Nancy Culpepper (6 page)

“East or West?” Jack says. This is a game they used to play.

“West.”

“Aha, I’ve got you,” says Jack. “You’re thinking of the parking lot at that hospital in Tucson.”

“Hey, that’s not fair going too fast,” cries Robert. “I didn’t get a chance to play.”

“This was before you were born,” Nancy says, running her fingers through Robert’s hair. He is on the floor, leaning against her knees. “We were lying in the van for a week, thinking we were going to die. Oh, God!” Nancy laughs and covers her mouth with her hands.

“Why were you going to die?” Robert asks.

“We weren’t really going to die.” Both Nancy and Jack are laughing now at the memory, and Jack is pulling off his sweater. The hospital in Tucson wouldn’t accept them because they weren’t sick enough to hospitalize, but they were too sick to travel. They had nowhere to go. They had been on a month’s trip through the West, then had stopped in Tucson and gotten jobs at a restaurant to make enough money to get home.

“Do you remember that doctor?” Jack says.

“I remember the look he gave us, like he didn’t want us to pollute his hospital.” Nancy laughs harder. She feels silly and relieved. Her hand, on Jack’s knee, feels the fold of the long johns beneath his jeans. She cries, “I’ll never forget how we stayed around that parking lot, thinking we were going to die.”

“I couldn’t have driven a block, I was so weak,” Jack gasps.

“You were yellow.
I
didn’t get yellow.”

“All we could do was pee and drink orange juice.”

“And throw the pee out the window.”

“Grover was so bored with us!”

Nancy says, “It’s a good thing we couldn’t eat. We would have spent all our money.”

“Then we would have had to work at that filthy restaurant again. And get sick again.”

“And on and on, forever. We would still be there, like Charley on the MTA. Oh, Jack, do you
remember
that crazy restaurant? You had to wear a ten-gallon hat—”

Abruptly, Robert jerks away from Nancy and crawls on his knees across the room to examine Grover, who is stretched out on his side, his legs sticking out stiffly. Robert, his straight hair falling, bends his head to the dog’s heart.

“He’s not dead,” Robert says, looking up at Nancy. “He’s lying doggo.”

“Passed out at his own party,” Jack says, raising his glass. “Way to go, Grover!”

Spence + Lila

1

On the way to the hospital in Paducah, Spence notices the row of signs along the highway: WHERE WILL YOU BE IN ETERNITY? Each word is on a white cross. The message reminds him of the old Burma-Shave signs. His wife, Lila, beside him, has been quiet during the trip, which takes forty minutes in his Rabbit. He didn’t take her car because it has a hole in the muffler, but she has complained about his car ever since he cut the seat belts off to deactivate the annoying warning buzzer.

As they pass the Lone Oak shopping center, on the outskirts of Paducah, Lila says fretfully, “I don’t know if the girls will get here.”

“They’re supposed to be here by night,” Spence reminds her. Ahead, a gas station marquee advertises a free case of Coke with a tune-up.

Catherine, their younger daughter, has gone to pick up Nancy at the airport in Nashville. Although Lila objected to the trouble and expense, Nancy is flying all the way from Boston. Cat lives nearby, and Nancy will stay with her. Nancy offered to stay with Spence, so he wouldn’t be alone, but he insisted he would be all right.

When Cat brought Lila home from the doctor the day before and Lila said, “They think it’s cancer,” the words ran through him like electricity. She didn’t cry all evening, and when he tried to hold her, he couldn’t speak. They sat in the living room in their recliner chairs, silent and scared, watching TV just as they usually did. Before she sat down for the evening, she worked busily in the kitchen, freezing vegetables from the garden and cooking food for him to eat during her stay in the hospital. He couldn’t eat any supper except a bowl of cereal, and she picked at some ham and green beans.

He knew she had not been feeling well for months; she’d had dizzy spells and she had lost weight. The doctor at the local clinic told her to come back in three months if she kept losing weight, but Cat insisted on taking her mother to Paducah. The doctors were better there, Cat insisted, in that know-it-all manner both his daughters had. Cat, who was careless with money, didn’t even think to ask what the specialists would charge. When she brought Lila home, it was late—feeding time. Spence was at the pond feeding the ducks, with Oscar, the dog. When Oscar saw the car turn into the driveway, he tore through the soybean field toward the house, as if he, too, were anxious for a verdict.

They had told Lila that her dizzy spells were tiny strokes. They also found a knot in her right breast. They wanted to take the knot out and do a test on it, and if it was cancer they would take her whole breast off, right then. It was an emergency, Lila explained. They couldn’t deal with the strokes until they got the knot out. Spence imagined the knot growing so fast it would eat her breast up if she waited another day or two.

They’re crawling through the traffic on the edge of Paducah. When he was younger, Spence used to come and watch the barges on the river. They glided by confidently, like miniature flattops putting out to sea. He has wanted to take Lila for a cruise on the
Delta
Queen,
the luxury steamboat that paddles all the way to New Orleans, but he hasn’t been able to bring himself to do it.

He turns on the radio and a Rod Stewart song blares out.

“Turn that thing off!” Lila yells.

“I thought you needed a little entertainment,” he says, turning the sound down.

She rummages in her purse for a cigarette, her third on the trip. “They won’t let me have any cigarettes tonight, so I better smoke while I got a chance.”

“I’ll take them things and throw ’em away,” he says.

“You better not.”

She cracks the window open at the top to let the smoke out. Her face is the color of cigarette ashes. She looks bad.

“I guess it’s really cancer,” she says, blowing out smoke. “The X-ray man said it was cancer.”

“How would he know? He ain’t even a doctor.”

“He’s seen so many, he would know.”

“He ain’t paid to draw that conclusion,” Spence says. “Why did he want to scare you like that? Didn’t the doctor say he’d have to wait till they take the knot out and look at it?”

“Yeah, but—” She fidgets with her purse, wadding her cigarette package back into one of the zipper pockets. “The X-ray man sees those X-rays all day long. He knows more about X-rays than a doctor does.”

Spence turns into the hospital parking lot, unsure where to go. The eight-story hospital cuts through the humid, hazy sky, like a stray sprig of milo growing up in a bean field. A car pulls out in front of him. Spence’s reactions are slow today, but he hits the brakes in time.

“I think I’ll feel safer in the hospital,” Lila says.

Walking from the parking lot, he carries the small bag she packed. He suspects there is a carton of cigarettes in it. Cat keeps trying to get Lila to quit, but Lila has no willpower. Once Cat gave her a cassette tape on how to quit smoking, but Lila accidentally ran it through the washing machine. It was in a shirt pocket. “Accidentally on purpose,” Cat accused her. Cat even told Lila once that cigarettes caused breast cancer. But Spence believes worry causes it. She worries about Cat, the way she has been running around with men she hardly knows since her divorce last year. It’s a bad example for her two small children, and Lila is afraid the men aren’t serious about Cat. Lila keeps saying no one will want to marry a woman with two extra mouths to feed.

Now Lila says, “I want you to supervise that garden. The girls won’t know how to take care of it. That corn needs to be froze, and the beans are still coming in.”

“Don’t worry about your old garden,” he says impatiently. “Maybe I’ll mow it down.”

“Spence!” Lila cries, grabbing his arm tightly. “Don’t you go and mow down my garden!”

“You work too hard on it,” he says. “We don’t need all that grub anymore for just us two.”

“The beans is about to begin a second round of blooming,” she says. “I want to let most of them make into shellies and save some for seed. And I don’t want the corn to get too old.”

The huge glass doors of the hospital swing open, and a nurse pushes out an old woman in a wheelchair. The woman is bony and pale, with a cluster of kinfolks in bluejeans around her. Her aged hands, folded in her lap, are spotted like little bird dogs. The air-conditioning blasts Spence and Lila as they enter, and he feels as though they are walking into a meat locker.

2

She felt that lump weeks ago, but she didn’t mention it then. When she and Spence returned from a trip to Florida recently, she told Cat about it, and Cat started pestering her to see a specialist. The knot did feel unusual, like a piece of gristle. The magazines said you would know it was different. Lila never examined her breasts the way they said to do, because her breasts were always full of lumps anyway— from mastitis, which she had had several times. Her breasts are so enormous she cannot expect to find a little knot. Spence says her breasts are like cow bags. He has funny names for them, like the affectionate names he had for his cows when they used to keep milk cows. Names like Daisy and Bossy. Petunia. Primrose. It will be harder on him if she loses one of her breasts than it will be on her. Women can stand so much more than men can.

She makes him leave the hospital early, wanting to be alone so she can smoke a cigarette in peace. After he brought her in, he paced around, then went downstairs for a Coke. Now he leaves to go home, and she watches him from behind as he trudges down the corridor, hugging himself in the cold. Lila is glad she brought her housecoat, but even with it she is afraid she will take pneumonia.

In the lounge, she smokes and plays with a picture puzzle laid out on a card table. Someone has pieced most of the red barn and pasture, and a vast blue sky remains to be done. Lila loves puzzles. When she was little, growing up at her uncle’s, she had a puzzle of a lake scene with a castle. She worked that puzzle until the design was almost worn away. The older folks always kidded her, but she kept working the puzzle devotedly. She always loved the satisfying snap of two pieces going together. It was like knowing something for sure.

Her son, Lee, towers in the doorway of the lounge. She stands up, surprised.

“Did you get off work early?” He works at Ingersoll-Rand.

“No. I just took off an hour, and I have to go back and work till nine. They’re working me overtime this month.” He has lines on his face and he is only thirty.

He hugs her silently. He’s so tall her head pokes his armpit, where he has always been ticklish.

“I didn’t know you were that sick in Florida,” he says. “We shouldn’t have dragged you through Disney World.”

“I knew something was wrong, but I didn’t know what.” She explains the details of the X-rays and the operation, then says, “I’m going to lose my breast, Lee.”

“You are?” The lines on his face freeze. He needs a shave.

“They won’t know till they get in there, but if it’s cancer they’ll go ahead and take it out.”

“Which one?”

“This one,” she says, cupping her right breast.

A woman with frizzy red hair hobbles into the lounge, her hospital gown exposing her fat, doughy knees. “I was looking for my husband,” she says, “but I reckon he ain’t here.”

Lila waits for the woman to leave, then laughs. She’s still holding her breast. “You don’t remember sucking on these, do you, Lee?” She loves to tease her son. “You sucked me dry and I had to put you on a bottle after two months. I couldn’t make enough milk to feed you.”

With an embarrassed grin, Lee looks out the window. “I believe you’re making that up.”

“You want one last tug?” She reaches up and tousles his hair. His eyes are her eyes—the same vacant blue, filled with specks, like markings on a baby bird. They both laugh, and she takes a cigarette from her housecoat pocket. Lee lights it for her, then lights his own cigarette. They share a Coke from a cooler filled with ice and free cold drinks in cans for visitors in the lounge. Lila’s proud of her son. He has such a pretty wife and two smart kids, but he has to work too hard to keep up his house and car payments.

“Spence didn’t know about these drinks,” she says. “He went all the way down to the basement to the machine.”

“He didn’t stick around five minutes, I bet,” Lee says, handing her the can.

“Lord, no. These places give him the heebie-jeebies.”

“They do me too.” Lee is playing with his lighter, flicking the flame on and off. “When’s Nancy coming in?”

“I don’t know. Cat called from the airport before we left home and said Nancy’s airplane was late. They was supposed to get here by about four o’clock.” She sips from the Coke and hands it back to Lee.

“Did Cat take off from work?”

Lila nods. “I told the girls they didn’t have to go to all this trouble, but I guess they’re scared I’m going to kick the bucket.”

“No, you won’t,” Lee says. He hesitates, trying to say something, but he’s exactly like Spence, bashful and silent at all the wrong moments. “What caused this?” he asks. “Do the doctors know what they’re doing?”

“They’re specialists,” Lila says. “The woman that runs the dress store where Cat works recommended the doctor I went to yesterday. He’s supposed to be good.” Touching her son’s knee, she says, “Promise me one thing, Lee.”

He flicks ash off his cigarette by tapping it from beneath with his little finger. “What?”

“That you and Cat will start talking to one another. I can’t believe my own children would hate each other.”

“We don’t hate each other!”

“Well, you could be nice to each other—it wouldn’t hurt.”

Lee stubs out his cigarette in the ashtray and nods his head thoughtfully. “I’ll try,” he says. “But it’s up to her.” He stands. “I have to get back to work.”

“Are you going home for supper?”

“No. I’ll grab a Big Mac or something.”

Lee walks her back to her room and gives her another hug. His belt buckle presses under her breasts. When he was about fourteen, he started shooting up like a cornstalk and she thought he’d never stop. He was named after Lila’s father, who abandoned her when she was four and went off to Alaska—long before it was a state. Lila was never sure it was appropriate to name her only son after him, but it’s Christian to forgive. Now, as he leaves, she suddenly feels the fear she felt when Nancy left home for the first time—certain she won’t see her child again.

After experimenting with the remote-control device, Lila watches television for a while. The news doesn’t make any sense. The commercials are about digestion. Her digestion has always been good. Spence has heartburn and can’t eat much for supper. Sometimes he has chest pains, but he says it’s just heartburns. On the news, a couple about her age have won over three million dollars in a lottery. “We’ll pay off the bills, I guess,” the man says. “And get a new living room suit,” the woman adds.

A nurse trots in with some forms for Lila to fill out.

“I can’t see good enough,” Lila says, searching for her glasses in her purse. “My glasses don’t fit anymore, but my daughter says that’s what I get for buying them at the dime store.” She laughs and holds the forms at arm’s length. Pointing to the blurred fine print, she asks, “What’s this say?”

“It’s just routine, ma’am,” says the nurse. “Tonight when the doctor comes he’ll give you a release form and read it to you and make sure you understand everything that’s going on.”

“What’s going to happen to me?”

Before the nurse can answer, a girl walks in and plunks down Lila’s supper tray without comment.

“My, you’re getting a feast tonight,” says the nurse, sending the tray toward Lila on a roller platform that fits over the bed. On the tray are dark broth, red Jell-O, black coffee.

“Couldn’t I have ice-tea?” Lila asks. “Coffee makes me prowl all night.”

“Don’t worry. We’ll give you a sleeping pill.”

Lila watches the sports news, something she would never do at home. When the weather comes on, she pays careful attention. The radar map shows rain everywhere in the adjoining states, but none in western Kentucky. They need rain bad. They had too much rain back in the spring. The high today was eighty-nine.

The liquid supper splashes in her stomach. From behind the curtain partition, a woman is groaning. A nurse coaxes her out of bed and helps her walk out of the room. The patient is old, her face distorted with pain as she clutches a pillow to her belly.