The Last Cadillac

by Nancy Nau Sullivan

  One morning, after Dad was ensconced with Richard Widmark, I struggled toward the garage with a load of wet sheets—it didn’t seem to matter how much I limited liquid intake, or how many diapers Dad wore, he still “leaked,” as he called it. I had to strip his bed and wash the sheets almost every day.

  In order to get to the washing machine in the garage, I had to go through Tick’s room (the former laundry room). Typically, his bed wasn’t made, as if he would even bother. His guitar stood ready at the foot of the bed; the built-in desk was covered with Legos, wrappers of edibles, notebook paper (balled up), a jock strap, at least a dozen books, and a baseball glove. And centered in the mess was a black and white composition book. I knew what it was. I stopped and plunked the clothes basket on the floor, curious to see what was written inside the notebook. For just a second, I weighed Tick’s privacy against my curiosity. The latter won, again. I opened the notebook.

  My mother brought up moving to Florida a long time ago—way over a year ago. She didn’t want to stay in what she called “the armpit of America” with my father living down the street. So we left town.

  At first I thought my mom was bluffing, but I was very wrong about that. My mom doesn’t bluff.

  This new life all started with the divorce. My dad had a mistress and then married her shortly after the divorce, right too soon to accept, if you ask me, and it makes me wonder. He moved to Lansing for a while, then got hitched and moved to Munster, which is only two minutes away from where I lived. That was good because I missed him a lot and I was lucky enough to see him and call him whenever I wanted, no matter what time it was. I still talk to him on the phone, and I see him sometimes once a month, but it really isn’t the same like it used to be. I guess we all have to make the most of it.

  My mom worked for the newspaper and she was paid very little. She always loved Florida and wanted to come here and start over. I guess I can’t blame her. I felt obligated to go with my mom because I’m a mama’s boy, and I didn’t want to leave her and my little sister alone.

  And then she said The Gamps was coming with us. Well, that about did it for me. Before I wasn’t too happy about the idea of going to Florida, but with the Gamps, that was a whole different story. He’s one of my heroes, if not my hero of all time. Gamps is cool.

  My cousin Jason said I would own the island! God! Was he wrong! At first, I thought the same way he did. In my past, I was always popular and had a lot of friends. But when I came down to Florida, I should have kept to myself. Been seen and not heard. I prayed I would have fun and not be depressed and would fit in better. Surprisingly, it kinda works, most of the time. I’ve had my ups and downs and I’ve managed to acquire some friends at the local fishing pier, which is a hangout for island youth. I helped Kevin cut up that bull shark he caught on the pier right after we got down here. Now that was cool. You’re not going find any eight-foot, one-inch bull shark (make a note of that) in Munster—except in your nightmares.

  My expectations were wrong at first. I know that now. I’m learning lessons in life. I’ve got my eyes open and I try to see and let myself experience some amazing things about life, God, and people, and I’ll keep trying. I’ve learned most importantly that nothing is ever what you expect, and nothing ever stays the same. Maybe that’s a good thing, and maybe it’s not. You never know.

  20

  ONE DAY AT A TIME

  Jack drove up in a powder blue Cadillac convertible. How he ever found the car at a local rental was a mystery. Jack had his resources. But it did seem an odd choice, since he usually drove the latest black BMW, or an overloaded Buick. He wore a new leather flight jacket, and his hair was windblown. I’d always thought he resembled a young Burt Reynolds, but his eyes were wearing bags and his face looked puffy, mainly because he was back to drinking fine wines.

  “Wow, some wheels you have there,” I said, stepping around the holly hedge at the end of the driveway.

  “The cottage is a mess,” he said. I didn’t see the connection, but Jack often dissembled. He used to send sympathy cards on birthdays.

  “Yes. Steve’s taking care of it, as you know,” I said, folding my arms. Then I repeated myself. “Nice car.”

  “Yeah, it’s snowing in Chicago,” he said, and chuckled, waving vaguely in the direction of the convertible.

  After our awkward hug, he went right in to see Dad, who sat out on the patio trying to coax a three-foot-tall egret into taking a hunk of salami. Dad pushed the salami in the direction of the egret with his cane, but the bird backed away, carefully and slowly, lifting its yellow feet high with each step. Dad tapped the cane again and the bird unfolded enormous white wings and soared over the hibiscus hedge.

  Dad’s face lit up when he saw Jack. Jack offered Dad a Marlboro.

  “He can only have two a day,” I said in my most authoritative voice. It was a bad thing to let my Dad continue smoking, but I rationed him two—sometimes three—cigarettes a day, or I didn’t hear the end of it. He tried to wheedle another out of me, accusing me of not being able to count. But I held out.

  Neither one of them looked at me. I left them sharing a cigarette, talking about lathes and railroad car parts.

  I flew off to the beach with the egret.

  Later that evening my brother came back and we all sat together under the mango tree on the patio. I lit votive candles on the round table, then we nibbled on chicken wings and guacamole and enjoyed the cool November evening. It was too cool for me, but not for Jack, who was glad to be out of the northern weather. The breeze swirled leaves around us in small funnels, and we listened to the wind in the trees and the roll and break of the gulf hitting the beach a few blocks away.

  Dad was quiet, nodding in his chair. With the night folding around us, I didn’t feel the need to talk.

  “Well, you seem to have done well here,” said Jack. He chuckled, not looking at me.

  “Yes, we are doing well. Dad’s happy. The kids are doing great.”

  “And you?”

  “Me? Why do ask, Jack?” I almost said, Why do you even care? But I bit it off. It wasn’t the right time; the moon was a rare silver piece, shining through the mango tree.

  “Because. It’s important.” That’s all he said. He drained the last of his red wine and slid the chair back. He kissed the top of Dad’s head, gave my shoulder a squeeze. Jack had a tennis game in Sarasota next day with business partners. He stayed in Florida a week. He didn’t come over to see Dad again for the rest of his visit.

  The cottage was under construction, after getting a double whammy from Josephine, followed by a milder-mannered storm called Opal. Fortunately, the cottage was less than half destroyed—a borderline case—so it was saved from condemnation by the city fathers and mothers of Anna Maria. Our contractor gathered local, state, and federal permits to rebuild the porch and fix the rest of the house. He recommended a concrete floor on the porch, instead of the former planks. But when the inspector came by and saw the additional plans for concrete, another permit was required. One of the joys of building in Florida, especially in the flood zone, is that one permit deserves another. So, until all the permits were collected and the insurance paid off, the work on the cottage was on hold. And with that, we couldn’t count on renters for the rest of that season. It was a wonder anything got done in the glossy world that is Florida.

  Since the cottage wasn’t available, the family didn’t come to visit for the holidays. But that did not mean it was a slow time for visitors. Dad’s old friends had found Florida over the years, and they stopped by. We had lunches at the Sand Bar, Moore’s, and Lynch’s.

  Also, my two elderly aunts from Bradenton came to visit—Aunt Marian and Aunt Roma. Aunt Marian, one evening with a fresh bottle of Pinch, and donuts every Thursday. She sat with Dad while I went out on errands. A retired school-teacher and Dad’s younger sister, she lived in a small condo in Bradenton, played bridge with her friends, and traveled with her son and his wife. I hoped to be like her one day—lovely, wh
ite-haired, gentle, and dignified—which was quite a stretch for me. Yet, in the spirit of that hope, it was Aunt Marian who encouraged—and mentored—my next career. After raising nine children with Uncle Ed, she went back to school to get her master’s degree and then taught middle school for twelve years. I told her I was thinking of teaching, but I needed those two years of education and English credits.

  “Just take one course at a time, and you’ll be done before you know it,” she said. “That’s all there is to it.”

  One day at a time.

  Two of the smartest people I ever knew were my Aunt Marian and Kurt Nimmergut, my co-pilot flying over Alta Loma. You’ll get there, they said.

  My Aunt Roma usually drove out to the island with Aunt Marian. She brought blue cheese dip, chocolate cake with mini chocolate chips, and rum-soaked pound cake. A meticulous gardener of ferns and azaleas, she loved the peace of her small white stucco house with a flourishing backyard of orange, grapefruit, and kumquat trees that she sprayed and cultivated—and we raided every winter.

  Dad, Marian, and Roma sat at the long table in the family room at the back of the house overlooking the wide yard shaded with plumeria and majo trees and oleander. As the sun filtered into their warm afternoons, they chuckled over lightweight vodka tonics, chicken salad sandwiches, and butter cookies, while reminiscing about high school, poker parties at the farm, and the old days.

  Dad was content, and the kids were happy and busy with school and sports and their friends. It was the making of The Adventure. If they were getting along fine, it was a good place to start—for my peace of mind. I could have put it to Jack that way, but Jack wouldn’t understand. And I didn’t want to open up another discussion about the availability of Polish maids in Indiana, or the necessity of providing him with financial statements. It was a regular dance with Jack—and with Julia—just to get away from them and find some peace.

  I escaped to the dock to watch the clouds sweep across the sky like neon curtains. I always looked forward to the evening, and the sunset never disappointed me. It was different every time, just like Tick said. The canal was a placid, glittering ribbon of black water, reflecting streaks of bright orange sky. An occasional mullet broke the surface with a gentle splash. What a moment to savor.

  Of course, it didn’t last.

  21

  THE LEG

  Along with the lovely cool days of early winter, with the hibiscus still blooming and the first oranges appearing as tiny green marbles, “The Leg”—like an obnoxious guest that refused to leave—came to visit and stay.

  There was Dad, and then there was “The Leg,” which abruptly took on a life of its own. For years, he’d had difficulty walking because of a bad back, and the stroke left him weak on the left side of his body. The Leg always twinged, but all of a sudden, there it was, acting up mightily and screaming for attention.

  “Oh, ‘The Leg,’” he said just about every time he moved, got up, walked, or rolled over. It was his constant lament, and the more I heard him complain about The Leg, the more of a pain it was, generally speaking. I was sorry that his leg hurt, but there seemed little that could be done about it. I took him to the family practitioner who prescribed over-the-counter painkillers. We were trying to avoid the side effects of fancy drugs. At first, Dad took Tylenol, which worked well for a time, and almost always put him directly to sleep.

  But The Leg persisted. We went to see a neurologist who suspected that the problem was associated with his bad back. Dad had chronic stenosis of the spine, a pinching arthritic condition of calcium deposits that put pressure on the nerves in the lower region of his back. Dad had back surgery years before, and that seemed to have alleviated much of the old back pain. But with age came the deteriorating condition. The full-blown problem of The Leg was something new.

  The doctor reviewed the x-rays of the old back operation and declared it had been a complete success, marveling at the good job on Dad’s back. He said it was “the best work on a four-and-five lumbar” he’d ever seen.

  But the x-ray also confirmed that the pain in his leg was the result of the chronic, debilitating stenosis in the spine. Doctors had removed some of the deposit, but apparently not all of it, or enough of it. Another operation to relieve the condition was out of the question because no doctor, the neurologist said, would operate on an elderly man who had already had a back operation, along with a stroke and cancer. I had to agree, but, God knows, I’d met enough doctors without a shred of common sense in the years since my parents started to fall apart. Maybe there was one out there who would do another operation, and it might really work, by accident. I didn’t know what to do. Dad was having fits with The Leg.

  “If the back operation was so successful, why does he have this pain in his leg?” I asked. I thought that was a logical question after all the praise about the back operation. The doctor held the x-ray in one hand and flapped it up to the light, while Dad sat on the examining table.

  “The leg is, after all, connected to his back,” the doctor said.

  “Well, yes.” I waited for him to elaborate on this pronouncement that didn’t require a one-hour wait and ninety-five dollars for ten minutes of his time.

  Dad had nothing to say on the matter, nor on the success of the back operation that left him with such pain in his right leg. But then the doctor turned to him and asked him what it felt like.

  “It feels like a knife stabbing up from the bottom of my foot and my whole leg is on fire and I tell you, oh mother of God, it’s killing me,” said Dad.

  The doctor nodded.

  “Now, he has pain in a different place, and it’s the result of the back business,” I said, trying once more to get a handle on The Leg. “Why is he in worse pain than before the successful back operation?”

  “The answer is simple,” the doctor said. “You will always have a residual effect after an operation like this in the lumbar region, no matter what you do.”

  “But you said the back operation was successful,” I said.

  “Oh, yes, it was successful.”

  “He’s in pain. Worse pain.” We continued on the merry-go-round in hell.

  The doctor nodded. Again.

  “That’s true. His leg hurts, and there are new medications we can try. Ultram, Neurontin, to name two. Let’s try one of these.”

  Here we go again. He included all of us in the test run, but Dad was going to be the guinea pig. We were going to try more pills. My heart sank. But we had to try something.

  The doctor prescribed Neurontin, a brand new miracle capsule that was supposed to work on the pain center of his brain. The cost—$1.80 a pill. Three-a-day for six weeks. And it had no effect whatsoever, except to make Dad nauseated. He sat with a towel or a bucket nearby, because he didn’t know when he might throw up.

  The following month, the doctor sent him to a specialist for a cortisone injection to the spine. These had worked in the past, before the operation, but the treatments routinely wore off. He tried another anyway, but it didn’t work either.

  He had therapy, massages, back braces, support hose, none of which did much good, and getting him into the support hose nearly broke my back.

  No matter what, we couldn’t seem to get away from The Leg. The pills were merely a crutch—a quick fix—and every doctor had a favorite. Generally, Dad was getting worse. Maybe there wouldn’t be any improvement. I had to face the facts that at some point nothing would work for anything. Getting old had its terminus. Still, I was impatient.

  I asked the pharmacist about the effects of taking Aleve and Tylenol for a long stretch. They seemed to be the only pills that worked with a modicum of regularity and didn’t upset his stomach. She didn’t see a problem with that.

  “But maybe his condition is getting worse,” she said. “Did you ask the doctor for a stronger pill?”

  Some days The Leg didn’t bother him much. Mom had arthritis, which she called “Arthur,” who “traveled,” but always came back. There were good day
s and bad. As time wore on, Dad complained more and more that he couldn’t walk, even with the aid of the walker. As a consequence, he didn’t want to get up. So, he wet himself.

  We worked out a little arrangement to give him some dignity when he needed dry pants. I stood behind him while he dropped his trousers and the wet diaper and then I stuck the dry one between his legs and he maneuvered it into place.

  Sometimes in all this, reality struck out of the blue. The situation is not going to get any better. I didn’t listen. We had to keep trying.

  Still, overall, he was in a better humor—I couldn’t have been happier when The Leg went away and left us all in peace. Since leaving Indiana, Dad had regained weight and lost the unhealthy pallor. In Florida, he began to enjoy himself with my aunts and visitors, in private “conferences” with Tick—and even in the playful teasing with Little Sunshine. He was a regular Old Sunshine. The only regular medication that worked had been vitamins and baby aspirin, with the occasional help of Tylenol or Aleve.

  But, the parade of pills never did it for him. They didn’t relieve the pain in his leg, and they hadn’t worked on symptoms of depression when Mom was dying. It was the crux of my general argument with Julia, and the doctor. Either the pill, or the dosage, was wrong. I could never figure it out. He didn’t stay with one long enough to discover why, because they all made him so goofy or sick to his stomach.

  On another visit to the neurologist, I said, “Isn’t there something we can do?”

  “Things of the last resort,” he said. “We don’t really want to try them if this new drug works.”

  The new drug did not work.

  So, we moved on to one of the “things of the last resort.” This thing turned out to be the Spinal Cord Stimulator. The stimulator was meant to intercept the pain signals from the brain to the leg. Basically, the contraption looked like a remote control attached to a wire. The wire went through the skin and was attached to the spine and the remote was hooked up to a belt on the stimulatee—a.k.a., Dad. It sounded simple enough, although I didn’t like the idea of Dad operating like one of those remote control cars the kids got for Christmas and broke by the time the new year rolled around.