Valentine(9)
Sloppy as a bag of fishing worms left out in the sun, Potter would tell Corrine if he were here. Then he’d fix her a Bloody Mary, heavy on the Trappy’s hot sauce, and fry up some bacon and eggs. He’d hand her a piece of toast to sop up the bacon grease. Back in business, he’d say. Pace yourself next time, sweetheart. Six weeks since Potter died—went out in a blaze of glory!—and this morning she can hear her husband’s voice so plainly he might as well be standing in the doorway. Same old goofy smile, same old hopeful self.
When the phone in the kitchen rings, the sound tears a hole in the quiet. There’s not one person in the world Corrine cares to talk to. Alice lives in Prudhoe Bay and only calls on Sunday nights when long distance rates are low. Even then, Corrine, who hasn’t forgiven her daughter for the blizzard that shut down the airport in Anchorage and kept her from Potter’s funeral, always keeps the conversations short, talking just long enough to reassure her daughter that she is fine. I am just fine, she tells Alice. Staying busy with the garden, going to church on Wednesday nights and Sunday mornings, going through your daddy’s things so the Salvation Army can pick them up.
Every word of it is bullshit. She hasn’t boxed up so much as a T-shirt of that old man’s. Out back, the garden is nothing but packed dirt and bird carcasses, and after forty years of letting Potter drag her to church, she isn’t about to give those sanctimonious bitches another minute, or another nickel. In the bathroom, his leather shaving kit still sits open on the vanity. His earplugs are on his nightstand, alongside an Elmer Kelton book and his pain medicine. The jigsaw puzzle he was working on when he died is still spread out on the kitchen table, and his new cane leans against the wall behind it. A stack of life insurance forms, along with six banker’s envelopes from the credit union, mostly fifties, a few hundred-dollar bills, lies on a gold plastic lazy Susan in the center of the table. Sometimes Corrine thinks about setting the envelopes on fire, one by one, with the money still inside.
The phone rings again, and Corrine presses her eyes against the palms of her hands. A week earlier, she broke off the volume dial in a fit of pique. Now, with the ringer stuck on high, the god-awful off-key chime pierces every nook and cranny of the house and yard, screaming when it could have asked. The voice on the other end is equally unpleasant when Corrine finally snatches up the phone, when she says testily, Shepard residence.
Because of you, a woman shouts, I got fired last night.
Who? Corrine says, and the woman sobs and slams the phone so hard that Corrine’s ear rings.
The stray cat is standing outside the sliding-glass door with a dead mouse in his mouth when the phone rings again. Corrine snatches it up and yells into the receiver, Go to hell. The cat drops his victim and bolts across the backyard, scaling her pecan tree and launching his large, ugly body over the cinder-block fence and into the alley.
*
They were making plans for their retirement when Potter’s headaches started the previous spring. He was fully vested in his pension, and Corrine had been collecting hers since the school board forced her out a few years earlier, in the wake of some ill-advised comments she made in the teacher’s lounge. Maybe we can drive up to Alaska, Potter said, stop in California and see that redwood tree that’s big enough to drive a truck through.
But Corrine had her doubts. You can’t even get the sun up there for half the year, she told him, and what the hell is in Alaska? Moose?
Alice, said Potter. Alice is up there.
Corrine rolled her eyes, a habit she’d picked up from thirty years of working with teenagers. Right, she said, shacking up with whatshisname, the draft dodger.
Two days after they put down a deposit on a brand-new Winnebago thirty feet long and with its own shower, Potter had his first seizure. He was mowing the front yard when he fell to the ground, teeth clattering, arms and legs jerking madly. The lawn mower rolled slowly toward the street and came to a stop with its back wheels still on the sidewalk. Ginny Pierce’s kid was riding her bike in circles on the Shepards’ driveway, and Corrine heard her hollering all the way from the bedroom, where she’d been reading a book with the swamp cooler turned up high.
They drove five hundred miles to Houston and rode an elevator for fifteen stories to sit in two narrow chairs with vinyl cushions and listen while the oncologist spelled it out for them. Corrine sat hunched over a spiral notebook, her pen bearing down on the paper like she was trying to kill it. Glioblastoma multiforme, he said, GBM, for short. For short? Corrine looked up at him. It was so rare, the oncologist said, they might as well have found a trilobite lodged in Potter’s brain. If they started radiation therapy right away, they might buy him six months, maybe a year.
Six months? Corrine gazed at the doctor with her mouth hanging open, thinking, Oh no, no, no. You are mistaken, sir. She watched Potter stand up and walk over to the window where he looks out at Houston’s soupy brown air. His shoulders began to move gently up and down, but Corrine didn’t go to him. She was stuck to that chair as surely as if someone had driven a nail through one of her thighs.
It was too hot to drive home, so they went over to the Westwood Mall, where they sat on a bench near the food court, both of them clutching bottles of cold Dr Pepper as if they were hand grenades. At dusk, they walked to the parking lot. They drove with the windows down, the wind blowing hot against their faces and hands. By midnight the truck stank of them—the remnants of a cup of coffee Corrine had spilled on the seat the day before, her cigarettes and Chanel No. 5, Potter’s snuff and aftershave, their mutual sweat and fear. He drove. She turned the radio on and off, on and off, and on, pulled her hair into a clip, let it back down, and turned off the radio, turned it back on. After a while, Potter asked her to please stop.