we were hit with a ray of hope. An artist moved into town. Margarita Hammer specialized in outdoor art, the enormous type that graces parks and city squares and libraries and government buildings.
Margarita, “half Mexican, half Dutch, one hundred percent rebel woman,” as she told us, was famous, eccentric, kind in a gruff way, and provided health insurance to her six employees. She needed a metalsmith for her artwork. She hired my dad. He would work sitting down most of the time. It wasn’t comfortable—his back still felt like a vice was squeezing him—but he could do it. He absolutely loved Margarita, the work, and his coworkers, three of whom had come from San Francisco specifically to work for her.
With the new health insurance he was able to go to a specialist. The specialist ordered an immediate operation and said the second operation had done more damage than help. My dad put it off as he’d just started his new job, but after three months Margarita Hammer found out what was going on and insisted my dad get the operation and threatened to fire him if he didn’t go. “Get your butt in there, Scott, or you’re out,” she told him. I was there when she said it, and I almost cried I was so grateful.
The operation helped immensely; the surgeon was brilliant.
My dad began to get better, stronger each day, and with it his fighting spirit returned. He now had the energy to go after Premium Health Insurance to pay for what they did to him. “Not only for me, Hummingbird,” he said, “but for my fellow Oregonians who don’t know what a rat’s ass of a company this is. They, and their children, are not protected. I would run them over with my tractor if I could.”
My dad’s case in court received a lot of attention, thanks to a talented young journalist named Draper Yates Hernion at our small town newspaper who was gunning to make a name for himself and move on. Jilly managed to get the trial set in our county, though Premium Health fought it.
Premium Health was arrogant and elitist. They thought they could lean on the fine print in the contract my dad had signed years ago to slither out of their obligations. They thought their slick attorneys could turn the heads of “easily swayed” people, the jury, who lived in eastern Oregon. It did not help that Draper overheard, and recorded, on the first day the attorneys were in town, those slimy city men talking about the “hicks” and “uneducated mice” and “tractor-driving, cow-herding, pig-slaughtering farmers and their fat farmer wives” and “straw-brained idiots” in Lake Joseph, and he printed it in an article here in town.
We have two hotels in Lake Joseph. After that article came out, all of a sudden, one of the hotels was chock-full. No rooms at all, they were booked for six full years. Sorry, Mrs. Golda Reams told the attorneys, “You’ll have to go somewhere else, gentlemen. Perhaps a cave, where you belong. Or a swamp. Have you considered the dump?” The attorneys blinked at her. Mrs. Reams has white, curly hair and stands six feet tall. She was in the army. “I can drive you to the dump,” she offered.
Avery Lindal, the owner of the second hotel, told the attorneys they were infested with lice and rats at the moment. She thrust her own pet rat, Maxie, in front of their faces and said, “Look what I found in the pantry!” Then she scratched her head hard and said, “Lice are impossible to get rid of.” They grabbed their suitcases and turned around. “Don’t you want to pet this rat?” she called after them, running with poor Maxie clutched in her hands. “They’re members of your own family!”
Our two bed-and-breakfasts had “no room, not one, especially for liars.” The attorneys went to the next town and the next town and the next, and by golly, no one had any room. Not one hotel or bed-and-breakfast. The attorneys ended up commuting two hours, each way, each day, to the trial.
They should have known that the “tractor-driving, cow-herding, pig-slaughtering farmers and fat farmers’ wives” across county lines would talk to one another.
Jilly walked the jury through all of my dad’s bank statements, showing how he’d paid his health-care premiums monthly, then she detailed my dad’s accident. His trip, semiconscious, to the hospital. How he was penalized by Premium Health for not protesting his entry into the local hospital because he was, again, semiconscious and in grave pain and not able to speak. How he was supposed to tell his employees to drive five hours to the hospital in the city that
was “approved for care.” How Premium continually refused to pay because of “absurd and criminal reasons.” How he, a single dad, had had to fight Premium Health after breaking four vertebrae in his back.
“This man, Scott Fox, paid premiums, every month, to get care, and when he fell off a roof, where was Premium Health Insurance? Cutting Mr. Fox out and laughing about it.”
The jury, filled with “fat farmers’ wives” and “cow-herding farmers,” took twenty minutes to decide that Premium Health Insurance had done wrong. I’m told it took twenty minutes because the jurors needed to run to the bathroom, lickety-split.
When the decision was announced, that whole courtroom, filled with “hicks and uneducated mice,” stood up and cheered, including me, Justine, Chick, and their families. The judge, Zan Millotti, a respectable woman who hated when the big guys tried to eat/cheat the little guys, sat and glared at those lizard-like attorneys over the top of her glasses.
“Arthur Yelsen, Frederick Kennesen, and Maxim Meredith the third”—she could barely contain her sneer at “the third” part of his name—“Premium Health Insurance is legally obligated to care for its policyholders. You did not do that. One of your policyholders fell off a roof after years of paying his premiums on time. You declined to meet your responsibility. While this man was suffering, you told him you wouldn’t pay his hospital bills. While this man was in pain, you abandoned him. While this man was struggling to walk, you made his life worse. You cut him off when he needed medical care at his most desperate point. As he was suffering, you then took away his, and his daughter’s, health insurance.
“You, Arthur Yelsen, Frederick Kennesen, and Maxim Meredith the third”—there was that sneer again—“are a disgrace. Premium Health Insurance is a disgrace. You will not only immediately pay all of Scott Fox’s medical bills, you will pay his attorney. In addition, you will return all of Scott Fox’s monthly premiums to him, as you did not hold up your side of the contract until you were dragged to court.” She shot them a deadly stare over those glasses. “Disgraceful,” she said again. “You should be ashamed of yourselves and Premium Health Insurance. You should call your company Trash Insurance. Or Nothing Insurance. Or We Will Not Pay Anything Insurance.”