The Best of Me(94)
Paul said four. Any more could be dangerous, since they have cyanide in them. Then he juiced what I think was a tennis ball mixed with beets and four-leaf clovers.
“Add some strawberries and I’ll have a glass as well,” my sister Lisa said. She’s not convinced about the cancer prevention but is intrigued by all the weight our brother has lost. When he got married in 2001, he was close to 200 pounds—which is a lot if you’re only five foot two. Now he was down to 135. It’s odd seeing him thin again after all these years. I expected him to look the way he did when he was twenty, before he ballooned up, and while he’s the same physical size as he was back then, his face has aged and he now looks like that kid’s father. It’s as if a generation of him went missing.
Part of Paul’s weight loss can be attributed to his new liquid diet, but I think that exercise has more to do with it. He bought a complicated racing bike and rides it while wearing what looks like a Spider-Man costume and the type of cycling shoes that have cleats on them. One day that May, as I walked to the post office, he pedaled past without recognizing me. His face was unguarded, and I felt I was seeing him the way other people do, at least superficially: this boyish little man with an icicle of snot hanging off his nose. “Mornin’,” he sang as he sped by.
It’s ridiculous how often you have to say hello on Emerald Isle. Passing someone on the street is one thing, but you have to do it in stores as well, not just to the employees who greet you at the door but to your fellow shoppers in aisle three. Most of the houses that face the ocean are rented out during the high season, and from week to week the people in them come from all over the United States. Houses near the sound, on the other hand, are more commonly owner-occupied. They have landscaped yards, and many are fronted by novelty mailboxes. Some are shaped like fish, while others are outfitted in cozies that have various messages—BLESS YOUR HEART or SANDY FEET WELCOME!—printed on them.
The neighborhoods near the sound are so Southern that people will sometimes wave to you from inside their houses. Workmen, hammers in hand, shout hello from ladders and half-shingled roofs. I’m willing to bet that the local operating rooms are windowless and have doors that are solid wood. Otherwise the surgeons and nurses would feel obliged to acknowledge everyone who passed down the hall, and patients could possibly die as a result.
While the sound side of the island feels like an old-fashioned neighborhood, the ocean side is more like an upscale retirement community. Look out a street-facing window on any given morning, and you’d think they were filming a Centrum commercial. All these hale, silver-haired seniors walking or jogging or cycling past the house. Later in the day, when the heat cranks up, they purr by in golf carts, wearing visors, their noses streaked with sunblock. If you were a teenager, you likely wouldn’t give it much thought, but to my sisters and me—people in our mid-to late fifties—it’s chilling. That’ll be us in, like, eight years, we think. How can that be when only yesterday, on this very same beach, we were children?
Of course, the alternative is worse. When my mother was the age that I am now, she couldn’t walk more than ten steps without stopping to catch her breath. And stairs—forget it. In that regard, our father is her opposite. At ninety-one, the only things wrong with him are his toes. “My doctor wants to cut one off, but I think he’s overreacting,” he said on the second morning of our vacation. The sun shone brightly through the floor-to-ceiling windows, and he was sitting shirtless at the kitchen table on the side of the house that Hugh and I share, wearing black spandex shorts.
The toes he presented for my inspection looked like fingers playing the piano, all of them long and bent and splayed. “How do you fit those things into shoes?” I asked, wincing. “Wouldn’t it be easier to go the Howard Hughes route and just wear tissue boxes on your feet?”
Just then, the plumber arrived to look at our broken dishwasher. Randy is huge in every way, and as we shook hands I thought of how small mine must have felt within his, like a paw almost. “So, what seems to be the problem?” he asked.
It’s the same story every time: Hugh calls and schedules an appointment regarding something I know nothing about. Then he leaves for God knows where and I’m left to explain what I don’t understand. “I guess it’s not washing the dishes right, or something?” I said.
Randy pulled a screwdriver from his tool belt and bent down toward a panel. “I’d have come sooner, but we’re still catching up from the winter we had. Pipes frozen, all kinds of mess.”
“Was it that cold?” I asked.
“Never seen anything like it,” he said.
My father raised his coffee cup. “And they talk about global warming. Ha!”
After twenty minutes or so, Randy suggested we get a new dishwasher, a KitchenAid, if possible. “They’re not that expensive, and it’ll probably be cheaper than fixing this here one.” I showed him to the door, and as he made his way down the stairs, my father asked when I was going to have my prostate checked. “You need to get that taken care of ASAP. While you’re at it, you might want to get a complete physical. I mean, the works.”
What does that have to do with the dishwasher? I wondered.
When Hugh returned, I passed on Randy’s suggestion regarding the KitchenAid, and he nodded. “While he was here, did you ask him about the leak under the sink?”