Live Like You Were Dying

by Michael Morris

  “Yeah,” I said and reached for my coffee. Circling my finger around the warm edges of the cup, I debated how much more to share with this man who was both friend and boss. “You say you got another doctor’s appointment tomorrow?” Jay asked.

  I bit my bottom lip and grimaced, and then, fearing that I might seem weak, I chuckled. “They’re working me over, but good. I think they’ve got a beach house to pay off or something.”

  “Man, do what you need to do. Listen to the doctors.”

  “Huh . . . that’s just it. They don’t tell me much.” Laying out the details of the suspicious spot, I watched Jay frown and then shake his head. “What’re you going to do?” he asked.

  “I’m trying to figure it all out. Day by day, you know.” When he got up to leave, he reached over and patted my arm. “Let’s hope that oncologist you’re seeing will point you in the right direction.”

  Watching Jay back out of the driveway, I wanted to run out the door and tell him that it was all a joke to buy me some time off. But it wasn’t a joke, and Jay sensed it the same way he could sense a vulnerable competitor ready for the kill.

  The next afternoon, Heather and I waited in yet another doctor’s office in downtown Atlanta. Various images of my mama during her downward spiral from pancreatic cancer floated through my mind. Treatment after treatment had left my mama a shattered woman with a tumor that refused to be broken. The last time I visited her, she had just had a procedure that was supposed to dry up the cause of her ailments. All it did was speed up her departure from this world. “I haven’t felt the same since,” she said with chapped and weathered lips. Her chalk-white hands matched the color of the sheet where she lay. “I’m just tired . . . just plain tired.” The way she died haunted me as much as her appearance the last time I saw her. She was alone when she left this world. My father had slipped off so that he could catch up on some sleep. In the end he had disappointed her, and the bitterness that I felt toward him had taken root.

  The doctor walked through the door and sat across from us at her mahogany desk. She had horn-rimmed glasses and streaks of gray throughout the chestnut hair that she twirled around her finger as she reviewed my chart. “I’m also inclined to say monitor it,” she said, putting my file on her desk. “I’d give it another month or two and then return for a follow-up X-ray and CT scan. However . . .” She looked away toward the gray sky beyond her window and then back to my medical file. “If you’re inclined not to wait, there is a study that a colleague of mine is leading. It’s a trial for an experimental drug that increases the likelihood of . . .” Experimental was the only word I needed to hear to know it was time for me to leave. She might as well have put a collar around my neck and called me her pet guinea pig.

  “What’s the matter?” Heather called out, running behind me in the hall.

  I passed a janitor slapping the floor with his wet mop. The elevator was now in full view. Heather hurried toward me, the tips of her heels clipping the floor like a military drumbeat meant for battle. All I could picture was the sight of my mother with cords snaking into her veins, spitting out the liquids that were referred to by code names. Experiments had done my mother in; I was sure of it. Now it was time for me to do what she should have done before her veins became bruised, squiggly lines that looked like worms beneath a layer of thin skin. It was time to break free and run.

  Heather never said a word as I slipped into the driver’s seat of our car. She knew me well enough to know that driving was something I had to do, something I could still control. We left the parking lot and drove in silence back to the bedroom community that housed Atlanta’s businesspeople, a world that I increasingly felt was not my own. —

  Following the doctor’s appointment, I couldn’t sleep at all. After tossing for half the night, I finally got out of bed at 4:30 and reached for the medicine that had always helped to soothe me in the past: work. I didn’t tell Heather I was planning on returning to the mill because I knew that I’d never hear the end of it.

  “What in the world are you doing?” she asked, squinting in the harsh bathroom light.

  With toothbrush in hand, I rolled my eyes and sighed. “I’m just going in for a little while.”

  “What?” Her voice was loud and her stance at the door told me that she was not giving in. “It’s not even daylight outside.” She glanced down at my work boots and threw her hands up in the air. “Unbelievable.”

  Following her back into the bedroom, I pulled a shirt from the closet and slapped the watch on my wrist.

  “You know, the doctor hasn’t signed a release for you to return to work yet.”

  “That hasn’t stopped me before now.”

  Heather yanked the blanket from the bed. “Why are you doing this, Nathan? Did Jay say something the other day?” “No, Jay said nothing. Look, it’s me. I need to work, Heather. If you want me sane, I need to work.”

  “So this is what you’re going to do? You’re going to go hide out at the job site every day instead of making a decision about what the doctors said.”

  I finished buttoning my shirt and flipped off the light switch, hoping that it would turn off the conversation too. “No sir,” Heather said and flipped the light switch back on. “You’re not getting away with this. For once, Nathan, think about someone other than yourself.”

  Her words pounded up against me until my chest ached even more. “What do you mean?”

  “I have watched you put that job first so many times that I can’t even count them anymore. You’ve never once thought of the cost to me or Malley.”

  “What are you talking about? I work like a dog to provide for my family.”

  “You’re talking about things. I’m talking about your presence in this house. You know, it’s funny: I thought the one good thing that could come out of your accident was being able to have you around more often. And now, here you are, wanting to run right back to work.”

  Heather pushed me away when I tried to hug her. “Don’t, Nathan. Don’t patronize me. I won’t stand here and watch you kill yourself. I refuse.” She turned off the light and fell into bed, pulling the sheet up around her neck.

  The ticking of the hallway clock let me know that time had not stood frozen. I eased out of the bedroom and contemplated still going into work, but Heather’s words kept me fenced for the time being. Outside, the stars were fading, and a turquoise color was rising up against the dark sky. An early-morning chill snapped me back to life. Heather had never understood why I needed to work harder than most. She had a college degree. My shortcut to the working world ended up being a shortfall for my self-esteem. Success at work was the adrenaline I craved, an assurance that I was not a failure in a world where opinions about men were made based on which engineering school they attended.

  A cloud of tension hung over the breakfast table that morning. While Malley cleared the dishes, I rubbed Heather’s back, trying to ask forgiveness without coming out and doing so. She nodded a weak acceptance and called out to Malley, “Go get your book bag. I don’t want to be late for work.”

  After they left I poured a cup of strong coffee in my travel mug and headed out for the mill. Heather might be upset if she found out that I went to work, but she’d be a whole lot more upset without a paycheck coming in to cover our mortgage.

  When I got there, Rex, the mill gate guard, sheltered his eyes from the morning sun. “Nathan? What in the world are you doing here?”

  “Rex, they’re working me over, but good,” I said, just as I had since the day we took on the mill project.

  “They told me you wouldn’t be back here for another three months or more,” Rex said and scribbled something on his clipboard.

  “Well, they told you wrong.” As I started to drive away, Rex’s words caused me to brake.

  “You’re gonna have to park out in the hourly employee area, though.”

  His cheeks blushed, and he flipped the pages on the clipboard. “A boy named Livingston showed up here last week, and t
hey told me to give him your parking place. He don’t look to be more than nineteen, if you ask me.”

  Driving through the mill, explanations for the situation flooded my mind. Most likely Livingston, the boy who’d just graduated from Georgia Tech’s engineering school, was filling in to make sure the shutdown project went according to plan. Besides, he had his own project at the textile mill in LaGrange to worry with.

  Walking through the employee parking lot, I saw the boy wonder’s Jeep parked in my spot right next to the metal trailer. Inside, the parts-supply man, Riley, was fixing a new pot of coffee. He flinched when he saw me walk in. “Well, hey . . . didn’t expect to see you.”

  “I got tired of counting ceiling tiles.”

  Riley stepped in front of me, still holding the can of Folger’s. “Everybody’s back there having a meeting in your office.”

  “Yeah, who’s everybody?”

  He glanced back at my office door and moved to let me slide past the copy machine. There were roughly twenty steps from the copier to my office door, but the voices floating from beneath the door made it seem more like two miles. Explanations that I had dreamed up while driving to the parking lot crumbled when I opened the door and found Brad Livingston sitting in my chair with his boots propped up on the desk. His eyes widened, and when he moved his feet, a set of plans fell to the floor. All of the foremen that I’d hired stood and tried to smile as if they’d expected me.

  “Looks like I’m interrupting something.”

  “No, that’s quite all right,” Brad said, rising to reach out his hand. “We’re just having our weekly update.”

  “How you making it these days?” Cal Rufford, the foreman over welders, asked.

  “Cal, I’m back to normal. Yeah, I woke up this morning thinking about that vat drum project that we need to—”

  “Uh, Nathan, we finished that last week,” Brad said and tapped his fingers against a stack of blueprints. “Hey, look, we’re all adults here. Nathan, why don’t you pull up a chair and join us.”

  Brad’s starched blue shirt wrinkled as he folded his arms. I stared at him long enough to make him reach down and fidget with the edge of a file on my desk.

  “I guess I lost the memo that said you were taking over my job.”

  Brad tossed his hands in the air and tried to joke it off. “Hey, with the pressure we’re under to get these projects in on time, I’m beginning to wish I hadn’t gotten the memo either.” Nobody followed Brad’s laugh, and he ended up coughing.

  Cal was looking down, tapping his pencil against a spiral notepad. “Is this the way it is, Cal? Have they replaced me with Super Boy?”

  “Nathan, there’s no need for that,” Brad answered for Cal. “We’re all on the same team here, and—”

  “Yeah,” Cal interrupted. “That’s more or less what happened.”

  “Cal, let’s not get into HR matters,” said Brad. “Look, Nathan, we welcome you here anytime. Jay has assured me that you’ll always have a place at Beckett Construction. Hey, if you were up to it, I could slot you as a millwright today.”

  “A millwright?”

  A shrill whistle from the plant vibrated the trailer, and the loudness washed away any words that might have been spoken.

  Walking past the copier, I tried to smile at Riley, just to let him know that the general was not fading into the sunset, but he never looked up. He just continued counting the number of bolts that were inside a plastic box.

  During the drive from the mill, I cussed that freckle-faced boy who had begged me with everything he was worth to leave college to work with him. Blood boiled until my hands twitched from pure hatred for Jay Beckett. My truck had practically memorized the drive to the corporate office, and I never even recalled taking the exit off of the interstate.

  Located on the fourteenth floor of rented office space, Jay prided himself on being able to look out of his floor-to-ceiling office windows and see Stone Mountain. Now it was my plan to let him take a flight to the mountain by personally throwing him out the window.

  When I opened the glass doors to the office, a young temporary worker with a row of pierced earrings scanned me from head to toe.

  “Get Jay Beckett out here,” I demanded.

  She knocked over the trash basket while trying to move away from the desk. After she had disappeared down the hall, Louise Finches walked out into the lobby, shaking her head. An older woman with bouffant red hair and a no-nonsense style, she had been with the company as long as I had. As the office manager, she knew Jay as good as anybody, and probably better than his wife.

  She glanced at the young receptionist. “I’ll take it from here.” She swept the air with her hands, and the young woman darted away.

  “Louise, now, don’t get in the middle of this. This is between Jay and me.”

  “Honey, I know, but he’s not here today.”

  Pacing around the glass coffee table that was most likely a rental, I never paused when a magazine fell to the floor. “Don’t start, Louise. Don’t patronize me like this. He’s here and I know it.”

  “Now, Nathan, get ahold of yourself.” Louise gripped my shoulders and looked me square in the eye. Her dark eyes were tired and circled in loose skin. “You’ve got a wife and a daughter to think about. Go home and take care of them. Take care of yourself. Come back after your body has healed. This isn’t nothing but a thing. Just a job, for crying out loud.”

  I laughed and then became concerned when my voice cracked. This place was not a job to me. It was my life. I had worked my tail to the bone for this business, and now they were pushing me out.

  Two women leaned against the frosted glass wall that separated the reception area from the rest of the office. When I glanced in their direction, they flinched and walked away.

  “Here’s the problem with you boys,” Louise went on. “You think life is nothing but profits and margins. You of all people should know different. You almost lost your life once already for such foolishness. Take this time off, Nathan. When you’re better, then deal with it.” She squeezed my shoulders. “Go home. It’s where you belong right now.”

  “Go ahead then; protect him.”

  “Honey, I’m protecting you.”

  Turning to leave, I yanked the glass door to the office with everything that I had in me. The door crashed against the wall and a gasp rang out. The sound of shattering glass brought the rest of the office staff out into the reception area. Looking over my shoulder, the last thing I saw before I walked into the elevator was Louise standing in the middle of the group, looking at me with her mouth wide open. Glass once painted with the Beckett Construction logo that I had helped design now rested in pieces at her feet.

  After supper, I sat on the step outside our front door as country as I pleased, wearing only jeans. It was the first time that I had dared to sit out in the yard shirtless and shoeless. The white bandage covering my outward wound shined for all the neighborhood to see, but my inner wound was buried so far down that not even Malley and Heather could detect it.

  The smell of freshly cut grass and the squeals of playing children were the only indicators that a change of seasons was taking place. Our brick house was complete with two white columns next to the front door. My hard work, common sense, and long hours had paved our entrance into Atlanta’s latest gated subdivision, complete with a community swimming pool. Now the job that had made it all possible was being managed by a boy who was technically young enough to be my son.

  When the front door opened, light from the living room fanned across the manicured grass, and the sound of a TV show poured out into the night. Heather squeezed in next to me on the step and hooked her arm into mine. The smell of her skin was as pure as the crisp spring air.

  “What’re you out here thinking?”

  I shrugged and pointed toward the house across from us. “Do you know who lives there?”

  She followed my point and then looked back at me. “Well, yeah. Ken and Gloria.”

  “
What’s their last name?”

  Heather wrinkled her brow and squeezed me slightly as if she thought I might have taken a leave of my senses. “Jarvett, Jarvis . . . something that starts with Jar.”

  When I laughed, she tossed her head back. “I don’t know. What difference does it make?” she asked. “Could be Jarhead for as much as I know.”

  “That’s what I’m getting at. We don’t know jack about these people.”

  “Well, Nathan, we haven’t exactly hosted a block party or anything.”

  “But you know what? In Choctaw we would know them. We’d know their parents, their grandparents.”

  Heather smiled and rested her hand on her chin. “What’s really bothering you tonight? I know it’s not knowing the last names of our neighbors.”

  For a second we just sat there, feeling each other’s breath rise and sink in a pattern that made us seem like we had one heart, one life, and I attempted to ignore her question. “Nothing . . . well, let’s just say that you don’t have to worry about me going into work, because they don’t need me.”

  “And who cares?” Heather threw her hands up in the air. “Listen to me: we need you. We need you right here with us.”

  A group of children rode past on bicycles, and I thought how much freer I’d felt at that age, with no responsibilities. Heather tapped me on my arm and made me look at her. “When are we going to talk about that doctor we saw yesterday?”

  “Seemed nice enough. I didn’t like the way she kept playing with her hair, though.”

  “Don’t give me that. You know what I’m talking about. The options.”

  “Options!” I almost coughed out the word. “Not many of her options sounded too good to me.”

  “Well, we can always go back to the surgeon and tell him . . .”

  Pulling at a loose string at the waist of my jeans, I shook my head. “No, I’m through with their options. That lung doctor is the only one who made a lick of sense. I’m through with discussing, cussing, and discussing this mess yet again.”