I felt dizzy. There was a long pause.
“Miss? Codi?”
“Rita, I’m really sorry. What can I tell you? He’s losing his mind. He’s got a disease that makes him confused. I think he was really just trying to do his job, but he got mixed up about what was the appropriate way to talk to you.”
“I heard that. That he had that disease where you go cuckoo and turn back into a baby.”
“Well, that’s not quite the way I’d put it, but it’s true. Occasionally rumors are true.”
“Is it true you’re really a doctor?”
I looked out my east window at the wall of red rock that rose steeply behind the house. “No,” I said. “That isn’t true. Did he tell you that?”
“No.” She paused. “Well, yeah. He said something a real long time ago, that you were in medical school or something. But not this last time. I heard it from somebody else, that you’re a doctor and Doc Homer’s dying and you’re going to take over.”
“Take over?”
“Take over being the doctor for Grace. They said you already saved that baby down at Doña Althea’s restaurant.”
“Oh, Jesus Christ.”
“Look, people say stuff, okay?” Rita said. “This town is full of major mouths. It’s just what I heard.”
“I’m only here till the end of the school year, so you can tell whoever’s spreading that gossip they’re full of shit.”
“Okay. Sorry.”
I regretted snapping at Rita. “It’s okay,” I said. “It’s not your fault. I’m not used to living in a place where everybody’s into everybody else’s business.”
“It’s the bottom level, isn’t it? My mom found out I was pregnant from a lady that works at the bank. Mom goes, ‘What is the date today?’ and the lady goes, ‘The fourteenth. Your daughter will be due around Valentine’s Day, won’t she? I had a baby on Valentine’s Day.’” Rita paused for my opinion.
“Yeah,” I said. “It’s the bottom level.”
“Uh-huh. Mom told me after that she had to tear up three checks in a row before she could make one out right. Like that was my fault.”
I set out to find Doc Homer the minute I hung up the phone, but it took me a long time to track him down, and my energy for drama kind of petered out. First I went to his office in the basement of the old hospital, up on the plateau—it was four o’clock on a Wednesday and he should have been there. But Mrs. Quintana said he’d gone downtown to check on old Mr. Moreno’s oxygen machine because it was making a noise, and then he was going to stop at the grocery to pick up some pork chops. It had been half an hour so I figured I’d catch him if I skipped Mr. Moreno and went straight to the grocery, but I got there too late. The grocer, Mrs. Campbell, said he had come there first, having forgotten he needed to go to Mr. Moreno’s. He’d stood for six or eight minutes in canned goods, as if lost, and then it came to him. Mrs. Campbell told me this with a sort of indulgent wink, as if he were Einstein or something and you could forgive it. He’d left for the Moreno’ house, but first was going next door to the pharmacy to pick up Mr. Moreno’s emphysema medication. I skipped the pharmacy and headed for the bright pink Moreno house, thinking I’d catch him as he came out and we could walk together back up the long hill, past the hospital, to his house. So the war on germs in Grace was being waged by a man who got lost in fruit cocktail. There was a clinic in Morse, just across the state line, and according to Mrs. Quintana a lot of people now drove over there. Disloyally, she had implied; she adored my father. She noted primly that they’d have problems with their state insurance forms.
On my way to the Morenos’ I stopped at the P.O. There was a letter from Hallie, which I would save for later. I liked reading them alone, with time for filling in whatever she might leave out.
It turned out the Moreno visit had been unexpectedly brief, and he’d left already. The oxygen machine had stopped making noises all on its own. I walked back up the hill alone. By the time I finally did get to Doc Homer’s kitchen his pork chops were cooked and he was just sitting down.
He looked surprised, almost pleased, his face turning up from the table, and he offered to put something on the stove for me but I told him I wasn’t hungry. I sat down at my old place at the table where I’d passively refused food a thousand times before. But tonight it made me sad to watch him eat his solitary supper—he’d cooked one serving of an entire balanced meal, vegetables and everything. This amazed me. When Carlo went on his work binges at the hospital, I skipped meals notoriously; I was lucky if I hit all the food groups in four consecutive days. But I supposed Doc Homer had gotten the knack of solitude. For him it wasn’t a waiting period, it was life.
“I hear you were kind of hard on Rita Cardenal,” I said.
He flushed slightly. “Do you know her? She’s expecting twins. She needs to take better care of herself.”
“I know. She was one of my students till day before yesterday. She’s a good kid.”
“I’m sure she is,” he said. “But she is rather hard to talk to. I wrote down a prescribed diet for her, which she wadded up and threw in the wastepaper basket before she left my office. She said she would eat what she pleased, since her life was already a totally creeped scenario. That is a quote.”
I smiled. “Kids here have their own minds, I’m finding out. I hadn’t really expected that.”
“They do.”
“My students talk like a cross between Huck Finn and a television set.”
He seemed slightly amused. I knew I was avoiding the issue. I took a deep breath. “I think I’ve let things go too long. I should have talked to you a long time before now. I don’t think you’re doing too well, and I feel like I should be taking care of you, but I don’t know how. We’re the blind leading the blind here. All I know is it’s up to me to do it.”
“There is no problem, Codi. I’m taking an acridine derivative. Tacrine. It keeps the decline of mental functions in check.”
“Tacrine slows the decline of mental functions, if you’re lucky. And it’s experimental. I’m not stupid, I did a lot of reading in the medical library after you told me about this.”
“No, you are not stupid. And I am fine.”
“You always say you’re fine.”
“Because I always am.”
“Look, I’m only here till next summer. We need to get things squared away. What are you going to do when you can’t keep up your practice anymore? Do you think you’re being fair?”
He cut up his cauliflower, running the knife between the tines of his fork. He dissected it into neat, identical-sized cubes, and did not answer me until he was completely finished. “I’ll do what I’ve always planned to do, I’ll retire.”
“You’re sixty-six,” I said. “When do you plan to retire?”
“When I can no longer work carefully and capably.”
“And who’s going to be the judge of that?”
“I am.”
I stared at him. “Well, I think there’s some evidence that you’re slipping in the careful and capable department.” My heart was beating hard—I’d never come even close to saying something like that to him. I didn’t wait for an answer. I got up and walked into the living room. It was the same, piles of junk everywhere. I was startled by something new: a dozen women’s shoes from somewhere, arranged in a neat circle, toes pointed in. Superficial order imposed on chaos. It’s exactly how I would have expected Doc Homer to lose his marbles. I felt dizzy and unsupported by my legs or Doc Homer’s floor, and I sat down. I couldn’t even tell Hallie this. She would come home.
The old red-and-black wool afghan, Hallie’s and my comfort blanket in old times, was still folded tidily on the sofa. In the months I’d been here it hadn’t been unfolded once, I was sure. I took the thick bundle of it into my arms and walked back into the kitchen and sat down, this time in Hallie’s chair, the afghan pressed against my chest like a shield.
“I’m taking this, if you don’t mind. I’ll need it when it gets coole
r.”
“That’s fine,” he said.
I stared at him for another minute. “Do you know what people in Grace are saying?”
“That the moon is made of green cheese, I imagine.” He got up and began to wash the dishes from his small meal. A large and a small skillet, a vegetable steamer, a saucepan, plate and glass, spoons and knives of various sizes, and the Piper forceps. Including the pot lids, around twenty separate utensils to cook and consume maybe eight ounces of food. I felt obsessive myself for counting it all up, but it seemed to be a symbol of something. The way he’d lived his life, doing everything in the manner he thought proper, whether it made sense or not.
“They’re saying I’m a doctor,” I said to his back. “That I’ve come here to save Grace.” Hallie and I had already used up all the possible jokes on our town and Doc Homer: Saving Grace, Amazing Grace. Every one left a bitter taste in the mouth.
“And how do they propose that you’re going to do that?”
“I don’t know. However doctors usually perform their miracles.”
“You know very well what doctors do. You finished four years of medical school and you nearly finished your internship. You were only two or three months away from being licensed to practice.”
I touched my fingertip to some vagrant bread crumbs scattered across the table. Because his back was turned I had the courage to ask the question point blank. “How severely do you hold that against me? That I didn’t make doctor?”
“Who is saying you didn’t make it?”
“I’m saying it, right now. I don’t have it in me, now or ever. Just the idea of me being a doctor is ridiculous. People depending on me in a life-or-death situation? Remember when I took Red Cross swimming lessons? I tried out the elbow-hold rescue on Ginny Galvez and we had a near-death experience.”
He spoke without turning around. “How did you arrive at the conclusion that you could not be a doctor?”
For a minute I buried my face in the afghan, which smelled like a familiar animal. When I looked up again he was facing me, drying his hands on a dish towel, one finger at a time. “I would just like to know,” he said.
“I couldn’t make it through my rotation on OB-GYN. I was delivering a premature baby, which turned out also to be breach, and there was fetal distress, and the mother’s pressure started to shoot up. I just walked away from it. I don’t even remember exactly what I did, but I know I left her there. She could have died.” I corrected myself. “They both could have died.”
“You were only a first-year resident and it was a high-risk delivery. I’m sure there was someone on hand to back you up. Malpractice laws being what they are.”
“That’s not the point.”
“You don’t have to deliver babies to be a physician. I no longer deliver babies myself. There are a hundred specialties you could choose that have nothing to do with obstetrics.”
“That isn’t the point. People were looking to me for a decision, and I lost my nerve. You can’t lose your nerve. You’re the one that taught me that.”
He looked me straight in the eye and said, “I lose my nerve a dozen times a day.”
It was the last thing on earth I expected to hear. I felt as if I’d been robbed. I put my face back in the afghan and suddenly I started to cry. I have no idea where the tears came from, they just came from my eyes. I didn’t want either one of us to admit helplessness here. I kept my face down for a long time, soaking the wool. When I finally glanced up he was putting something away in the refrigerator. In the dark kitchen, the brightly lit interior of the refrigerator was a whole, bright little foreign land of cheerful white boxes, stacked like condominiums. There must have been fifty tupperware containers in there: pies, cakes, casseroles. I thought of Uda’s squash pie, and understood with surprise that all the women of Grace were taking care of Doc Homer. As a caretaker, I was superfluous.
He saw me looking at him. He stood with the refrigerator door half open, illuminating his face. “Codi, you could be a doctor if you wanted to do that. You learned the skills. Don’t try to put the blame on something abstract like your nerve—you have to take responsibility. Is it something you want, or not?”
“I don’t know.”
He didn’t move. I kept thinking he ought to close the refrigerator door. He’d always had a million rules about everything. Wasting electricity, for example.
“It’s not,” I finally said, for the first time.
“No?”
“No. I thought it would be an impressive thing to do. But I don’t think it was a plan that really grew out of my life. I can’t remember ever thinking it would be all that delightful to look down people’s throats and into their nasty infected ears and their gall bladders.”
“You’re entitled to that opinion,” he said. “That the human body is a temple of nastiness.”
I held him steady in the eye and he smiled, ever so slightly. “You bet,” I said. “People are a totally creeped scenario.”
The news from Hallie was brief and moderately alarming. There had been contra activity in her district, nobody hurt but four John Deere tractors burnt down to scorched metal hulls. She sounded sick about that. “A Deere is like a hunk of gold here. Because of the U.S. embargo we can’t get parts, and the ones still running are Nicaragua’s patron saints.” She sounded completely, happily settled in, though, much more so than I was in Grace. She talked about waking up in the mornings: Roosters hopping up onto the windowsill. An army of little girls in polyester dresses out in the street with huge baskets on their heads, forging out on a hundred urgent missions. She was making good progress with some new cultivation methods; wished she knew more about diesel mechanics. A man named Julio, a literacy teacher from Matagalpa, had asked her out on a date. (She drew stars all around the word “date,” making fun of herself.) They had busy schedules, so finally they met after work and rode together to a meeting in a church where Hallie delivered a lecture on pesticide safety. The church was full of gnats and kerosene smoke and little kids crawling around on a big piece of plastic, crying, impatient for their parents to take them home to bed. She and Julio had ridden over together on her horse, Sopa del Dia, and had a nice time going home.
Sunday night was Halloween and Emelina’s children took to the streets. Grace was at an interesting sociological moment: the teenagers inhaled MTV and all wanted to look like convicted felons, but at the same time, nobody here was worried yet about razor blades in apples.
Emelina volunteered me to go trick-or-treating with the four older boys while she stayed home to dispense bribes to the rest of the town’s marauders; she felt a pagan holiday would do me good. I was only chaperone and crossing guard, not expected to go in costume. There was a state law against anyone over twelve wearing a mask or making direct requests at people’s doors. The city fathers of Grace were independent to an extent: they ignored state law when they closed school on November 2 for the town’s biggest holiday, the Day of All Souls. But to be on the safe side they were going along with the Halloween mask law. John Tucker was disappointed but tried not to show it. Emelina encouraged him to go with us anyway, more or less as a second chaperone. She was wonderful to watch. I guess I’d never really seen good mothering up close.
He agreed to go, dressed in J.T.’s black raincoat, with a quarter-inch of talcum powder on his face. Emelina ran deep eyeliner shadows under his eyes. It was convincing—he looked either sick or dead, depending on his position. Mason went as a bug, with grocerybag wings and radio antennae strapped to his head with a yellow sweatband. He instructed Emelina to draw on bug fangs with her eyebrow pencil. I don’t think Emelina ever actually wore makeup, she just kept it on hand for emergencies. The twins both were going as teenagers (i.e., convicted felons), but decided they needed fangs also.
We made a pretty good haul; in this fruit basket of a valley, I’d never seen such an orgy of sucrose. Jawbreakers and Gummi Bears multiplied in the kids’ bags like the loaves and fishes. The twins pulled me along by bo
th hands, and Mason gripped my leg when we crossed the street. We hit every house on the road that circled the canyon to the south—the longest possible route to the courthouse. John Tucker hung back in the shadows at the edges of yards, but I escorted the boys right up to the doorsteps, secretly enjoying these little peeks into people’s bright living rooms. Our last stop was at the lemon-yellow home of Mrs. Nuñez, whom I knew to be an important figure in the Stitch and Bitch Club. I was beginning to learn my way around the matriarchy of Grace, a force unknown to me in childhood.
Old Mrs. Nuñez recognized the kids immediately, but for some reason mistook me for Emelina. I think she just didn’t really look. She chattered at the boys as she dropped Hershey’s kisses and bubble gum into their heavy grocery bags: “Oh, what an awful-looking bug you are. You get away from my house, you old cucaracha. And you ugly old twins, too. You’re too scary.” She kissed them all on the tops of their heads.
She stopped suddenly, holding her glasses and peering out at the pale apparition of John Tucker, who was hanging back around her shrubs as required by law. “Cielo santo!” she said, with real concern. “What’s the matter with your brother?”
“He’s thirteen,” said Glen.
All Souls’ Day dawned cool, and the people of Grace put on their sweatshirts and gave thanks. The heat wave was broken. By half past eight the sun was well up and sweatshirts peeled off again, but it was still a perfect day. Every able-bodied person in Grace climbed the canyon roads to converge on the cemetery.
It was the bittersweet Mexican holiday, the Day of the Dead, democratic follow-up to the Catholic celebration of All Hallows. Some people had business with the saints on November 1, and so went to mass, but on November 2 everybody had business at the graveyard. The families traipsing slowly uphill resembled harvester ants, carrying every imaginable species of real and artificial flower: bulging grocery sacks of chrysanthemums and gladioli; tulips made from blue and pink Styrofoam egg cartons; long-stemmed silk roses bouncing in children’s hands like magic wands; and unclassifiable creations out of fabric and colored paper and even the plastic rings from six-packs. The Stitch and Bitch Club had had four special meetings in a row.
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