Live Like You Were Dying (9 page)

“Naw, there's enough for me to do around here.”

Lana grinned to reveal those shiny teeth that I remembered. “Now, before the summer's over, we're going to have a big cookout,” she yelled while buckling her seat belt. “A high-school reunion of sorts. It'll be just like old times again.”

Watching them drive away, I felt myself becoming more a part of the ten acres that surrounded Grand Vestal's place. I imagined being in exile, unable to step foot past the fence post at the edge of the road, exiled from the townspeople who I'm sure had already started thinking about the type of flowers they might send to my funeral. It was the part of small-town life that I didn't miss, so I chose not to worry with them unless they happened to drive into the kingdom known as Grand Vestal's.

My father was the only regular visitor each day. He showed up every afternoon right after his nap and always stayed exactly one hour. He sat at the kitchen table, listening to Grand Vestal's updates about our morning activities. I wondered why he never asked me why I didn't drop by to see him. But I guess the memories of the past were still too fresh for both of us, and the inner wounds were not yet healed. He was there the day the Walker sisters took Heather to lunch.

Before I could close the front door, Grand Vestal was talking. “Was that Henry Walker's daughter that Heather went out to eat with?”

“Yes, ma'am.”

Grand Vestal folded the newspaper that she was reading. “She has a twin too, right? The one that runs the dress shop.” “Yes, ma'am. But they just opened up a travel agency too.” My father was leaning over the table, rolling the salt shaker between his fingers. “I've been studying about taking a vacation.”

“Vacation?” Grand Vestal cried. “You're thinking of taking a vacation?” My father nodded. “Where on earth to?” “Don't know yet. Thinking about seeing some of the country.”

Grand Vestal fanned herself with the newspaper. “Ronnie Bishop, has the heat got the best of you? You haven't ventured past the county line since Moses was a boy.” With the exception of his stint in the service, my father had never left Georgia.

“Just been thinking that it's time for me to see the country while I still got my health.”

“When are you going?” Malley asked as she passed through to the kitchen.

“Don't know yet.”

“Is anybody going with you on this vacation of yours?” Grand Vestal asked.

When my father shrugged off the question, Grand Vestal threw down the newspaper. “Lord have mercy! I could get more information from the fence post out there.” She got up and started dusting the coffee table. Recreation and daydreaming were now officially over. There was work to be done.

After my father left, I tossed a bale of hay over the fence into the pasture. As the cows trotted toward the fence, I brushed away pieces of hay that clung to my shirt, and that's when it hit me. For the first time I had taken on a physical job without my ribs causing me to grimace. The cows looked up when I cheered; the yell made me feel twice as good about being free from the pain.

By Memorial Day, the summer heat landed on Grand Vestal's house with a seduction of laziness that she never tolerated. While a portable fan rotated on the back porch next to a pile of watermelons, we weeded out the garden and fought the streams of sweat that stung our eyes. Malley pushed her bandanna back higher on her head but never complained. “Sweat is nothing but a sign of honest work,” Grand Vestal said. The definition might as well have been scratched across the sand of her garden. I wondered if there was some sort of magic in the way that she had said the words that kept a twelve-year-old girl from griping.

“This row is mine,” Malley pulled back stalks of corn and yelled.

“Yours?” I asked, pulling weeds from around the tomato plants.

“It's hers, all right.” Grand Vestal said from one row over. “She's going to work two rows all by herself. Then when we take the produce to market in Valdosta, she'll pocket the money too.”

The sun burned against our skin the same way that it cooked the soil. Grains of sand fell from our fingertips like pieces of grilled peppercorn. Then the sound of crackling gravel and tires hitting the washed-out place in Grand Vestal's driveway caused us all to walk out from the garden like actors stepping from behind a green curtain.

Coming around the side of the house was my father's red pickup, pulling a white travel trailer with a red stripe down the side. Swinging around the clothesline, my father pulled up to the edge of the porch and stepped out, grinning as big as he had the day Malley caught the bass.

“Ronnie Bishop, what've you gone and done now?”

My father reached up and tapped the side of the camper. “They auctioned off Louis Franklin's belongings at the feed store this morning. His boy claims this trailer hasn't yet seen five hundred miles. Louis never got out much.”

“You went and bought a fifth-wheel camper?” Grand Vestal pulled her neck close to her chest until it looked like she might have a roll of fat. “What business do you have spending money on such as that?”

Shrugging, my father kicked at a stone in the dirt. “I told you I wanted to take a look at the country.”

“In that thing?” Grand Vestal asked with her hands propped against her waist.

“A man gets tired of looking at four walls all the time.” “Where on earth are you planning to go? A man your age has got no business traveling by himself neither. Next thing you know, somebody will have knocked you in the head and taken off with that camper and your wallet both.” Malley ran up to the trailer and opened the door. She was still standing there, peering inside, when my father said the words that made them all stare at me.

“If somebody was wanting to . . . oh, I don't know . . . go out west . . . maybe to that big hole out in Arizona . . . you reckon any of ya'll might go with me?”

Grand Vestal and Malley stepped slowly toward me the same way they might act if they were trying to catch a feral cat that had darted away at the first sign of affection. Their wide-eyed stares burned holes through the excuses that raced through my mind.

That night, sitting on the edge of the bed beside Heather, I said, “I can't do it.”

“You can't, or you won't?” she asked. I rubbed my head while the details swirled around me.

“Fine. You know what? I don't want to go.”

“Why not? Like you told Malley the night you took her and her friends dancing, ‘What if this trip goes down as one of the best times of your life?'”

“That's a low blow, using a man's own words against him.” Heather laughed and leaned into me. “Seriously, Nathan, you'll regret it if you don't go. Trust me. You'll regret the what-if, and if I recall, you recently told me that you didn't want to live your life by ‘what if.'”

I threw up my hands. “There you go again, using my words against me! Why did I have to hook up with a woman with the memory of an elephant?” She laughed again and then left me alone to sort out a decision.

Walking around the bedroom, I fought the nervousness of finally coming face-to-face with my father on a trip that would take days on end, sitting in a pickup, staring at the empty asphalt before us. What would we talk about? How would we ever get beyond the silence? I kept thinking it was a mistake, but the part of me that had decided to live saw only the adventure that lay ahead. My smart-aleck comments to my father were now swinging me by the tail. It was time to either take action like a man or to quit whining like a baby.

I slipped out to the back porch and flipped through the places that my mother had once dreamed of visiting. Until Malley had found the scrapbook, her dreams had been buried right along with her. For me the scrapbook became a textbook of lessons learned from putting off for tomorrow what should be carried out today. Not taking the trip that she had longed for would be the same as letting her down. Rubbing the top of the photo album that held my mother's dreams, I knew that the trip was meant for her as much as it was for me. A journey for those who had wanted to live.

The next morning Grand Vestal filled jugs of water in the kitchen and handed them to me. “You need to drink well water with some nutrients in it.” She moved about the kitchen gathering ginseng, green teas, and other spinach-looking juices that she claimed ate up toxins.

Before I walked outside, I searched the living room, trying to sear the details in my mind. The smell of ash and smoke from the wood-burning stove and the way Grand Vestal's glasses were laid across the Bible on the scratched-up coffee table. Pausing at the door, I fought the feeling that I might never pass this way again.

By the time I'd loaded the luggage, Grand Vestal had finished organizing the small kitchen in the camper and securing the boxes that she'd prepared for us. Sweat trickled from her brow as she pushed back the lose ends of hair. “Bye, Sugar Boy.” She patted me three times the way she always did for luck. “Just keep your eyes on the path ahead of you. Don't look to the right or to the left. Then you'll find what you need.”

“Yes ma'am. Take care of my girls for me,” I said, winking at Heather and Malley. Heather wrapped her arms around my neck.“Can I talk you into going with us?” I asked, whispering in her ear.

“No,” she said, kissing me. “It's time, Nathan. Time to do this on your own.” I leaned over and hugged Malley. She handed me my mother's scrapbook.

“Here, don't forget this.” She smiled when I squeezed her extra hard.

“You're still my baby girl,” I whispered in her ear.

My father sat in his truck, sipping from a white thermos stained with coffee. He seemed startled when I walked up next to the truck window, like he was unsure whether I'd really make the trip. He wiped the spilled coffee from the pocket of his shirt and nodded at me.

The truck door creaked as I closed it, and the sweetness of cow feed that my father transported from the feed store every Friday engulfed me. It was the same scent that I'd smelled in the truck the day he taught me how to drive in the pasture.

My father never said a word as we left Choctaw, Georgia, that summer day. He just honked the horn and tossed a hand out the window and saluted. Malley and Heather stood on the same concrete step where Grand Vestal had first greeted us. I kept watch over them long after they had slipped away from my view.

Up until we'd reached Alabama, my father had been satisfied to eat sausage and crackers from one of the supply boxes that Grand Vestal had packed for us. By the time we were north of Birmingham, though, he was ready to stop at a diner and have a real meal.

Inside, the Shiny Diner lived up to its name with chrome booths fastened with red vinyl cushions. A young woman with a ponytail took our order. When she served the plates of meat loaf, she paused before turning to walk away. “You have got to be father and son.”

Chewing a piece of bread, I looked up at the same time my father did. “Yeah,” we both said and she walked away, nodding.

When she brought the check to the table, I asked her how she knew we were father and son. With her head tossed back, she said, “This is just a part-time thing. I'm working on a psychology paper and use this job to help pick out father-son connections. I'm calling it ‘Male Connections.'”

“You don't say,” I said and reached for a toothpick from the jukebox-shaped container at the end of the table.

“It's always the same. They order the same foods, give the same looks to each other, but yet . . . there's seldom any talking. Just mainly looks.”

She ripped the ticket from the pad, and I snatched the check before my father could grab it. “It's on me this time.”

“I'll pick up the tip, then.” My father pulled himself out of the booth by gripping the chrome tabletop. He never acknowledged the waitress or her observations that jolted me to the core of my insides. Make no mistake about it, I had not left my family behind to spend time communicating to my father through our mutual love of meat loaf. I was going to know him right down to the DNA that we shared but never discussed. It would be a journey that tested the limits of my patience more than any project deadline I'd ever faced at Beckett Construction.

Chapter Eight

Driving down the middle of America on Interstate 40, hotel chains and fast-food restaurants filled the open spaces just as country music and talk radio filled the gaps of silence inside the truck. With each state line we passed, I found myself missing Heather and Malley more and more, until I almost gave in and asked Dad to turn around. The old part of me that kept wanting to resurrect my obsession with time told me that this was all a waste, a trip better suited for an airplane, with my wife and daughter, people who actually liked to talk. The steady tread of the truck tires caused the passenger door to vibrate against my shoulder, and I gave in and leaned closer until my face was pressed against the side of the window. Pretending to sleep, I kept a vigil over the green clock on the truck dashboard. An hour later we pulled over at a rest stop.

Outside of Oklahoma City, a billboard advertising the Championship Rodeo greeted us with an outline of a cowboy holding his hat in one hand and gripping the rope on a bucking bull with the other. Nodding at the sign, my father said,“They played a rodeo taped there on TV the other night.” He chuckled and gripped the steering wheel tighter. “I wondered if we'd pass that place.”

“Let's stop.”

He glanced at me and quickly looked back at the interstate. “Naw. We best not.”

“Why not?”

He ran his hands over the steering wheel before finally settling for driving with one hand on top of the wheel and one on the bottom. “We got that canyon to see.”

“Well, if it's been there this long, I bet it will still be there whenever we make it. Come on, live a little.”

The words seemed to startle him right down to the toes of his boots. He grimaced and then coughed.