“You okay?” he asked me.
I nodded, though I felt a little dizzy.
He didn’t say another word to me, but kept alternating between thirty chest compressions and breathing twice into the man’s mouth. Time seemed to slow down, and for a few minutes the only thing I could hear was my father’s heavy breathing. Then I heard the sirens. When I looked up, two paramedics were running toward us, pushing a stretcher.
My father stepped aside as they loaded the man onto the stretcher. People were patting him on the back, saying great job, but he turned to me and said, “Let’s go.”
We left without paying for, or picking up, our groceries. It was as if my father desperately needed to get out of there.
On the drive home, I didn’t know what to say. He’d just saved a man’s life. My father was a nurse and trained to do these things, but it was still a shock to me. The only other medical thing I’d ever seen him do was apply a butterfly bandage to Mom’s forehead a few years ago when she tripped and ended up with a pretty good size gash over her right eye.
When we pulled into the driveway, he asked, “You okay?”
I nodded that I was.
“I’m going to go for a run to clear my head.”
“Sure, Dad,” I said. But I didn’t want him to go. I wanted him to explain to me what had just happened, how you could save someone’s life and want nothing more than to distance yourself from the event and not talk about it.
I watched my father walk out of our front yard. At the edge of the yard, he turned back as if he knew I was standing there. He smiled at me, a little forced half-smile and then disappeared down the street and into the sunshine ahead.
13
While my father was out on his run, I cleaned the bathroom and vacuumed: two more chores I had picked up since Mom left. When he walked in the front door, he was sweating as usual, his face flushed pink.
“I thought we might go to a movie after I take a shower,” he said. “Sounds good,” I said. I couldn’t remember the last time the two of us had gone to the movies.
We decided on an action movie, but I dozed off in the middle of it. When I woke up, I turned to my father. He was staring at the screen, a slight smile on his face. I was having a hard time seeing him as my dad, something had changed between us. Of course, it wasn’t hard to figure out why. How many people see their father save someone’s life?
After the movie, we went to Pizza Hut for dinner and ordered a large pepperoni. Mom hated meat on her pizza so she would only order cheese, maybe a veggie with extra cheese.
When I was stuffed and couldn’t take another bite, I finally said, “It was great, Dad, what you did at the grocery store.”
“You did a good job, Julian. Most kids wouldn’t have been able to handle it.”
“Have you done CPR before at work?”
“A few times. Do me a favor, Julian. Don’t tell your mother about it.”
“Why?”
“Just don’t, please.”
“Okay.” I wanted to ask him about Mom again, find out what was really going on between them. I had my suspicions, but neither one of them would tell me. And maybe it was because they didn’t want to disappoint me or maybe they didn’t fully understand it themselves. But I couldn’t push him that night, not after what he’d done.
“Did you always want to be a nurse?” I asked.
He laughed. “No. I wanted to be a potter.”
“A potter?”
“You know, like make pots, bowls. Your grandfather was a potter. He worked construction but at night and on the weekends he would go out to his garage and make pots. About once a month he would fire up his kiln, which was basically a big oven where you put the pottery so that it cooked and hardened. When I was about your age, he started letting me come out to the garage and taught me how to make a pot. I could see why he loved it so much. It just felt so natural to me, everything from turning the clay and shaping the pot, to firing the kiln.”
This was news to me about my grandfather, but I’d never known the man. He’d died the year I was born. And it was news to me that my father used to do pottery. I never would have guessed he’d done something like that. “Why did you stop?”
“Lots of reasons.”
“Like what?” I asked.
“I married your mother and one of us had to get a real job, so I enrolled in nursing school. I hadn’t planned on it. If you’d told me back when I was your age I was going to become a nurse I would have laughed in your face. Your mother actually brought the information pamphlet home and we read over it and it seemed like a good idea. At the last minute, she backed out. I figured what the hell and filled out all the forms and to my surprise they accepted me.”
“Do you miss it, pottery?”
“It’s been so long I don’t think about it anymore.”
“Couldn’t you do it like your father, at night and on the weekends?”
“I suppose I could if I really wanted to.”
I wanted to ask him if pottery filled his heart with joy at one time. I didn’t think being a nurse did and was pretty sure running didn’t either. I viewed his running this marathon as a goal he wanted to accomplish, a way to eat up time until this thing with Mom blew over.
“Why do you ask? You trying to decide what to do with your life?”
“I guess,” I said.
“Seems to me that you’d make one hell of a gourmet chef.”
“I don’t know.”
“We’ve all got to do something.” He looked at his watch. “Oh, shit. It’s seven. Your mother will be calling any minute.”
I’d forgotten about her calling tonight. I wondered if she’d call back later. In the time she’d been gone and we’d established the Wednesday and Saturday routine, I’d never missed one of her phone calls.
14
Since we were already late, we decided to stop and do our grocery shopping again. We didn’t go to our normal store. Dad said he didn’t want to run into anyone who knew what had happened earlier, so we ended up driving twenty minutes out of our way. It was almost nine by the time we made it home.
Mom had called three times. She didn’t leave a message, but I saw her number on the caller ID. After my father went to bed, I took the phone out on to the back porch.
“Everything okay?” she asked. “I was worried.”
I told her Dad and I had gone to a movie, then out for pizza and just lost track of time. I didn’t tell her about what happened at the grocery store, but I did ask about his pottery.
“Was he good?”
She laughed. “He was amazing, a natural. People would buy whatever he made.”
“So why did he quit?” I asked, wanting to hear her side of the story and wanting to know something more about my father’s life before he became a nurse.
I heard her light another cigarette, take a long drag and exhale. “I met your father at an arts & crafts show. He was only twenty, probably the youngest craftsmen at the show, but his pottery was amazing. I remember he had on old jeans, a T-shirt covered with dry clay, like he’d come straight from his workshop. He looked so damn handsome, Julian. He had longish hair and a beard. I asked for his number and called him a week later and asked him out.”
“You asked him out?”
She laughed again. “Hard to believe, I know. On our first date, I showed him some of my poems, which was all I wrote back then. He said he thought they were good. Three months later we got married.”
Maybe I’d heard the story of how they met before but had forgotten. But she still hadn’t answered my original question. “But why did he quit?”
“Why do people quit anything?”
“I don’t know.” I had quit playing sports because I knew I wasn’t very good at them, but that didn’t seem to be the case with Dad.
“What did he tell you?”
“He said one of you needed a real job, so he decided to become a nurse.”
When she didn’t say anything, I asked, “Is that tru
e?”
“Yeah, I guess it is.”
“Come on, Mom.” Our backyard was black dark and I could hear cicadas and frogs calling back and forth. I imagined my mother walking around a little motel room in Florida, a place that seemed as far away from me as a remote village in Russia, the phone pressed against her ear, covered by all that hair of hers.
“Out of the two of us, your father was the one who could go out and work in the real world. He was good at everything he did.
All I did, even back then, was smoke cigarettes and lean over a typewriter. I’ve never been any good at anything besides writing. When I got pregnant, he decided to go to nursing school. He planned to continue with his pottery on the side and weekends. And he did for a while, but you were not an easy baby and I needed help and he had his nursing classes and eventually it just got to be too much.”
“Do you still have any of his old pottery?”
“Only one, that pot in the living room. The one with the little flowers painted on it.”
I almost dropped the phone. My heart pounded in my chest and I felt, for a moment, like I might vomit. Shit, I’d destroyed my father’s last piece of pottery.
“You still there, Julian?”
“Yes.”
“I better go. It’s getting late.”
“Goodnight, Mom.” I hung up before the ocean air and wind filled my ear. After setting the phone on the table, I lowered my head into my hands and began to cry.
15
When I woke the next morning, my father was still asleep. I wasn’t sure I’d be able to face him after discovering what I’d done. I tried to find some comfort in the fact I hadn’t known what the pot was, or what it meant, but it didn’t offer much.
I walked over to Old Lady Peters’ backyard, but she wasn’t outside. I assumed Simon had already taken her for their usual Sunday outing. I changed the bath water and filled the feeders. On the table, a sparrow and a pair of chickadees were jumping back and forth, eating cookie crumbs.
I heard my back door open and knew my father was probably looking for me. I didn’t want him to catch me over here, but I didn’t really want to see him either. I felt awful about what I’d done and knew I couldn’t avoid him for too long. We were two guys living alone in a small house. But I didn’t really want to avoid him. I wanted to hear more of his stories, find out more about him and my mother.
Eventually, I would have to confess. It would be better if I just told him instead of waiting for him to discover the pot was gone. But I wouldn’t, couldn’t, tell him yet. It would have to wait until the right time.
When I heard the back door shut again, I walked out of her yard and stopped at the shed and retrieved my bike, an old black Mongoose I’d had for years. I filled both tires with air and walked the bike around to the front yard where my father was stretching on the porch steps.
“There you are,” he said. “Going for a bike ride?”
“Thought I’d go with you.”
He smiled. “I could use the company.”
My father didn’t run particularly fast, so I was able to keep up without much trouble. We circled our block and crossed over into another neighborhood, and then further out again into yet another neighborhood. Each of the neighborhoods were similar to ours: older two and three bedroom homes close to UNC-Greensboro.
He stared straight ahead, never blinking or changing his expression, as he ran. The soft tap of his shoes hitting concrete, his breathing, and the hum of my bike tires were the only sounds I heard.
We passed a man and woman out walking. The man was pushing a baby carriage. I wondered what he had given up for his child. I wanted to apologize to my father for everything I’d cost him, his love of pottery and then destroying his only remaining piece of pottery, but didn’t know how.
“That’s two miles. Time to turn around,” he said.
We covered the same area, not talking, only moving forward, covering ground and distance. Then we were back in our neighborhood and finally on our street. When our house was in view, my father stopped running and walked the last fifty yards. I eased back on my pedaling and stayed beside him.
At our house, he started his usual stretches, resting one foot on the third step and leaning into it. I rolled my bike down the driveway and set it against the back of the house. My legs felt a little wobbly, even though he’d worked much harder than me.
Walking back out front, I spotted Old Lady Peters’ car pulling into her driveway. Simon was driving. I considered waving but figured it was best not to. Simon went around and helped her out. She looked at me and gently nodded her head. I nodded back.
Dad was sitting on the steps, holding two bottles of water. I took the one he offered and sat next to him. “Thanks for going with me.”
“What do you think about when you’re running?”
“One step at a time,” he said and smiled.
“I called Mom last night, after you went to bed.”
“Did you tell her what happened at the grocery store?”
“No,” I said. “Do you think she’s going to come back?”
He lifted the bottle to his mouth and took a long drink. “What does she tell you?”
“That we’ll have to wait and see.”
“That’s true. And it’s also true that she went down there when the manager quit and that she wanted to finish her novel. But you’re smart enough to know there’s more to it than that.”
“Do you want her to come back?”
“Of course, I do.” Then he stood up as if he’d said all he was going to on that subject. “Thanks again for coming with me today.”
“You bet.”
“So what’s for breakfast?”
“I was thinking about French toast.” I knew he loved French toast.
“Damn, that sounds good.” He squeezed my shoulder as we headed in the front door.
16
By the time I made it to Old Lady Peters on Monday morning so many things had changed. I’d learned what my father’s passion had been and that he’d essentially given it up for me and I’d destroyed the only remaining evidence from his past life. I’d also learned how my parents met and my father had admitted for the first time that Mom’s leaving involved more than a motel and a novel.
But Old Lady Peters was sitting at the table, sipping tea with three sparrows standing in line, waiting to get a nibble off one of the sugar cookies she held out for them, as if nothing had changed at all.
She turned and smiled. “Morning, young man.”
“Good morning,” I said.
There was a pot on the table behind the tray of tea and milk and cookies. It was the same size as the one I’d given her, but there was a plant with bluish-purple flowers in it now. The pot made me think of my father’s. I wondered if she might have some advice on how or what I should tell him.
“Is that the pot I gave you?”
“Yes,” she said. “I knew you had a good eye for detail.”
“What kind of plant is that?”
“Hyacinth,” she said. “They come in all kinds of colors—pink, white, red, and this shade of blue. It’s called hyacinth blue.”
“It’s pretty.” I didn’t know what else to say. It was pretty.
“The sparrows have hatched. Do you want to see them?”
“Let’s go.”
As we walked over to the shrubs, I spotted something white in the grass. I picked it up, realizing it was part of a discarded bird egg. It was so light that I found it hard to believe this thin shell had supported a life. “Can I have this?” I asked, holding up the shell.
When she said I could, I slid it into my shirt pocket.
I set the bucket down and held onto her arm as she climbed up. She laughed and said, “They’re beauties.”
The baby birds didn’t really look like birds at all. They were pink and featherless, no bigger than one of my fingers. They could have been anything, baby rats or squirrels. Their mouths were stretched wide open, asking for food.
I wouldn’t say I was disappointed in what I saw, just surprised. How was it possible something this fragile might be able to fly some day?
“What do you think?” she asked.
“Wow.”
“We better leave them alone, don’t want to worry Mom and Dad.”
As we walked away, back over to the table, the babies’ parents flew back over to the nest, one of them disappeared inside while the other, the father with his black beard, stood on the roof, keeping guard.
“How long until those sparrows are able to fly?”
“Couple weeks.”
She looked down at her watch. “School starting late today?”
I ran and filled the feeders and changed the water. The birds flew away as I approached, disappearing into the shrubs until I was done and then flying back to the feeders. A pair of gold finches flew over my head, bright and yellow in the sky.
“See you tomorrow,” she said. “Don’t forget this.” She was holding the pot with the pretty flowers in it.
“You sure?”
“You found it you should keep it.”
I took it from her and said, “Have a good day.”
And then I was gone. How many other kids, I wondered, spent the morning looking at a nest full of baby birds? But how many would even care?
17
When we made it back from the run, I pulled our dinner out of the fridge and set the casserole dish in the oven, on reheat, while my father went to take a shower. I’d decided what I’d do was make dinner when I got home from school and then it would be ready when we got back from training. This was the first day I’d tried it. I’d made baked ziti with sausages, one of my favorites, which wasn’t hard to make at all.
While you boiled the pasta, you cooked the sausages just enough to sear them. Then you cut them into ½ inch pieces and placed them in a casserole dish with the pasta, some sauce and topped it off with tons of mozzarella. Into the oven at 350 for about thirty minutes. Done. Tasty.
Heart with Joy Page 5