“Sure is pretty,” someone would say, and they would all agree and marvel at the flowers in silence for a while.
The illness seemed worse this time around, or maybe it was just that they all knew how deadly it was. Grandma kept saying he’d recover the same as he did before, but Dr. Buckerfield always said goodbye when he left like he was saying goodbye forever and Meg often found herself checking for a heartbeat whenever he slept. Once the first batch of blooms were done, Meg was the one to arrange for deliveries. Grandma started slipping away with Old Hadley and the flowers, and the only way Meg could keep them all going was to pull out the dead roses and tulips and bring in fresh ones. It became necessary to stop in every day after work to make sure nothing was drooping.
“What do you make of all this business, Meg?” Old Hadley asked one day.
“If you mean your illness, I’d have to say, I think it’s horribly unfair.”
Old Hadley was propped up against a big pile of bedpillows, and he looked horribly small. He had one finger in The Hotel New Hampshire to hold his spot. “How do you figure?’
“Most people are getting this from sleeping around. You got it in a hopsital from a medical procedure.”
Old Hadley rubbed his chin. “I see what you’re saying. All the fuss and none of the fun. I never have been good at doing things the right way,” he chuckled. “At least you’re here, I got that much going for me. And soon I’ll be seeing my mama. She’s going to hit me up with a whole lot of I told you so’s, and I’m just thankful God gave me a little time to prepare.”
Meg touched his cheek, pretending to check for fever. “I liked what you said in Dr. Simon’s office about making it walk. It was very brave of you to go to Birmingham.”
He shook his head. “I had a handful of reasons for going to Birmingham, and I don’t think being brave was one of them. I’m just doing what anyone would do in my shoes—looking for a way to win.”
“A lot of people in your shoes would be too busy thinking about what they’re losing to realize there might be anything at all to win.”
“Maybe they need to take up pinocle,” he said.
After that, Meg didn’t feel so peevish anymore. She told Brenda James to go on and finish off the bowling league. She told her friends to count her out at Wingdings. She raided the old toyroom at home for board games and carted them over to Old Hadley’s house. Grandma was quite taken with Hi Ho Cherry-O.
She also made up a schedule, of sorts, to help pass the evenings. Mondays were Make Grandma Eat a Big Mac Night. Tuesdays were Change the Sheets & Take a Shower Night. Wednesday’s were Stay Up Late and Watch Dynasty Night. And every night was Game Night. When Old Hadley couldn’t manage Drink Your Water Night due to the painful sores in his throat, Meg considered taking him to the hospital.
He wanted to stay in his home, he said. The medicine wasn’t working so well this time, and there was nothing much they could do for him. “If I’m going to get better, I stand the best chance of it here in my own house. If I’m not, well, I’ll not get better here best in my own house, too. Either way, I don’t mean to miss out on Dynasty or losing to your grandmother at Clue.”
Old Hadley didn’t even like Dynasty, but he sure did enjoy ribbing Grandma about it. Sometimes the only spark he got all week long was the spark he got when he pretended they were going to watch The Facts of Life instead, and Grandma had to beg and plead and fluff his pillows until he’d agree to let them switch the channel.
Some days it seemed like these little tifs were the only thing to keep them going. Grandma was exhausted trying to help him. Patti Carol had left six months ago when she overheard Dr. Buckerfield mention GRID. They hired a nurse named Shaniqua Brown to come for eight hours during the day, and this helped. Shaniqua was a big bossy black gal, though, and Grandma didn’t care for her one little bit.
“Got no use for bossy people,” Grandma said.
This set Meg and Old Hadley to laughing until they both could hardly catch their breath. Still, it wasn’t like people were lining up for the job so Grandma was stuck with bossy Shaniqua.
###
Eventually, Old Hadley got too weak to even move Colonal Mustard around or put little plastic cherries on a tree. About the only thing he opened his eyes for was the news story Meg read him about a group in San Fransisco that had banded together to promote awareness of the disease.
“I hope they kick its ass,” Old Hadley croaked in a voice so raspy, the words sounded more like coughs than speech.
Buckerfield told Meg that he didn’t have long. Many a night, she’d stood over his bed with her hand pressed to his heart, whispering, “Please oh please oh please.” It was always such a relief to feel his heart still beating in there. Then, a funny thing happened one Saturday morning when she went to check on him. She peeked in the bedroom and discovered Old Hadley out of bed and wearing his old coveralls.
Grandma was holding a pair of carpenter’s pants pinched between two fingers, sneering at a brown splotch across the seat. “And what about this one? Are you sure it’s paint?”
“What else would it be?” Old Hadley asked.
Grandma snorted. “You’re an old man. Lord knows.”
“Hello, Meg,” Old Hadley said when he saw her standing in the doorway. “Your grandma and I are going to paint my bedroom.”
Meg almost fell over. “You’ve been laying in bed for weeks.”
Drop cloths had been spread over the furniture and floor. The containers of flowers formed an explosive garden off in one corner. “What’s your hurry all of a sudden?”
He shrugged his bony shoulders. “I’m tired of the color.”
Meg glanced at the bedroom walls. “They don’t have a color.”
“Precisely,” he said.
She didn’t know how he managed to stand when he couldn’t even managed to sit the day before. Still, his face looked more brown than gray at the moment, and he was stirring a can of paint with some of his former vigor.
“Well, this is quite a change,” Meg said.
Grandma leaned on Meg and stepped into the carpenter’s pants with the brown stain. “He could have painted this room a thousand times over yet he waits until today.”
“Couldn’t do it until today,” he said.
“Why the hell not, you doddering old fool?” Grandma said.
“Didn’t know what color to make it.”
Grandma gave Meg a pointed look and made the cuckoo sign.
“What color did you pick, Old Hadley?” Meg asked, twisting to look over Grandma’s shoulder as the woman fought to work her highheel through the pants.
“Magenta,” he said.
“That seems an odd color for a man,” Meg said.
“It is an odd color for a man,” he agreed. “Did you know that Newton didn’t even put magenta on his color wheel? He believed that only the spectral colors counted.” Old Hadley smiled and stirred his magenta paint. “Now Goethe, on the other hand, he argued that magenta was the natural result of mixing violet with red in the dark spectrum, just the same as mixing blue and yellow in the light spectrum will give you green. You see, I was reading Theory of Colors last night. Goethe thought magenta was an essential color.”
“Blah blah blah. What does that have to do with the price of tea in China?” Grandma asked.
Old Hadley quoted a poem for her:
Should your glance on mornings lovely,
Lift to drink the heaven's blue
Or when sun, veiled by sirocco,
Royal red sinks out of view -
Give to Nature praise and honor.
Blithe of heart and sound of eye,
Knowing for the world of colour
Where its broad foundations lie.
He stood up with a wince and a creak. “Goethe said that.” He picked out a paintbrush from a pile on the floor. “Would you like to help, Meg?”
The three of them stood before the first dingy wall, contemplating where to begin. “I knew a woman once who painted he
r walls the most God-awful shade of red,” Old Hadley said.
“And how is this different?” Grandma asked.
“It isn’t. What you got to understand is that it’s about how the color makes you feel. That woman, she needed to make her walls red at the time.”
Meg couldn’t stop looking at them both. How could he be well enough to paint a wall? And Grandma! It would have been funny enough to see her in pants, but carpenter’s pants?
“I always start with a message when I paint,” Old Hadley said. “Some little thing that will secretly live on underneath the color.”
“You do?” Grandma asked. “Do all my walls have secret messages hidden under their colors?”
“Every single one of them. Now what sort of message shall we put on this wall?”
“If no one knows it’s there, what good is it?” Grandma wondered.
“We’ll know it’s there.”
Meg dipped her brush in the magenta paint. “I don’t mean to get all corny with this, but Old Hadley has taught me something that I hope I never forget. Maybe we could paint that on the wall, just to be on the safe side?”
“What is it?” Grandma said. “Never sit in poop-colored paint?”
“No, Grandma. He’s taught me that you don’t have to just lay down and die just because you’re going to die. I’ve played a lot of pinochle with you both, yet I never understood until now that there is more than one way to win. I propose we paint one word each. Grandma, you get MAKE. I’ll go in the middle with IT. Old Hadley can do WALK.
“That is corny,” Grandma said, but she went up to the wall and painted her word in curly, pink letters. Meg made her letters big and wide. Old Hadley finished like a pro, his lettering beautiful and strong. They all stood back to admire their work.
MAKE IT WALK
“Needs an exclamation point,” Meg said.
Somehow, all signs of illness seemed to evaporate as they slapped on coat after coat of bright paint. They opened the windows, and the sun came in, and when magenta splattered on Grandma’s shoes, she didn’t even stop to wipe them off.
Old Hadley knew grandma when she was a child, and Meg asked him what she was like back then. “Was she as sassy as she is now?”
There was a time when Meg would have never voiced such a thing out loud for fear of the repercussions, but the strokes of noisy pink paint made her feel bold.
“She was terrifying,” Old Hadley said as he meticulously cut in around the door. “Some things never change.”
“He always thought he was so special. I had to knock him down a peg or two,” Grandma said.
“Her hair wasn’t that phony color of yellow that it is now,” Old Hadley continued.
Grandma looked like she might kick over the paint bucket.
“It was the color of butter,” he said.
Grandma shook her paintbrush at Hadley. “He pretended he couldn’t read so I would have to give him lessons.”
“She liked giving lessons.”
Meg wished now that she had never brought up their childhood. She hadn’t meant to ruin the moment. It was always ticklish with Grandma.
“We read some wonderful books,” Old Hadley said.
Grandma nodded. “We had a book club, believe it or not.”
“We made up our own holiday.”
Grandma looked down at the trail of little pink footprints she’d made across the drop cloth. “He was my closest friend.” She slapped a few sloppy strokes over their message. “Pathetic, isn’t it?”
The room was hot now, thanks to the sun. It smelled of paint and flowers, and everyone’s skin was the color of a rose. The paint pinked everything. “It’s like a sunset in here,” Meg said.
“Or a sunrise,” Old Hadley said.
Because he was beginning to look tired and there wasn’t a good place to move the vases, they decided to paint around the flowers. White shadows in the shape of Ballerina roses remained on the magenta walls. “We can go back and get those later,” Meg said. “Let’s put you on the couch tonight.”
A bed was made up in the other room, and Old Hadley looked sleepy but happy when she tucked him in. “Thank you,” he said, and he squeezed her paint-stained fingers.
Meg cleaned the brushes under the hose outside and the grass and mud turned the color of Old Hadley’s bedroom. She hammered the lid down on the paint can and left it by the front door so they could finish up another time. She hung the carpenter’s pants next to Old Hadley’s coveralls and took her grandmother back to her house. “We can move Old Hadley into his magenta bedroom tomorrow,” Meg said.
###
Meg stopped at the market for some milk and doughnuts the next morning, and when she paid Mr. Bing, she noticed there were dark crescents of magenta still clinging under her fingernails. The color made her smile.
When she opened Old Hadley’s door, it was clear he’d already moved back into his bedroom. The house smelled of the work they’d done, and Meg pondered his other white walls, wondering what wild color they might make them. She put the doughnuts on a white china plate she found in the kitchen, poured three glasses of milk, and carried them on a tray into the magenta bedroom.
Grandma was back and sitting in a chair beside his bed with a book in her lap and a drop cloth bunched around her paint-dribbled shoes. She was fast asleep, and something about her looked different to Meg. She suspected it was all that lovely pink light. It softened her. Old Hadley was in bed, just as she’d guessed, and she tipptoed in, quiet as a mouse.
A jar on the nightstand caught her eye when she made room for the tray. Every vase, cup, bottle, and jar to be found had been confiscated for the indoor garden except for three glasses they’d saved for drinking. The jar stood out like a sore thumb. The word WHOOPS had been handpainted on one side, and there was nothing in it. Now why did they empty this one? Meg thought.
She glanced around at the mess they’d left behind, dropcloths splattered with multicolored drips from other walls and other secret messages, magenta-tipped paintsticks, the occasional loose nail scattered here and there on the floor, and the snow-white silouette of ballerina roses growing up one wall. Perhaps we should leave that wall alone, she thought? The white of the roses somehow made the magenta all the more special and beautiful.
With a little searching , she was able to spot the brushmarks that hid the message they made. As she patted the spot, it occurred to her that she’d not heard any coughing since she came into the room. Maybe Old Hadley really was going to make another amazing recovery?
He looked awfully still. She rested her magenta stained fingers on his chest and softly chanted, “Please oh please oh please.”
Nothing.
She kept her hand on his quiet heart and whispered her prayer for a long time. Long enough for tears to fall on the tops of her fingers and slide away between them. “Grandma,” she said. “He’s gone.”
At that same moment, she realized what was different about Grandma. She was wearing glasses! Grandma didn’t own glasses. Grandma was like Mrs. Leaf across the street who could only hear half the words anyone ever spoke to her yet refused to be fitted for a hearing aid. She placed her hand on Grandma’s chest, but this time she knew there was no point.
Just like that, on the same sunny morning, both of them were gone.
For the longest time, she stared at the glass full of purple-pink orhids that Grandma had arranged two days before. The flowers they’d shoved into the corner were crowded and mashing into each other, and Meg set about returning them to their appointed locations around the room, taking care to remember where Grandma had originally placed them, positioning flowers for optimum viewing. “There,” she whispered.
Curious to know what the last book was that Lucinda Worth-Homes and Hadley Crump read together, Meg slid the worn volumn from her grandmother’s grasp. It was a shabby, well-read thing and tucked between two pages near the very end was a yellowed recipe card printed in childish handwriting.
From the kitchen of . . .
Great Expectations
By Charles Dickens.
But, it is the same with any life. Imagine one selected day struck out of it, and think how different its course would have been. Pause you who read this, and think for a moment of the long chain of iron or gold, of thorns or flowers, that would never have bound you, but for the formation of the first link on one memorable day . . .
Rating System
Juicy Swears !
Lots of Kissing x
Pain and Suffering +
Could Make You Go Blind *
Books
Anna Karenina x+
Age of Innocence x+
Tom Jones x+*
Romeo and Juliet x+
Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man +x
Great Expectations +x
Hunchback by Victor Hugo +
Adventures of Tom Sawyer !
Pit and the Pendulum by Edgar Allen
Poe *
The Postman Always Rings Twice +x!
Dracula by Bram Stoker +x
Ulysses x*
Venus Wears Furs x*+
Of Mice and Men +!
Lady Chatterley’s Lover X*
Absinth: Torment of Love
Amaranth: Fidelity
Apple Blossoms: Good Fortune
Asparagus Fern: Fascination
Aster: Daintiness
Azalea: Ephemeral Passion
Begonia: Beware! I am fanciful
Bindweed: Busybody
Blue Bell: Delicacy
Buttercup: Childishness
Camellia – Red:
You’re a flame in my heart
Chrysanthemum, white: Truth
Clover: Fertility
Cockscomb: Silliness or foppery
Daffodil: Unrequited love
Dahlia: Good taste
Forsythia: Anticipation
Gardenia: I love you in secret
Heather: Protection from danger
Hollyhock: Fecundity
Hydrangea:
Thank you for understanding
Lavender: Constancy
Lily, day: Coquetry
Lily of the Valley:
The Reading Lessons Page 34