Once Upon a Project

by Bettye Griffin

  She had given up on ever finding lasting love.

  Chapter 19

  Mid-April

  Chicago

  Grace awoke early, as she usually did. This morning she awakened with a frown on her face. Eric lay beside her on his back, ungodly snorts coming from his mouth in a regular rhythm. Had he been snoring like that all night long? It amazed her that she’d gotten any sleep at all.

  She slipped out of bed and into the bathroom, where she closed the door and wiped her sweaty body with a cool cloth. These damn hot flashes were killing her. She hated waking up with her back and chest soaking wet, yet the rest of her freezing, because she’d thrown off the covers when the sweats had started.

  Plus it was wreaking havoc on her hair, which was often plastered to her head when she awoke and never truly felt clean anymore unless she had just washed it. It wasn’t fair. She could cope if this was her only symptom, but she still suffered from all the fatigue, cramps, and bloating she’d always had, plus these damn sweats as well. It felt like someone had turned the thermostat up to eighty degrees in here.

  She brushed her hair and pinned it up. It didn’t look bad, even if it was a little old-fashioned, more suited to 1947 than 2007. All she needed was a pair of wide-legged pants and fur-trimmed mules. But at least it was off her neck.

  In spite of her efforts to cool off, Grace still felt sticky. She desperately wanted to take a shower, but she decided to do that after Eric left. He might hear the shower running and think she was some kind of lunatic, taking a shower at five-thirty on a Sunday morning.

  She ran the wet cloth over her skin one last time before turning out the light and tiptoeing back into bed next to Eric, who continued with his incessant snoring. She lay down on her back, her head nestled against the pillows. She would eventually fall back to sleep, but it would be difficult in view of all that racket Eric was making.

  She mentally laid out the things she wanted to do today. First on the list was kicking Eric out so she could get started on her weekend exercise, a vigorous three-mile walk. Not only did she begin Saturdays and Sundays with this routine as long as the weather cooperated, but it made a perfect excuse on those rare occasions when a man showed the bad taste to ask what was for breakfast, like she was going to pull out a skillet and fry up some bacon. That was a sure sign that she’d gotten involved with a real boob.

  Eric stopped snoring, and the sudden silence that followed made her want to rub her ears to make sure her hearing was still intact. Then he stirred, and finally he sat up.

  “Good morning, beautiful. What’s for breakfast?”

  Chapter 20

  Late April

  Lake Forest, Illinois

  “It’s bad, I know it.”

  Elyse clutched Franklin’s arm. “Come on, you don’t know that.”

  “Elyse, if I just had a touch of indigestion, Dr. Obi wouldn’t request to see me in his office.”

  “And hasn’t your workup been negative so far? The abdominal CT scan didn’t show anything amiss, and neither did the MRI. He might want to speak with you personally to warn you of what could happen if you don’t follow a strict medical regimen. Let’s face it, Franklin, half the time you don’t take your blood pressure pills. And I’m sure the doctor knows it, from the high readings you have whenever you see him.”

  Outwardly, Elyse sounded confident, but inside she felt as worried as Franklin was. He made a good point—why would Dr. Obi request to see him in person unless his workup showed something serious? And Franklin said that the woman who called to make the appointment suggested that his wife come along, too. Some situations simply couldn’t be handled delicately, and the appointment setter’s suggestion was about as subtle as those giant billboards on the Dan Ryan Expressway advertising the casinos down in Indiana. At least Dr. Obi had had the courtesy to ask that the appointment be set for tomorrow morning, so she and Franklin wouldn’t have to cope with the anxiety for too long.

  He pulled her close. “I know you’re trying to keep my spirits up, Elyse. I love you. But my gut—the same one that years ago told me that you were the woman I would marry—tells me that Dr. Obi has bad news.”

  Sitting ramrod straight in Dr. Isaac Obi’s elegantly furnished office, Elyse felt like she’d just been body slammed. Pancreatic cancer! She didn’t understand. No one in Franklin’s family had ever been diagnosed with any kind of cancer, much less one of the most difficult to pinpoint and, therefore, one of the deadliest forms of the disease.

  She voiced her thoughts aloud, and her husband’s doctor replied, “Mrs. Reavis, there is evidence to support that some forms of cancer—certain female cancers, for example—are more likely to occur in primary relatives in the same family, but it isn’t a given by any means. And there is no evidence to support that other cancers are hereditary. Researchers are learning more all the time, but the study of genetics is still very much an ongoing science. Neither Mr. Reavis nor anyone else is protected from developing a malignant tumor simply by virtue of no one else in their family having ever been affected in the past.”

  Normally Elyse admired the precise speech of the Nigerian-born physician, but today she wanted to jump across his oversized desk—made of luxurious dark brown cherry wood with no legs—and throttle him. He’d just explained that the ERCP they’d done, which involved passing a tube through the pancreatic and bile duct openings and injecting dye, came back with a reading that usually meant pancreatic cancer.

  “What’s my prognosis?” Franklin asked matter-of-factly.

  Elyse knew instinctively that he was putting on a show of bravery for her. She wanted to put her face in her hands and weep. Instead she held her breath, waiting for the physician to reply.

  “It’s difficult to say at this time,” Dr. Obi said. “But primary pancreatic cancer is among the most difficult to diagnose. The pancreas lies deep in the abdominal cavity. I think that the fact that we aren’t able to visualize a tumor at this time is in your favor.”

  Elyse shook her head, unable to hold back her tears. “This can’t be happening.”

  Franklin squeezed her hand tightly. “Elyse, we’ll deal with it.”

  She forced herself to stop crying by thinking of him. She was supposed to be strong for her husband, and instead here she was bawling like a baby.

  “Mr. Reavis, I’m going to refer you to Dr. Stephen LeBlond.”

  “Is he good?” A hopeful note crept into Elyse’s voice. She realized that she sounded nearly childlike, but she desperately needed something positive to cling to.

  “He’s one of the preeminent oncologists in Chicago. He’s on the staff at the University of Chicago Hospital. I’ve already consulted him on your case, and I asked him then if he could take you on as a new patient. He assures me he will fit you in this week, tomorrow if you like. Now that we know there is a malignancy, you’ll need to have it removed, and soon.”

  Elyse and Franklin walked out of the office with their arms linked. “I’m sorry about the way I acted in there, Franklin,” she said as he opened the passenger’s-side door for her. “I didn’t mean to sound hysterical.”

  “It was a perfectly natural reaction. That’s why I tried to prepare you for possible bad news last night.” He waited while she seated herself, then closed the door and walked around the back to the driver’s side.

  She watched him move, almost graceful in his steps, like he was gliding rather than walking. A sixth sense had told her not to offer to drive, that it would only infuriate him.

  He’d always been a needy patient when he was down with a cold, asking her to make him a cup of tea or something to eat, but this was different. They both knew he would recover from a cold, and she pampered him without complaint, getting as much a kick out of it as he did. She’d even worked out a routine: When she thought he might be feeling better and faking it just to prolong her waiting on him hand and foot, she dressed in a long white sweater that came to midthigh and beige thigh-high stockings and entered their bedroom with a thermom
eter in hand then bent over him to straighten his sheets so that her sweater rode up, giving him a view he couldn’t resist. If he gave her ass a weak pat and did nothing else, he obviously hadn’t regained his strength. On the other hand, if he grabbed her and pulled her down on the bed, he was feeling a lot better.

  But there would be no recovery from this, and he wouldn’t tolerate anyone treating him like an invalid. She’d have to act normally. But how long would he be able to seat her in the car and then walk around to take the wheel? she wondered. Instantly she felt a stab of guilt for such a pessimistic thought. She bit her lower lip hard to keep from succumbing to tears again.

  “All right,” he said as he started the engine, “we obviously have to work some things out. First of all, no one is to know about this, at least not yet. I won’t be the subject of a death watch until I absolutely have to. I don’t even want the kids to know, and I don’t want you saying anything to your parents. Nor will I say anything to anyone at work.”

  Elyse realized that he’d thought this out beforehand. They’d both had a restless night last night. Had she had even an inkling of what was on his mind she wouldn’t have slept for ten minutes. “What about your manager?” she asked.

  “Just because I report to him doesn’t mean he has a right to be privy to my health issues from the get-go. I’m taking today off, but I’ll be back at work tomorrow. He’ll have to be told eventually, but not right now.”

  Elyse felt relieved that Franklin didn’t plan on going to work. It amazed her that he could get in the driver’s seat and calmly drive home after being handed a possible death sentence by Dr. Obi. If he’d insisted on going to the office, it would suggest possible denial issues, which could be a huge problem in itself. Still, she didn’t agree with much of what he’d said. “What about the kids? Don’t you think they have a right to know?”

  “Elyse, I’m not looking to keep them uninformed indefinitely. Right now, while I’m feeling okay, they don’t have to know. They’ll only start falling behind in their studies because they’ll be worried about me, and finals are coming up. I haven’t even seen this specialist yet. We can tell them just before I go in for my surgery. A day or two before, to give them a chance to drive up here. I’ll tell Frankie and Rebecca at the same time.”

  His son and daughter from his first marriage. Of course they would need to know about his condition, too. Elyse knew it wouldn’t stop there, that they would inform their mother. She hoped that Carolyn, the first Mrs. Reavis, wouldn’t call and make a scene once she learned of Franklin’s illness. Carolyn had always had a flair for the dramatic, and hysterics would only serve to make an already tense situation more so.

  Elyse raised her chin, her head pressed against the headrest of the Navigator, her eyes closed, asking herself for the twentieth time in fifteen minutes how such a terrible thing could happen to her Franklin. “Oh, Franklin. You have to beat this; you have to.” She barely realized she’d spoken aloud.

  “I hate it when people say they’re going to beat cancer,” he said, sounding almost angry. “It’s an insult to the memories of all the folks who’ve died of it, implies they were weaklings.”

  Elyse shifted her head to its normal position. She felt like she’d been slapped in the face. “I didn’t mean—”

  He kept talking, as if she’d said nothing. “Long-term survivors didn’t make it because they were so big and bad; they made it because they had a combination of good medical care and nonaggressive forms of disease. All the money in the world won’t keep a person alive if they’ve got a highly aggressive cancer that spreads to vital organs. Look at Jackie Onassis . . . that billionaire businessman Reginald Lewis . . . Paul McCartney’s first wife, Linda. They all had millions, but none of them lived long enough to collect Social Security.”

  “None of them needed it.”

  “That’s not my point, Elyse. I’m saying that they all died, despite the best treatment money could buy. You don’t think they were getting their medical care at the free clinic, do you?”

  She looked at him, unsure if he really meant for her to reply to his diatribe, which she knew was more of a vent session. Still, he didn’t have to jump on her, did he? She was on his side.

  “I guess that’s enough of that,” he said. In an unexpected show of affection, he removed his right hand from the steering wheel to rest on top of her left. “Funny, but I’m feeling pretty good right now. Just a little tired. Not like a man with a limited lifespan.” He increased the pressure on her hand when he heard the gasp she was unable to keep in. “Elyse, I love you. I’d like nothing more than to have ten or twenty more years with you. But if one of us has to leave, it’s best that it be me. You know life has no guarantees. This could have happened to one of the kids. And then how would we feel?”

  She shut her eyes tightly, unable to bear the thought of any harm coming to Todd or Brontë. She and Franklin were supposed to die first. But she couldn’t abide imagining Franklin dying, either. Not this soon. They were supposed to live to be an old couple in their rocking chairs, playing with grandchildren.

  Guilt stabbed at her like a peptic ulcer. Isn’t that what she’d said to him a couple of weeks ago? That he was ready for a rocking chair? If only she’d heeded his complaints of not feeling well, noticed his diminished appetite sooner. She would have gotten him to the doctor right away. A month or two might have made a big difference in his prognosis.

  Now he might not live long enough to sit in that rocking chair.

  “I’ve lived a good life.” He gave her hand a final squeeze, then returned his to the wheel. “Maybe we shouldn’t talk about it anymore right now.”

  She nodded, opening her eyes. He wanted everything to be normal . . . at least as long as that was feasible. She choked back a sob. Franklin summed up his life just as calmly as if he’d remarked that it looked like rain.

  She understood why he didn’t want anyone to know about his illness just yet, but Elyse knew she was about to break her word. She couldn’t put on a brave face and act like everything was normal, especially for her children and her parents, with whom she spoke regularly, unless she confided in someone. But she wouldn’t talk to anyone close enough to their social circle for the news to leak out. Franklin would never forgive her.

  Her old friends, the ones about whom just last week she’d said she didn’t expect to have much contact with, would help her through this.

  Elyse reread Kevin Nash’s e-mail once more.

  I’m sorry your husband is sick. Let me know if there’s anything I can do to help. Sometimes it’s nice to just have someone to talk to. I don’t work too far from you. Maybe we can have lunch together.

  That was awfully nice of him, she thought. Still, she couldn’t understand why she hadn’t heard from Pat. She’d left a message for her on her home phone Thursday night, three days ago, and when she didn’t hear back she sent her an e-mail as well. That was when she saw the first e-mail Kevin had sent, telling her how nice it was to see her at Junior’s after such a long time and asking her to keep in touch.

  Elyse quickly decided that Kevin, who lived on the north end of Chicago in Rogers Park, was far enough removed for her to be able to confide in. News of Franklin’s cancer wouldn’t drift up and reach their friends and neighbors in Lake Forest if Kevin knew about it any more than it would if

  Pat did. She hit the REPLY button and typed out a brief message about Franklin’s diagnosis and upcoming surgery, plus her own concerns about what the future might hold.

  Kevin’s caring reply immediately lifted her spirits. But she still wondered why she hadn’t gotten a response from Pat.

  Chapter 21

  Late April

  Pleasant Prairie, Wisconsin

  “Oh, shucks,” Bruce Dillahunt said as he handed Susan a red and white plastic popcorn container. “I forgot my drink.”

  “I’ll get it,” Susan offered quickly. She was up and in the kitchen in a flash. She picked up Bruce’s freshly filled glass of Dr Pepp
er and brought it to him in the family room, where they were about to watch the cable debut of a film they’d planned to see during its theatrical release, but hadn’t gotten around to seeing.

  “Thanks.”

  She took her place next to him on the sofa. The kids were home, but they were watching a different program in Quentin’s room. It almost felt like the old days, before they had children.

  Ever since that night at Junior’s Bar nearly a month ago, Susan had found herself thinking continually of Charles Valentine: as she vacuumed, emptied out the dishwasher after a cycle, or folded laundry. She saw the affection in his eyes when she lay down for the night, and fell asleep with thoughts of making love to Charles.

  And she felt terribly guilty. Even with things as bad as they were between her and Bruce, he was still her husband, and she couldn’t justify daydreaming about another man.

  The key, she thought, was to reinvigorate her marriage. She’d recapture the old magic if it was the last thing she did. This nonsense had to come to an end.

  “Oops. Guess I should have brought more napkins,” Bruce said.

  “I’ll—”

  “No, I’ll get them. You stay put before you spoil me so bad I won’t want to wipe my own mouth.” He chuckled.

  It occurred to her that maybe she’d been overdoing it. She wanted to make it up to Bruce for—as Jimmy Carter so famously said—lusting in her heart, even though he had no idea of her carnal thoughts toward Charles. She’d made his favorite foods all week, even baking that chocolate pumpkin cheesecake he adored, and didn’t complain once when he unfailingly announced how tired he was—which she’d come to recognize as code for “I don’t want to have sex tonight.”