The Grim Reaper Comes Calling

by Darrell Maloney

  “It doesn’t,” Dave replied.

  “I want to scream ‘springtime!’ but still be subdued enough for fall too.”

  “That doesn’t make any sense either.”

  “Of course it does.”

  “Okay,” Dave said. “Not gonna argue with a crazy woman. Just not gonna do it.”

  “And of course,” she went on, “it’s got to match the recliners.”

  “Honey, the recliners don’t match now.”

  “I know. That’s why it’s important that the couch matches both of them.”

  “Sheesh.”

  “Oh, Dave, you’re such a… man! Everything I’m saying makes perfect sense.”

  “I think I’m going over there to look at… lamps or something.”

  “Honey, we don’t need any lamps.”

  “That’s why I’m just looking and not buying.”

  Truth was, Sarah didn’t really care if Dave didn’t help her pick out a couch. By doing so he relinquished the right to complain about the one she chose.

  If, as he asserted, she was crazy, then she was crazy like a fox.

  Dave headed to the lamp section, where he happened upon two other men who were “looking and not buying.”

  One of them said, as Dave approached, “You too, huh?”

  “Uh huh.”

  The third man said, “You know how I get even with my wife?”

  “No, how?”

  “After we leave here, before I take her home, I’m dragging her with me to go shopping for some new tools.”

  As it turned out, Sarah’s couch fit the room perfectly.

  It screamed springtime but was still subtle enough for fall.

  It was a floral print, but wasn’t too flowery.

  It complimented the color of Dave’s recliner and the style of Sarah’s.

  Most importantly, it was just the right width to accommodate a dying woman and the two small children who considered themselves the luckiest kids on earth.

  Simply because their beloved mother managed to make it through another night.

  Amy got up after a minute or so. With all her heart she wanted to stay longer. She’d have stayed there all day long if she hadn’t had an important job to do.

  She considered herself her mother’s nurse, you see.

  It didn’t matter that she was too young to go to nursing school by a decade.

  Or that, while she could spell nursing and define the word, she hadn’t much of a clue what was involved in the profession.

  She could take what she knew about the nursing profession and balance it all on the tip of her pinky finger, with a lot of real estate left over.

  She knew that doctors took care of sick and injured people, but they seldom smiled and never hugged their patients.

  And they were almost always men.

  And they must not have liked teeth, because they didn’t help you if you had a toothache.

  She knew that nurses took care of sick and injured people too, but they smiled just as much as regular people and didn’t mind giving hugs.

  And they were almost always women, but they didn’t like teeth either.

  Amy had never been to a dentist in all her life. Neither had Robert. When a family was as poor as theirs, trips to the dentist were a luxury beyond their means.

  Monica limited their intake of sugar as much as she could, and prayed that any dental issues they had as children wouldn’t be too painful.

  Like many poor mothers she hoped any decay issues went away when their baby teeth came out. And that by that time in their lives they’d gotten used to a diet that contained little sugar.

  And that it was now instilled in them and became a lifelong habit.

  Monica suffered from bad teeth and had pretty much her entire life.

  Even now she had occasional toothaches and very sensitive teeth.

  But mothers with limited means tend to give priority to their children. When there isn’t enough food for everyone, the kids get priority. And the same is true of health care.

  Monica needed to be in a hospital, but she had no money. She needed a full-time nurse, but had only Amy to fill that role.

  Amy would do her best, but with limited experience and limited knowledge, both knew it wouldn’t be enough.

  She went down to the basement to get several bottles of water.

  This wasn’t the boiled rainwater she and Robert were drinking.

  This was what Amy called “the good stuff.” The store-bought bottled water that Dave stockpiled in the months leading up to the blackout. There were still almost sixty cases lining the basement’s walls. And while the rainwater she and her brother were drinking was safe, she applied kids’ logic to her mom’s water.

  “The cleaner the water is, the better it is for her.

  “Maybe if it’s clean enough it’ll clean the cancer from her body and heal her,” she told Robert.

  It could only make sense from a child’s point of view.

  Of course, Monica had told her a hundred times not to waste the good water on her.

  “You need to save it,” she said. “For the times the rain doesn’t come for awhile. When there’s a drought you’ll need it.”

  Amy won the argument when she started to lie about it.

  “This is rainwater, Momma. It just tastes good because we boiled it a little longer than usual.”

  Amy thought that by loosening the cap before she brought the water to her mother she could fool her.

  It didn’t work. Monica knew.

  But if it was so important to Amy she have the good water that Amy would lie to make it happen…

  Then Monica would cave on this particular issue.

  Chapter 36

  If Amy resented at all that Robert got to cling to his mother and snuggle with her while she went to fetch her mother’s water, she didn’t let on.

  She’d already accepted her role as Monica’s caregiver.

  Now she was well on her way to accepting another role as well.

  She had a friend in school, before the world went all to hell.

  Her name was Angela. And they had a lot of things in common.

  Both were quiet, for one thing. They seldom spoke unless spoken to, but then were exceedingly polite.

  For another thing, they both occasionally showed up with knots on their heads or bruises on their bodies. Both took great pains to conceal those knots and bruises from others, but both recognized the “signs.”

  And both girls could count their friends on the fingers of a single hand.

  One day Mrs. Jamison, the girls’ teacher, assigned a “team project.” It was one of those projects sneaky teachers assign to fulfill part of their own agenda as well as the mandated curriculum.

  Part of her agenda was to teach the students how to work together on things. Especially the shy or quiet students, or students who seemed to have trouble making friends.

  Amy and Angela, of course, were all three.

  The girls were told to team up and to prepare a report on the country of Argentina, due a week later.

  Neither had ever heard of Argentina, but that was no problem.

  “Later today,” Mrs. Jamison told her class, “We will visit the library for one hour. All of you can find books related to your specific countries and sign them out for the project.”

  Not knowing beans about Argentina wasn’t the only problem, from Amy’s point of view.

  Since they wouldn’t be allowed to work on their project in class, they’d have to do it all at home.

  And there was no way she could invite Angela to her home. Not with her father Ronald freshly out of prison, immensely angry at the whole world, and looking for any excuse to punch his wife or children.

  Amy walked up to her friend in the hallway after school and meekly asked, “Um… I don’t think we can work at my house. Can we work at yours instead?”

  Amy didn’t realize she was holding her breath until she exhaled a sigh of great relief. It came after Angela
said, “Sure… I mean, I guess so.”

  Angela was a child so shy, so timid, she just couldn’t bring herself to say no to anyone.

  She rushed home that day, hoping against hope she didn’t overstep her boundaries. To have to go back to school the next day and have to tell Amy she’d been overruled by her mom, that they couldn’t go to Angela’s house after all… well, that was just a prospect too painful to think about.

  When Angela walked through her front door that day she found her mom sitting on her couch with two of her drug buddies.

  They were using a clear glass tube with a round bulb at the end, holding it over a cigarette lighter while slowly inhaling the snow-white smoke it put off.

  It was a meth pipe, specifically designed for melting crystal methamphetamine shards and converting them to an inhalable gas.

  “Mom, I have a school project with another girl. Can she come over here after school for a couple of days so we can work on it?”

  Her mother finished filling her lungs and exhaled a large cloud of white smoke in Angela’s general direction.

  Then she handed the pipe and the lighter to a scummy looking man seated next to her so he could take a turn.

  Angela’s mother was hit and miss.

  Some days she hated her daughter so much she’d just as soon beat her as look at her.

  Other days she smothered the child in kisses and told her she loved her to the moon and back.

  Today, high as a kite and happy she’d been able to trade eighty dollars worth of food stamp groceries for forty dollars worth of dope, she was in a good mood.

  “Sure, honey. Whatever you want.”

  That was all it took.

  Angela wasn’t going to tempt fate or give her mother a chance to change her mind when her head got clear.

  She was out the door faster than she came in and avoided her mom for the rest of the day.

  The next day, the first time Angela brought Amy home, Angela went in first to scout things out.

  Her mother was passed out naked on her bed, between two naked men Angela had never seen before.

  She quietly closed the door and the girls did their work in the kitchen.

  Angela’s only sibling, a sixteen year old sister named Kristy, made them Hamburger Helper for dinner that night. It was nothing fancy but it was tasty and filling.

  After they finished Kristy and Angela walked Amy home and Amy learned a bit about their family situation.

  It turned out that Amy had something else in common with Angela: a father who went to prison. Amy’s had been released not long before. Angela’s would never be back. He’d killed a man in a bar fight and was sentenced to life without parole.

  Angela’s mother dropped out of high school. She’d never had a job, other than a part time gig at a burger joint she lost after she tested positive for drugs.

  Kristy called her mother a “whore twice over.”

  “She’s a prostitute by trade. She says she only has one thing of value and if she has to rent it out to eat then so be it.

  “She’d also a whore to the drugs she pumps into her body. I keep telling her she’s going to kill herself and she says ‘Good. Then my misery will finally be over.’”

  Kristy took over the mother role long before. Angela had witnessed her mother do things no child should ever see. They’d seen her overdose twice and considered her lucky to be alive.

  They’d written their mother off long before.

  In Kristy’s mind and in Angela’s mind, they had each other and nobody else.

  Chapter 37

  Other than her own mother and the teachers at her school Amy never really had any role models.

  The last few months, though, she found one in a very unlikely source: Angela’s sixteen year old sister Kristy.

  Even at that age she was way more mature than her own mother.

  She hated school but was determined not to repeat her mother’s mistake and drop out.

  And she swore off drugs at age seven, becoming the youngest student in her grade school to take the D.A.R.E. challenge and sign her pledge.

  “I’ve personally seen what drugs can do to people,” she told her counselor without offering any specifics. “I would rather die than take any drugs into my body.”

  That same day she took Angela aside and whispered to her, “If you ever take drugs I will take you to the top of a high cliff and drag you off with me.”

  “Don’t worry,” Angela responded. “I’m just as against them as you are.”

  Kristy protected her sister as much as she could.

  She made sure Angela went to school each and every day, for she knew she wasn’t safe at home when Kristy was gone.

  Once, when their mother passed out while turning a trick, her angry customer walked out looking for someone to beat.

  Kristy stepped in front of Angela and was beaten bloody. The police were called but the man got away.

  When their mother came to she didn’t blame the man or her drug habit. She blamed Kristy for losing one of her steady customers.

  That was the life poor Angela was brought up in.

  After the project was finished Amy never went into Angela’s house again.

  She heard a rumor Angela’s mother went to prison and it was just the two of them… Angela and Kristy… occupying the same house.

  The rumor went on. Kristy was working part-time at a fast food restaurant and relatives were helping them pay the bills. And that they were getting on splendidly.

  Amy wondered if they survived the blackout and were still doing okay.

  She thought of the pair often, and wondered how Kristy would handle the situation she and Robert were in, with a dying mother and presumably dead father.

  She concluded that Kristy would make the most of things and work hard to make her mother comfortable and to prolong her life as much as she could.

  And she, Amy, would do the same thing.

  Even though she hadn’t seen Kristy in more than a year, she was the one Amy would emulate.

  Kristy was her role model and would guide Amy’s efforts.

  And if Amy had the chance, and she really hoped she would someday, she planned to walk over to Angela’s house to check on them and make sure they were okay.

  She didn’t know it, but she’d get the chance to meet Angela and Kristy again very soon.

  Chapter 38

  Fate works in very odd ways. Or doesn’t work at all.

  A lot of people give fate the credit when seemingly bizarre incidents happen, when in reality they have nothing to do with fate.

  A pair of old friends bumping into each other at a supermarket’s produce aisle, the day after one told her husband it would be nice to see that friend again, is sometimes called fate in action.

  In reality, it’s nothing more than a coincidence.

  After all, the two friends each have to be somewhere.

  And they are a thousand different somewheres each and every day of their lives.

  Pump six at the 7-Eleven, the lobby at the 7-Eleven, the beer aisle at the 7-Eleven, the parking lot at Taco Bell, the restroom at Taco Bell, the cashier’s line at Taco Bell, and on and on and on…

  If the two friends live in the same city or region, eventually one of those thousands of places one friend is each and every day will line up with one of the thousands of places the other friend is.

  From that perspective it’s not even a coincidence, really.

  It’s inevitable.

  Sociologists will point out the trillions of individual transactions and movements that go on around the world every single second of every single day.

  They say with that many individual transactions going on some really incredible coincidences are going to happen. How could they not?

  This author was looking through his second wife’s seventh grade yearbook one evening and came across a familiar face: that of his first wife. He met Barbara in 1974 in Lubbock, Texas and met Jane in 1984 in Adelanto, California. And in 1971 b
oth of them were seventh grade classmates in a middle school in Mississippi.

  Many would say that fate had to have a hand in that, but fate had nothing to do with it. It was just a bizarre coincidence.

  That’s a true story, by the way.

  So as impossible as it sounds, it wasn’t surprising at all that as Amy watched her mother sip her water and wondered about her friend Angela and Angela’s big sister Kristy… Kristy and Angela were thinking of her as well.

  Kristy asked her little sister, “Angela, that friend of yours who came over a few times to work on that project with you. Her name was Amy, right?”

  “Uh, huh…”

  “Do you know about her situation?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Do you think if we went over and asked her family for any extra food they had, do you think they’d give it to us?”

  “I don’t know. I don’t think they had a lot of stuff. I mean, I know her dad was in prison before and was out but was real mean. And she said they sometimes went to bed hungry. And I’m not even sure where she lives. Somewhere on Maple, I think. She told me she didn’t want to do the project at her house because she was afraid of her dad. So she never told me the address.”

  Angela had often wondered whether Amy’s family situation had gotten any better. Whether she was still alive. Whether she and her family were struggling, and wishing perhaps she knew how to get hold of Amy so the two families could team up.

  She’d heard the old adage about there being strength in numbers. If that was true, maybe surviving as a group would be easier than surviving as a pair of parentless children.

  Because God knew surviving as a pair of parentless children really sucked.

  Angela and Kristy Powell weren’t faring quite as well as they’d hoped to when the power went out.

  The people at Child Protective Services came knocking on the door to check on their welfare.

  Angela wasn’t quite seventeen at the time of the blackout. Not old enough to care for herself and an eight year old sibling. Not legally in the State of Texas, anyway.

  The aunt who, when their mom was arrested, told the CPS people she lived two doors down and was keeping an eye on the pair was nowhere around anymore.