Live Like You Were Dying (6 page)
Before I could thank her, Deana rolled up the window and pulled down the sunglasses that held back her blond hair. “Appreciate it,” I said trying to walk as fast as my ribs would let me.
The crossing guard was shaking her head. “You deaf?” she yelled.
When I pulled up to the white crossing lane, the brightness of the guard's orange safety banner almost blinded me. “Life is good . . . try it sometime,” I said smiling. The woman looked at me with the same openmouthed wonder that Louise Finches had the day I jerked the glass door from its hinges. I guess whether you're off the chart by acting ugly or nice, people are shocked just the same.
That Friday, after Heather and Malley left, I went to work. At the entrance to our subdivision, I dug up the black-eyed Susans that dotted the edge of the road and put them in a pot that I'd been hiding behind the lawnmower. Not satisfied that there were enough flowers, I drove farther north to the construction site for a new subdivision. To the right I spotted the unspoiled field that I'd scouted earlier in the week. Gold flowers with the center as dark as Heather's eyes covered an embankment that ran along the ditch next to a barbed-wire fence.
At the high school, I sat in the parking lot and waited until the bell signaling the first break rang. That was the signal that the coast was clear in the classroom. I got the janitor, Isaac, to let me borrow a wheelbarrow. A group of girls stared and then giggled when I said, “Maybe one day you'll have somebody deliver flowers to you in a wheelbarrow.”
Heather was in the teacher's lounge during the class break, just like her next-door teacher had told me. Easing into the classroom, I began arranging the pots of flowers until the room resembled a country field. Black-eyed Susans covered every square inch of Heather's desk and lined the rows between the student desks. On the chalkboard I wrote:
Why did I do it? Because you're an A Plus Wife, Partner and Friend. I love You X Infinity . . .
At the end of the school day Heather called to thank me.
She called just as the driver of the limousine I had rented for Malley and her friends pulled up to the house.
“Come go with us,” I said after I told her about my plan. “We'll swing by and pick you up.”
Heather laughed. “No, sometimes a daughter just needs to be a daddy's girl. Go on and have fun.”
“You know, I didn't have enough room on the chalkboard to write everything that I wanted to say.” I felt like a young kid talking on the phone to his girlfriend.
“And what is that?” she asked.
“Nothing in my life was right until we hooked up,” I said, my voice cracking like an adolescent's.
“I know,” she whispered. “I know. Well, go on before you're late picking up the girls.”
The girls, as in six girls, were all of Malley's closest friends. I had called their parents earlier in the week and made the girls take a vow of secrecy. So far so good. I had told Malley's friends to wait with her by the flagpole. I saw them from the distance and had the driver pull right in front of the flagpole. I watched Malley as the girls started to giggle. She had no idea what was happening.
“Anybody need a ride around here?” I called out while standing through the sunroof.
Malley threw her hand over her mouth. “What's this all about?” she cried between her fingers as the girls started to pour into the limo.
“This is your night out on the town. Come on. Get in!”
“I swear, if I get embarrassed . . .” Malley said, looking around.
“You'll what?” I asked, jumping out of the car to help her inside. “You'll get embarrassed . . . but what if tonight goes down as one of the best nights of your life? Are you going to remember it?”
She shook her head and laughed. “Daddy, you're so crazy these days.”
“Yeah, well, just wait to see how crazy I get tonight,” I said, striking a John Travolta dance pose with my finger up in the air and my legs bent far apart.
“Oh my gosh! Get in the car!”
At dinner, I went around the table, saying the names of the girls until they giggled and rolled their eyes. Sitting in the restaurant where I'd taken Heather on our anniversary, I swelled up when I heard the girl sitting next to Malley turn and whisper, “My dad's never done anything like this.” At The Retro Club near downtown, the sign at the ticket window read “12- to 14-Year-Olds,” but judging from the size of the boys who looked like they'd been corn-fed, I was glad that I'd come. Inside, the lighted dance floor vibrated from the songs of the seventies and eighties. A DJ who couldn't have been more than nineteen wore a headset and stood on top of a center platform. He nodded to the beats of songs that I recalled from my days as a boy at the skating rink. Under the floor, colored lights pulsated with the rhythm of the music that blasted from overhead speakers. The girls took off to the dance floor, worming their way through a flood of kids. Joining the other parents at the edge of the dance floor, I wondered what I would have thought if my own father had escorted me to a place like this at Malley's age. “Waste of money,” I could almost hear him say at the very suggestion. Right then while watching my daughter toss her hair and laugh, I was pleased that I'd turned out to be more like my mother. In the past few weeks, I'd told Malley that I loved her more times than I could count. When I was growing up in my dad's household, it seemed that the word
love
was as difficult for him to speak as a foreign language. We were as different as the moon and the sun, and I was determined to pave a completely different trail with my child.
I felt a tug on my hand and turned to see Laci and Emmy, two of Malley's friends, leading me out onto the dance floor. I grooved with the best of them. The words to “Jive Talking” rained down, and suddenly I felt as cocky as the boy in Choctaw who had once skated backwards to impress the group of girls who congregated by the concession stand. I danced and danced and never once thought of spots on X-rays or company organizational charts that no longer included my name.
When she saw me, Malley shook her head and laughed. In the center of a circle of screaming twelve-year-olds, I closed my eyes and, with the beat of the music of my past, shook away the fear of the future. I didn't care if I was embarrassed after the song ended and I faced the stares of the parents; I was living for the moment, and right then the moment felt good.
Malley talked about that night for two days straight, and it took about that long for my legs to stop aching from the dancing. The next day, Malley asked me to take her to get a KC and The Sunshine Band CD, and I gladly complied.
When we returned, I noticed that the car had been backed into the driveway, and the trunk was wide open. Heather came out carrying a suitcase and a pair of shoes. “What's this?” I asked.
“You'll see,” Malley said and then jumped from the truck. The trunk of the car was filled with our suitcases and the tote bag full of books usually meant for a beach trip.
“Was this part of some covert operation?”
“You're not the only one with surprises,” Heather said. “Malley and I can still manage to pull one over on you.”
“What's up with all this?”
“Remember that list?” Malley bit her lower lip. “The list with the chili dogs from that place and that pond and all that stuff?”
“Now, hold on . . .” I struggled to find one commonsense reason why we shouldn't return home for a visit to Choctaw.
“Hold what?” Heather asked. “I've already called Grand Vestal. She's got the place ready for us. She's so excited. She's fixing fried chicken tonight, special for you.”
“From the looks of it, you're planning on us staying there until the end of time.”
“What does it matter? We have the whole summer,” Heather said as she readjusted the suitcases. “It's time, Nathan . . . It's time to run barefoot through that plowed field again.”
Even though her name was Grand Vestal, there was nothing grand about my grandmother except for her heart. She had lived all of her life on a tract of land that my grandfather had managed to farm, if for no other reason, to keep the bill collectors away. Long since widowed, Grand Vestal still lived at the end of the red clay road that was lined with live oaks dating back as far as her people, a small Creek Indian tribe. When the first white man came to the area after the Trail of Tears, the ones who had hidden out in the swamp told them that they were Choctaw Indians, believing that only the Creek Indians were marked for persecution. From then on, the area that eventually grew into a tiny town hovering just above the Florida border was simply called Choctaw.
Grand Vestal greeted us before we could make the bend around the road to her house. Two shirts flapped on a clothesline next to the tin-roofed house with blue shutters shaped like slivers of the moon. She stood on the lowest concrete porch step, its corner chipped away by time. Wiping her hands on a stained yellow rag, she raised it up as if I might have forgotten my way home.
Deep wrinkles lined her eighty-three-year-old face, the skin tanned from hard work and her Indian heritage. She wore the usual polyester navy slacks that belled at the bottom and a sleeveless daisy-print top displaying muscles that women in Atlanta pay trainers to have. The earth was her workout center. She built her arms by continuing to plow her own garden and milk her own cow. Her hair was just as I remembered it. With each step, the gray braids swung from her shoulders with the excitement of a young girl.
She was talking before we could open the car doors. “Eugenia, the woman down at the end of the highway, saw ya'll pull onto my road. She called and said, âThey're turning right now.'”
“How'd she know to look for us?” Malley asked while wrapped in Grand Vestal's arms.
She pulled Malley back and studied her the way she might've if Malley had the measles. “How'd she know . . . how'd she know? Well, you're the brightest thing to land on this side of Georgia since that star fell from the sky and burnt a hole through my barn.”
After Grand Vestal hugged Heather, she turned her attention to me. She brushed the hair from my forehead and looked at me so deeply that I had to turn away and point to the dogwood tree that still filled the corner of her yard. “I see that old thing is still around.”
“Sugar Boy, that tree's like me. It'll be here till Gabriel blows his trumpet.”
That evening we finished off the best fried chicken a man could eat, and I helped Grand Vestal clean the kitchen while Malley and Heather got ready for bed. “You're adrift . . . I see it in the way you move your eyes,” she said, running her hands over my forearms. “Your bones are weary too.”
Her diagnoses always made me uncomfortable, because nine times out of ten she was right. “I'm fine . . . really. I could plow a garden if you wanted me to.”
She straightened the tablecloth and laughed. “You and your garden! You don't know how many times I'm out there working in that pasture and get so tickled. It's a wonder the neighbors don't call the police on me. Sometimes I just howl thinking about . . . you know what I'm fixing to say?”
“The foot thing.”
She fanned her hands and giggled. “Yes, gracious, yes. Every time I'm out in that garden, I can just see you running through that dirt barefooted. Your little bird chest just a-heavin' for air.”
“Yeah, well, I've still got that bird chest,” I said, patting my mending ribs. The very touch caused the spot to cross my mind. It was a distraction that both irritated and reminded me of chores left to be done.
“Did you call and let your daddy know you were coming?” I was hoping she wouldn't ask, but now there was no way out.
“No, I ran out of time.”
“Well, now, just so you know . . . he's coming over for dinner tomorrow.” I wanted to protest, but there was no use. Facing him and the past would be a task I'd have to handle sooner or later.
I watched her fill a glass of water, which was her nightly routine, and then reach for a plastic lid from a margarine container to keep out the night critters, as she called moths. I felt the pang that comes with being reunited. I could have dictated her moves as good as any Hollywood director. Her habits were stamped in the memories of my childhood and lodged too deep to be stolen.
“Good night, Sugar Boy,” she said just before turning out the kitchen light.
Standing in the darkness with the soft rays of moonlight streaming in from the kitchen window, I reached out for her arm and said the words that I should have said all of those times before. “You're something special, Grand Vestal. I haven't said it in a long time . . . but I love you.”
Her gasp was quick, and her pat to my arm was even swifter. “You sure do know how to make an old lady proud. I love you too, Sugar Boy. You are a bright spot that lingers around this place.” She brushed her thick hand across my face and nodded. “Now, then, we best get to bed because Herman will be a-crowin' soon enough.”
“Herman?” I asked, trailing behind her, the hallway boards creaking beneath our weight. “What happened to that other rooster?”
Grand Vestal opened the door to her bedroom. “Oh, you're talking about Augustus. Shoot, he got to crowing too early, so I had to serve him up for Easter dinner.”
At sunrise Herman went to work. The rooster was loud enough to wake anybody in the vicinity of forty acres. Malley snatched the bedroom door open, her hair tangled and hanging in front of her face. “Can somebody make that bird shut up?” she yelled down the hall.
From the kitchen, Grand Vestal laughed that deep-gutted laugh she had. “Only the good Lord, Miss Mary Sunshine. He's just doing his job, that's all.”
It was a strange mix of feelings watching my past and my future meld together. Grand Vestal took Malley out to the barn, and Malley came back forty-five minutes later carrying a bucket of fresh milk and a smile warmer than the plate of biscuits that sat on the table along with grits and sausage. When we finished, Grand Vestal stood and started clearing the table.