“The café makes a mean cheeseburger,” he says with a grin. “Wait till you try it. My taste buds are going crazy just thinking about it — fried onions, sharp cheddar, spicy beef, and a tangy sauce that no amount of sweet-talking will make Connie — she’s the cook — give me the recipe for.” He looks up from his plating. “Ketchup and vinegar for your fries?”
I nod.
“Malt or regular?”
“Malt.”
“What do you want to drink?”
“Water’s fine.”
Sam makes a face and shakes his head. “You can’t have water with a burger. Not only is it immoral, I’m pretty sure it’s against the law.” He reaches into the fridge and pulls out a pop for me and a beer for himself. He slides the drink across the counter. “Here. Grab your plate, and let’s see if there’s a ball game on.”
Though I haven’t eaten since breakfast, I’m not hungry, but I pick up my plate anyway and follow Sam into the living room. I don’t get it. He’s the one with cancer, but I’m the one who’s a basket case. How can he act like nothing’s wrong?
It’s the Jays versus the Red Sox. I’m relieved. I don’t have the energy to do battle with Sam today, not even over a baseball game. As it turns out, the Jays win, and I manage to choke down half my burger. Maybe my luck is changing.
Sam looks disapprovingly at my plate. “You don’t like it?”
“I do,” I protest. “It’s really good. I’m just not very hungry. You can finish it if you want.”
He pulls the plate toward him. “Don’t mind if I do. There’s people starving all over the world, you know.” He jabs me with his elbow and winks.
Despite my depressed mood, I smile and roll my eyes.
When he’s finished eating, he takes our plates to the kitchen and returns with another beer. He sits down with a sigh, stretches his arms out along the back of the couch and puts his feet up on the coffee table.
“That’s better,” he says. Then he frowns at me. “You look terrible.”
I open my mouth — to say what, I don’t know, but Sam waves me into silence before I’ve uttered a single word.
“Don’t waste your breath trying to sell me that allergy story again.” His frown turns to concern. “Your mother called me about an hour ago.”
I don’t say anything. I’m too shocked. Obviously, Mom has told Sam about our phone call. I don’t know whether to be angry or glad.
“Don’t be upset with her,” Sam says as if he’s reading my mind. “She’s just concerned about you. She’s your mother, and mothers do stuff like that when their kids are hurting.”
I nod.
“She blames herself, of course. That’s another thing mothers do, but then I guess you already know that. The thing is it’s not her fault. It’s mine. I pressured her into sending you here while she went on her honeymoon. I knew it was the only chance I was going to have to meet you and get to know you, and for you to get to know me. I made her promise not to tell you about the cancer, because that would’ve coloured how you thought about me before we even met. Do you understand what I’m saying?”
I nod again. “Yes.”
What Sam says is true. If I had known he had cancer, I wouldn’t have been able to look him in the eye or talk to him without thinking about death. I wouldn’t have seen him as a free-spirited, wise-cracking cowboy who challenged me. I would only have pitied him. The truth is I would probably never even have met him, because I wouldn’t have agreed to come to Webb’s River in the first place.
What a mistake that would have been. When I think of how full and rich and fun my time with him has been, all our conversations, even our head-butting, I wouldn’t undo a minute of it.
But now that he’s made a place for himself in my heart, how can I let him go?
My tears start to flow again — and here I was so sure I was cried out. Sam leans across the couch and brushes them away with his thumb.
“None of that,” he says. Then he adds, “You’re not very attractive when you cry.”
“Sam!” I wail and smack him.
He puts up his hands to defend himself, but his face breaks into the familiar roadmap of laugh-lines I’ve come to love.
“How can you kid around?” I demand.
Sam’s expression becomes serious. “You mean because I’m dying?”
It makes me wince to hear him say it. I nod.
“We’re all dying, Dani — me, you, all of us. From the moment we’re born, we’re on the road to death. The only difference between you and me is that I have a better idea of when and how it’s going to happen. You don’t know, so you can choose to believe you have another seventy years left. You might; then again you might not, but since you don’t know, you live like you have forever.
“But think about this. If you knew the bus that’s taking you back to Vancouver was going to crash and you were going to die in that crash, would you stop doing the things you like to do and focus only on that bus crash?”
He pauses to let me think about what he’s saying.
“Because if you do,” he continues, “you’ve already stopped living, and you might as well jump off a cliff right now. I’m going to die of cancer — in a few months they tell me — but until then I’m alive, and for as long as I can, I’m going to enjoy it, and that includes joking around.”
“Okay,” I sniff and smile. “I get it. But don’t you want to do something special with the time you have left? You know — like see the Taj Mahal or go bungee-jumping? Live out some of your dreams?”
He smiles and his eyes sparkle. “I guess I must be one of the luckiest people in the world, because I’ve been living my dreams my whole life. I’m a simple man. I like books. I like baseball. I like bein’ a cowboy. And I like the wide open spaces. I know what you’re getting at though — I like that Tim McGraw song too — but the truth is I’ve never felt the need to go skydiving or mountain climbing —” He chuckles before continuing. “And I’ve already ridden a few bulls, though none of them was named Fu Man Chu.”
His face gets serious again. “When I finally accepted the facts and realized I wasn’t going to outrun this cancer, there was only one thing I hadn’t done that I needed to, and that was meet you.”
Chapter Twenty-Three
Talking with Sam doesn’t make me any less afraid of losing him, but his positive outlook is contagious. If he can focus on living, then so can I. I’ll grieve for him when he’s gone. In the meantime, there are no more secrets. Sam is finally answering my questions, and I have a lot of them.
“Why haven’t you ever married?” I ask. “You’re good-looking and smart and funny. Women like you. I can’t believe you haven’t made that walk down the aisle at least once.”
Sam squints at me suspiciously through his eyebrows. “That almost sounds like a compliment. What’s the catch? Where’s the punchline?”
“No catch,” I say innocently. “No punchline. I’m serious. If I was old, I’d think you were okay.”
Sam shakes his head and snorts. “Yup, that’s a compliment all right. Thanks very much.”
I grin. “No, seriously. How come you’ve never married?”
“Not every fella is husband material. You’d do well to remember that.”
I’m about to ask him what fatal flaw he has that would make him a crummy husband when my phone rings. I fish it out of my jeans and look at the display screen. Then I frown and put the phone on the coffee table.
“Aren’t you going to answer it?” Sam says.
I shake my head. “At the moment, I’m more interested in the conversation we’re having.”
Sam frowns. “If it’s your mom, I think you should talk to her. She’ll worry, otherwise.”
I shake my head again. “It’s not her. It’s Micah.”
Sam’s eyebrows jump. “And you don’t want to talk to him?”
I look away. “We sort of had a fight.”
“Oh,” Sam says.
I try to steer the conversation back
on topic. “You were about to tell me why you wouldn’t make a good husband.”
“No, I wasn’t.”
“Sam!” I groan. “Sometimes you can be so aggravating!”
He leans toward me and mumbles, “Not a good trait in a husband.”
I go to swat him, but he pulls back and grins at me.
“Aw, come on,” I pout. “Stop being so difficult. You can’t tell me you haven’t at least been tempted to get married.”
Sam looks thoughtful for a few seconds, and then his face relaxes into a smile. “There was this one time.”
And then my phone rings again.
“Saved by the bell,” Sam mutters.
I growl and snatch my cell off the table. It’s Micah again, but this time he’s texting me.
SRY ABT 2DAY. I WS A JERK. PLS DNT B MAD. <3 MICAH
By the time I finish reading, I’m smiling and quickly text him back.
IM SRY 2. CALL ME 2MORR. XOXO. DANI.
When I put the phone down and look back at Sam, there’s a definite glint in his eye. “I take it all’s well in paradise again?”
I feel myself blush. “Could be.” Then I quickly zip back on topic. “So now, tell me about the time you came close to getting married.”
He scowls at me. “You’re like a dog with a bone — you know that?”
“Don’t change the subject.”
Sam grumbles something under his breath that I don’t catch, and then he launches into his story. “It was a long time ago. I had only been in rodeo a couple of years, when I met this girl at a party, a rodeo party. She was a university student, but it was summertime, and she and her girlfriend had come to the Calgary Stampede on holiday. It was love at first sight — for both of us, and for the next year or so we saw each other whenever we could. It wasn’t easy what with her going to school and me riding rodeo. It meant a lot of chasing around the country for both of us, but we were in love, and there wasn’t anything we wouldn’t do to be together.”
“So you proposed!” I interject excitedly.
“I did.”
“And she accepted!”
Sam smiles. “Yes.”
“So what happened? What went wrong?” I ask. “How come you didn’t end up getting married?”
“Let’s just say real life and common sense intervened.”
I cock my head curiously. “What do you mean?”
“Being in love with somebody is one thing. Making a life with them is a whole different ball game. Once we started thinking about the future and talking about what we wanted out of life, we realized that we were going down two completely different roads, and it soon became clear that marriage would be a mistake.
“The thing is that even though my head could see that, my heart still wanted the girl. Thank goodness, she was more sensible. She’s the one who called off the engagement.”
“But you loved each other!” I wail.
“I still love her,” Sam says quietly. “And I believe there’s part of her that still loves me too, but that was then and this is now, and we are both living the lives we knew we wanted. Don’t get sucked in by all those love songs, Dani. As wonderful as love is, real life has a way of knocking the stuffing out of it, and if couples aren’t on the same page, people who start out in love can end up hating each other and themselves.”
“So she called it off and gave you back your ring?”
He chuckles. “She called off the engagement, but she didn’t return the ring.”
“Why is that funny?”
“Well, I didn’t have much money back in those days, and like I said, I spent most of it just travelling back and forth to see my girl. When I proposed, I couldn’t afford a proper ring, so I gave her one out of a gum ball machine. Considering we were engaged over two weeks and she wore the ring that whole time, it held up pretty well. Mind you, we had to glue the stone back in a couple of times.”
If he says anything else, I don’t hear it. It’s like I’ve slipped into another dimension. My mind whirls like a tornado, dropping me in my mother’s bedroom, in front of her jewellery cabinet. I’m looking down at a little black box with a cheap, plastic ring inside.
It’s a coincidence — right? There are lots of couples who get engaged with cigar bands and gum ball rings. And uncles who come into existence over night?
“Dani?” Sam’s voice brings me back to the trailer. “Are you okay? You’re really pale all of a sudden.”
My mouth is dry. I lick my lips. “Did she marry somebody else?”
Sam looks puzzled, but he nods. “As a matter of fact, she did. A fellow from university. Somebody she’d dated before we met.”
“Did she have any children?”
“Why are you asking these questions?”
“Did she have any children?” I repeat.
He closes his eyes. Then he lowers his head and sighs. “Yes. A little girl. She was named Danielle, after her father.”
“What’s your middle name, Sam?”
He lifts his head and looks straight into my eyes. “I think you already know the answer to that,” he says.
For several minutes, we just stare at one another.
I think I should be mad. Or hurt. Or at the very least, feel betrayed. But I don’t feel any of those things. I am surprised and a little overwhelmed, but, oddly, what I feel mostly is relief because finally things make sense.
Finally, I understand why my mother has married so many times. I get why Gary left. I get why my mother sent Sam all my pictures. I get why she sent me to Sam. What I don’t get is why Sam wasn’t part of my life all along. So I ask him.
“I have no idea who my parents were,” he says. “I was what they used to call a foundling. As a baby, I was left on the doorstep of a childless older couple in a small town. Apparently, they’d always wanted kids, but it just never happened. So when I appeared, they made up some story about me being a grandson and kept me. But I guess somebody got wise, because when I started school, social services showed up and took me away. At that point I was too old for anyone to want to adopt — except for the couple who’d been raising me, and they were too old to adopt me — so I spent the rest of my childhood in foster homes. It wasn’t so bad, but it didn’t give me much sense of family, and when I finished school, I took off and joined the rodeo.” He smiles. “No regrets.
“When your mother and I broke off our engagement, we didn’t know she was pregnant. When she told me a couple of weeks later, I proposed all over again, but she turned me down. I said I’d quit the rodeo and get a regular job, but she wouldn’t hear me. She said we’d both be miserable. She was probably right. She said she was going to marry that fella from university. He was just finishing his degree and already had a teaching job lined up. He loved your mother just like I did — it’s not hard to do — and even though he knew he hadn’t sired you, he wanted to be your dad.
“And that’s when I bowed out. I wanted you to have a real family. I didn’t want you pulled in a bunch of different directions. So I made your mother promise not to tell you about me. As far as you were concerned, Gary Lancaster was your dad. It wasn’t that I didn’t want to claim you, but it wouldn’t have been fair to you. Your mom didn’t like the idea, but she went along with it.
“I guess in that live-forever mindset I was in, I figured that one day when you were grown, I’d get the chance to meet you. Then when I got sick, I knew time was running out. It was now or never.”
“I wish it had been sooner,” I say quietly. “I wish you had always been a part of my life.”
“I wish that too, darlin’. It was a dumb decision on my part. That just goes to show you — being grown up doesn’t automatically make you smart.”
He goes to the kitchen and comes back with two beers. He holds one out to me.
I blink at him curiously. “I’m not old enough to drink.”
“Yeah, well, I can’t really wait around for that,” he says, “and I want to share at least one first in my daughter’s life.” We
clink bottles. “Just don’t tell your mother.”
Author's Note
With the exception of Webb's River, the places mentioned in the story all exist. There is even an annual William's Lake Rodeo, although the date and some of the details have been altered in order to make it fit the story. The rodeo actually takes place at the end of June, not July.
Copyright © Kristin Butcher, 2013
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Editor: Sylvia McConnell
Design: Courtney Horner
Epub Design: Carmen Giraudy
Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication
Butcher, Kristin
Truths I learned from Sam [electronic resource] / Kristin Butcher.
Electronic monograph.
Issued also in print format.
ISBN 978-1-4597-0692-7
I. Title.
PS8553.U6972T78 2013 jC813'.54 C2012-903215-8
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Truths I Learned from Sam Page 12
