Beauty and the Mustache (4 page)

Her hair was streaked with
gray. The last time I saw her she was still coloring it chestnut
brown. My brain informed me that was two years ago.

My momma had always seemed
young to me. She had Jethro at sixteen, Billy at seventeen, Cletus
at eighteen, and me at twenty. The twins came two years later, and
Roscoe—the youngest—arrived approximately two years after that.
Seven children before she was twenty-five, and six of them
boys.

Now, thin and gray, she
looked older than her forty-seven years. She looked ancient, like
all the stress and worry and hardship she’d shouldered raising a
family of seven and handling my deadbeat father had finally caught
up with her.

As instructed, I sat in
the chair by her bed. The nurse reassured me once again that she
would page the doctor, and then she left me alone with my
momma.

I couldn’t focus on
anything. I don’t know how long I sat looking around the room
staring at nothing, unable to form a complete thought; maybe an
hour, maybe more.

Images and sound bites
from my childhood, of her care and love for me, of our daily
telephone calls, lobbied for attention, and my mind felt slippery
and confused.

My mother shifted, and my
gaze was drawn to her as she opened her eyes. They fell on mine
immediately.

“
Ash….” she whispered. She
gave me a weak smile. “Be a good darling and get me some ice cream.
I’d give my eye teeth for some ice cream.”

I watched her for a minute.

Ice cream—I could get her
ice cream. That was something I could do. Because under no
circumstances was I ready to talk about her death. Instead, I would
go get her ice cream.

“
Rocky road?” I asked
quietly.

“
If you can find it,
though I’m not picky.”

I nodded once and stood, moving to the
door.

“
Honey,” she called after
me. I turned and met her eyes, which were alight with amusement.
“You can leave the flowers and balloons here. No need to take them
with you.”

I glanced from her to the
balloons and flowers still clutched in my hands.

“
Oh.” I put them on the
chair where I’d been sitting.

I’d almost made it to the door before she
called me back again, “Ashley, one more thing. This is really
important.” The urgency I heard in her voice made my heart rate
spike and my eyes sting.

I crossed to her
immediately and covered her hand with mine. “Anything…you can tell
me anything.”

She gave me a weak smile,
squeezed my hand with hers, and said, “This isn’t something you
need to worry about yet. But when the time comes you should use
hemorrhoid cream to remove bags under the eyes.”

***

Dr. Gonzalez found
me coming back from the cafeteria, my momma’s
rocky road ice cream clutched to my chest. He pulled me into a
consultation room and broke the news I’d already
guessed.

My mother was dying.

She had cervical cancer.
It was stage four. It had metastasized everywhere. He gave her six
weeks. Hospice had been called, and they were on their
way.

She’d either ignored or
confused the symptoms with menopause. He said she’d likely had
symptoms for more than a year. I was not surprised that she’d
disregarded her own pain. Her selflessness was her greatest
strength and her most infuriating fault.

When I was sixteen, she’d
walked around on a broken foot for two weeks. She finally went to
the doctor when I handcuffed her to Billy’s truck and drove her to
the emergency room.

After the chat with Dr.
Gonzalez, I delivered my momma’s ice cream. Not long after that,
the social worker for hospice arrived and spoke to us both. The
entire experience was surreal.

My mother ate her ice
cream and chimed in every once in a while with, “Now, I don’t want
anyone to go to any trouble on my account.”

I could only stare at her. Words failed me.
Thought and motor skills were also failing me.

It was decided that she
would be released tomorrow and given transport back to the house.
We would be assigned a day and a night nurse who would help us care
for her over the next six weeks or so.

Six weeks.

I stayed for the rest of
the day. We chatted about my job and her coworker friends at the
library. She asked me to break the news first to her boss, Ms.
Macintyre. Momma felt confident that Ms. Macintyre would know what
to do about the rest of the staff.

I stumbled out of the
hospital around 9:30 p.m. feeling exhausted and empty. My brain
whispered to me as I walked to my car that the only thing I’d
consumed that day was a triple-grande Americano at 7:00
a.m.

I wasn’t hungry, though. I
was the opposite of hungry, but neither full nor
satiated.

I slipped into the driver’s
seat and stared unseeingly out the windshield, and was pulled from
my trance by the sound of my cell phone ringing. I glanced at the
caller ID. It was my friend Sandra, my
best
friend Sandra.

Relief and a tangible
feeling I couldn’t name seized my body, a pain so sharp that I
gasped. It felt like the glass chamber that had surrounded me all
day had finally shattered. I was suddenly breathing, and the air
that filled my lungs hurt. The photo of Sandra’s smiling face on my
phone blurred, or rather my vision blurred because I was crying. I
swiped my thumb across the screen and brought the phone to my
ear.

“
Hello?”

“
Ashley! Thank God, you
answered. Marie and I need you to settle a debate. Which is worse:
not having enough yarn to finish a sweater or discovering that the
yarn you used for the sweater was mislabeled as cashmere and is
actually one hundred percent acrylic?”

My brain told me that it
was Tuesday, which meant that back in Chicago where I lived and
worked and had a lovely life reading books and enjoying my friends,
it was knitting group night. Sandra, a pediatric psychiatrist with
a pervy heart of gold, was in my knitting group, as was
Marie.

“
Sandra….” My voice broke,
and I rested my head against the steering wheel, tears falling
messy and hot down my cheeks and neck and nose.

“
Oh! Oh, my darling….”
Sandra’s voice emerged from the other end earnest and alarmed.
“What’s going on? Are you okay? What happened? Who made you cry? Do
I need to kill someone? Tell me what to do.”

I sniffled, squeezed my
eyes shut against the new wave of tears. “It’s my mother.” I
pressed my lips together in an effort to control my voice, then
took a shaky breath and said, “She’s dying.”

“
Your mother is
dying?”

“
They’ve called hospice.
She has stage four cervical cancer. It’s metastasized everywhere.
She has six weeks….” I sobbed, almost dropping the phone and
shaking my head against the new onslaught of tears.

The other end was quiet
for a beat. “Okay…where are you? I can be there by
tomorrow.”

I shook my head. “No.” I
sniffed and wiped my hand under my nose then took a deep breath.
“No, no. Don’t do that. I just…I just needed to tell someone. I’m
leaving the hospital now.”

“
Are you in
Knoxville?”

“
Sandra….” I covered my
eyes with my hand and sighed. “You are not flying down
here.”

“
Yes. I am flying down
there.”

“
So am I!” I heard
Elizabeth’s voice from the other end. Elizabeth was also in my
knitting group and was an emergency department physician. She
worked with both Sandra and me at the hospital in
Chicago.

Their threat to fly down
to Tennessee sobered me, and I gathered a series of calming breaths
before responding. “She’s at the hospital in Knoxville. They’re
releasing her to home hospice tomorrow.”

I related the rest of the
facts surrounding my mother’s sudden hospital admission, how she
hadn’t told anyone she was sick, how she’d ignored all the signs
and symptoms until it was too late. Reciting the details calmed me.
By the time I was finished, the tears had receded.

“
Oh, honey.” Sandra’s
impossibly kind and empathetic voice soothed me from the other end
of the line.

“
Tell her I found
tickets,” Elizabeth said in the background. “We can leave first
thing tomorrow.”

A disbelieving laugh tumbled from my lips.
“You can’t just drop everything and rush down here.”

“
Yes, we can. We’ll see
you tomorrow.” I heard Sandra say, “I want the aisle seat.” It was
muffled, as if she’d covered the phone with her hand.

I heard a rustle and then
Elizabeth’s voice was in my ear. She’d obviously commandeered the
phone from Sandra. “Honey, listen. Sandra and I will be there
tomorrow. Just text Sandra your home address. Don’t worry about
anything. We’ll stay in a hotel and help you get your mother
settled. Where are you going now? Is anyone there with you? One of
your brothers?”

“
No. I’m on my way back to
the house now to tell them the news.”

Elizabeth
tsked
softly. “Oh, my
dear friend, I wish we were already there. We would huddle hug and
get drunk.”

“
Me too,” I admitted,
grateful that there were people in the world who loved me. I didn’t
have the strength to argue against their generous offer, so I
simply said, “Thank you.”

“
No need for thanks. We’ll
see you soon.”

I nodded, and my eyes
watered again as I clicked off the call, but I blinked the wetness
away. I needed to pull myself together. I needed to tell six boys
that their momma was dying, and I had no idea how they were going
to take the news.

After eight years with
barely any contact, my brothers were basically
strangers.

“
Death is a very dull,
dreary affair, and my advice to you is to have nothing whatsoever
to do with it.”

—
W. Somerset
Maugham

I imagined that
this was what Snow White must’ve felt like when
she woke up in the presence of the seven dwarves.

Seven hovering
beards.

Seven sets of bewildered eyes.

Seven inquisitive
expressions—partly suspicious, partly amused.

The fainting was my
fault.

I drove home from the hospital in a daze. I
walked to the front porch. Jethro came out of the house trailed by
several others. I glanced over his shoulder. The world went
black.

I should have known
better. I was a nurse for hootenanny’s sake! Two hours of sleep, no
food, intense levels of stress; no wonder I passed out. I was lucky
to have made it home without crashing my car. I’d never been in a
position of forgetting to eat before.

Now I was laid out on the
couch in my momma’s house surrounded by a sea of beards. I heard
the roosters in the back crowing up a fuss.

My brothers’ expressions
were varying degrees of anxious and curious. At last, my eyes
settled on the measured, silvery blue stare of a stranger. My brain
told me that this stranger’s name was Drew Runous, that he was a
pillaging Viking highlander laird, and that earlier in the day he’d
mentally pictured me getting my rub on.

Drew was sitting next to
where I lay on the couch, leaning over me, one arm braced to the
side and his hand at my temple.

That’s when the
fuzzy-headedness began to retreat.

“
What are you doing here?”
I asked him groggily, placing my hand to my forehead as I tried to
sit upright.

“
Don’t do that.” He pushed
my shoulders back to the couch. The hand at my temple moved to my
wrist, his index and middle finger pressing against my pulse point.
“You fainted. You need to take it slow.”

“
Listen to him, Ash. He’s
a doctor.” I recognized the voice of my third brother. I turned to
see sweet and anomalous Cletus just as he brushed a strand of hair
from my face. He gazed at me with kind hazel eyes. “It’s good to
see you, baby sister.”

I gave him a small smile.
I hadn’t seen him in eight years. An unexpected wave of nostalgia
rushed over me. I ignored the tears stinging my eyes and responded,
“You too, big brother.”

“
I’m not that kind of
doctor,” Drew said quietly, and my attention moved back to
him.

“
What?”

His stern face and
gray-blue gaze focused on me. “I’m not a medical
doctor.”

I blinked at him and his
bewitching eyes. “Okay….”

“
But you said you was a
doctor.” Cletus glanced between him and Jethro.

“
He is a doctor, just not
that kind.” Jethro placed his hand on Cletus’s shoulder and spoke
softly.

“
What kind?” Cletus
asked.

“
He’s a PhD. It’s like
being an expert in something. He doesn’t do the people medical
stuff.”

“
I know what a PhD is,”
Cletus mumbled.

“
Fine, you know what a PhD
is,” Billy said to Cletus, but his stare was affixed to me. “What’s
wrong with you, Ash? Are you sick? Did you see Momma?”