A Perfect Day (3 page)

“That’s the first love note I ever wrote to your mother.”

Allyson read it softly aloud.

“You have a poetic heart.” She ran her finger across the black-and-white photograph of a young woman that was taped to the bottom of the letter. “Is this Mom?”

“She was about your age when that was taken.”

“We look alike, don’t we? Doris Day hairdo aside.”

“You always wondered where you got your good looks.”

“I’ve never wondered.” She began turning pages again until she stopped at a leaf with her mother’s funeral program. Next to it there was a picture of herself as a small girl dressed for her mother’s wake. Her father looked young in the picture, she thought. It made him seem only that much more remarkable to her.

“How did you go on after losing the love of your life?”

“I had you. Failure wasn’t an option.”

“You’ve always been there for me. I don’t know how I’d live without you.”

He smiled, but his eyes revealed deep sadness. Then he said, “Well, girlie, we need to talk about that.”

Allyson’s heart skipped at his words, and she moved back from him to look into his face.

“What?”

He didn’t answer for what seemed a long time to her. “I don’t think I’m going to be able to make your wedding.”

She looked at him as if anticipating the punch line of a joke. “What are you saying?”

His lips tightened and his brow furrowed in deep creases. “I guess there’s no good way to put this.” He scratched his head the way he did when he was troubled. “I have cancer, Al. Pretty bad cancer.”

Allyson’s mouth opened, but no sound escaped.

“It’s pancreatic cancer. The doctors say that there’s nothing they can do. I’d even try some of that chemo hocus-pocus if it could get me to your wedding, but the doctors don’t think I have that long.”

“How long?” she asked. Panic rose in her voice.

“With treatment they say I only have three to four months.”

“Three months . . .” Numbness spread throughout her entire body, making it difficult to continue. “. . . And without?”

“They give me two.”

She began to cry. “No.” Then she erupted angrily. “You don’t even look sick. We’ve just spent the whole afternoon riding . . .”

Carson put his arm around her. “It hasn’t gotten me yet, girlie. But it will. They tell me pancreatic cancer is that way. It sneaks up on you. The truth is I didn’t feel a thing. I only found out about it because my eyes were turning yellow. They say it’s the most fatal of all the cancers.” He looked back at her. “Truth is I kind of expected it to be coming along.”

Allyson stopped crying briefly and looked at him, confused by what he had just said. “Why would you expect something like this?”

“On account of something that happened a while back. About six weeks after Mom died I was diagnosed with cancer. Had a big tumor growing inside my neck.” He pointed to a small scar. “That’s where they tested it. I was already in a world of hurt with her loss and wondering how I was going to raise you alone when
whammo,
the rest of the wave hits. I about lost my faith over it. I couldn’t believe that God would do this.” Carson looked out over the land around them then continued in a softer voice. “When I was done being angry with God, I made Him a promise. I told Him that if He would let me live to see you grown and married off that I would do everything I could to fill the gap left by your mother—and that I would never touch alcohol again.”

Allyson was stunned. “You used to drink?”

Carson chuckled. “Oh yes, girlie, I used to drink,” he said, the tone of his voice implying the understatement. “. . . Like a sailor on a weekend pass. That’s one of the reasons your mother and I fought so much. A week after my promise, I went back to the doctors. There was no sign of cancer. I remember my doctor looking at one X-ray and then the other as if it were a prank. Some of the doctors tried to explain it away as a misdiagnosis. Doctors don’t like to be wrong—think they could wrap up the universe in a handkerchief. But I knew better. God had accepted my deal. I started AA that night. Haven’t touched a drop in almost twenty years. Believe me it wasn’t easy. There were nights I went outside and howled at the moon. But then I’d look at you and I’d remember why.” He rubbed her knee. “I don’t think it’s a coincidence that the symptoms came just a few days after you told me you were engaged. The way I see it, the Lord fulfilled His part of the bargain.”

“How can you be so calm about this?”

“Truth is I’m scared. ’Course I’m scared. Any man who says he’s not afraid of dying is a liar or an idiot. Or both.”

Allyson lowered her head and began to sob. Carson ran his hand over the back of her head, through her hair, bringing her head against his chest. “Honey, we can see this two ways. We can be upset that I’m being taken out of the game or we can be grateful that I got to play the extra innings.” He took her face in his hands and lifted it until she was looking into his eyes. “You have no idea how much I’ve loved watching you grow up. Or how proud I am of the woman you’ve become. Frankly, I’m grateful for the extra innings.” He turned away so she wouldn’t see the tears welling in his eyes.

Tears streamed down her cheeks. “That’s why you wanted me to come home this weekend?”

He nodded slowly, his gaze lost in the valley before them. “It’s the last chapter of our story, girlie. I wanted one last perfect day.”

A
llyson didn’t return to finish the summer se mester. She spent the next two months at her father ’s side, at first busying herself with cooking and caring for the house and yard, then, as the cancer became more debilitating, caring just for him. Within three weeks he was having trouble walking and became bedridden. Allyson rarely left him. She even slept on a cot in the same bedroom. I called her every day during this time. I could feel her father ’s deterioration through her voice, as if life was draining from her as well, and I suppose it was.

I pled with her to let me come and be with her, but she wouldn’t allow it. She couldn’t explain why she didn’t want me there, but she didn’t have to. I think I understood. She couldn’t mix the two men in her life any more than she could simultaneously entertain thoughts of the wedding and funeral. It would be too much for anyone. She finally asked me to stop asking and promised that she would let me know when it was the right time for me to fly out.

Carson knew that his death would be difficult for Allyson, too difficult perhaps, so he did what he could to protect her. He made all the funeral arrangements himself, choosing a casket, writing his funeral program and his own obituary (which turned out to be as understated as he was) and paying for services in advance. As much as he hated lawyers, for Allyson’s sake he hired an attorney who brought to the house the papers to complete Carson’s will, and they crossed the t’s and dotted the i’s, with Allyson physically in attendance and emotionally a universe away.

As the cancer progressed, her father was given new drugs, one of which caused hallucinations. Every few nights Allyson would wake to find him sitting up in bed talking to people who weren’t there; usually to her mother.

I can’t imagine how difficult it must have been for her, and I have never felt so helpless in my entire life.

On September 9, almost three months to the day since she had learned of her father ’s cancer, Allyson called. It was time, she said. Her father was dying.

 

I had met Allyson at the University of Utah in an English literature class. I was working on my master ’s and was employed as an aide in the class. The first time I saw her I knew that I was in the right place.

Allyson came to Utah on an academic scholarship. I had come to the U because of the help with tuition I received since my father was a professor at the school—which was almost reason enough for me to go elsewhere. I don’t know how best to describe my father. The simplest noun seems adequate. Flint. Old and hard and sharp. I don’t ever remember calling him Father or Pa or Dad like my friends called their fathers. It’s always been sir or, as I grew older, Chuck.

Charles (Chuck) Harlan had run away from home at the age of seventeen and joined the military during the last years of World War II. He had seen combat in the Navy. But I didn’t hear it from him. He saw the kind of action a man doesn’t talk about lest he unearth something he’d spent years burying. I blame those years for who he was. I have to blame something.

He married late in life to Irene Mason, a woman fifteen years younger than him. She was also from a military family. She was a staunchly religious woman who bore four sons in five years. She died at the age of thirty-four in childbirth with her last son. Me.

Chuck remarried four years later to a woman he met in the administration building at the university. Colleen Dunn. I’ve always considered Colleen my mother. Colleen was also younger than Chuck, ten years or so, but the gap in age was the subtlest of their differences. When I was old enough to understand the contrast in their personalities I was astonished that the two of them had ever come together. Truly, love is blind. Or maybe just stupid. They couldn’t have been more mismatched.

In the words of her friends, Colleen was a party waiting to happen. She was a large woman with an extra chin or two and a lap that could hold four boys and often did. What I remember most about her is that she liked to laugh. She sometimes drank too much, nothing hard, dessert wine or sherry and she never drank alone. Unlike Chuck’s first wife, she went to church only for us children. I knew her feelings about church but still considered her closer to God than Chuck. Though Chuck never missed a church service, he lacked the graces of faith my mother held in abundance: love, gentleness and mercy. It was as if religion was simply an extension of the military world he had left: a world of rules. Chuck was big on rules. He ruled the home with an iron Bible.

Every now and then it would come down on one of us. One afternoon he caught Stan, my oldest brother, looking at pictures in the women’s undergarment section of a department store catalogue. Even though Stan was only eleven at the time, Chuck whipped him with his belt so severely that Stan couldn’t walk. He crawled to his bedroom, where he remained until the next morning.

In the end, Colleen stayed with us for nine years: probably eight and a half years longer than she would have had there not been us boys. She stayed as long as she could to protect us from Chuck.

The day she told me she was leaving I suppose that I wasn’t all that surprised. Even at the age of thirteen I realized that if there ever had ever been a connection between Chuck and Colleen, it had long been severed. Her laughter was gone. I suppose she went to find it. Right or wrong it didn’t lessen the pain any. I told her that I hated her. I might have even told her that I was glad she was leaving. I’ve always regretted those words and hoped she knew them for the bald-faced lie they were. In my heart I wished that she would take me with her. But she didn’t. And Chuck never left.

Looking back I realize that I spent much of my life seeking Chuck’s approval. But I learned not to expect it. It would be like waiting for a train after its route had been cancelled. I was both amazed by and envious of Allyson’s relationship with her father. What a difference a father can make. Allyson was confident and independent. I was insecure and fearful. To this day I don’t know what drew her to me.

 

I flew in to Portland, where I waited nearly three hours for a commuter flight to the small Medford airport. My thoughts were bent on Allyson and what I was walking into. I had called from the Portland airport and spoken briefly to her, but she wasn’t herself. It was like talking to a stranger, and from her voice I knew that Carson’s death was very close.

The taxi left me in the dirt-and-rock driveway that led to the Phelps residence. The hills of Ashland were a quilt of color, unlike during my first trip to her home, last Christmas, when all was snow. Though the land was even more spectacular than Allyson had described it, her home was nothing like what I’d expected. It looked as if a trailer had taken root in the fertile Rogue Valley soil and grown rooms and steps and a porch with a mosquito screen.

Carson was a handyman and he liked to fiddle with things, his residence being his most frequent victim. Allyson told me that the house had changed form every year for as long as she could remember. She grew up thinking that people just lived that way. She’d come home from school to find her father, hammer in hand, knocking out a wall or building an addition. He had been that way up until the last few months, when his sickness had sapped his strength as well as his ambition. But still he talked about the guest room he was going to build when he felt good enough to get out of bed. They both knew it would never happen, but it was a pleasant fiction all the same.

The taxi’s meter read nine seventy-five. Through the open car window I handed the driver a folded ten-dollar bill. “Keep the change.”

“Gee, thanks,” the driver said sarcastically, stashing the bill in his front pocket.

The taxi’s back tires spun as the driver reversed out of the drive. I slung my duffel over my shoulder, climbed the wooden stairs of the front porch and knocked on the door.

An elderly woman opened the door and welcomed me in. She was short and broad-hipped, with silver hair. She wore a pink hand-knit sweater. Her smile and her eyes were pleasant but appropriate for the circumstances. I could see the family resemblance.

“You must be Robert.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

She reached out and touched my arm affectionately. “I’m Allyson’s aunt Denise.”

Allyson had spoken of her many times. Allyson was very close to her. She had become Allyson’s surrogate mother after her own mother had passed away. I had not met her last December only because she had gone on an east coast trip with a few of her friends.