by Dan Alatorre
I didn’t know how to answer.
“Look.” Tyree scooted his chair forward and rested his arms on the table. “How does a situation appear when something good and bad are happening? When they happen simultaneously?” He let that sit in the air for a moment. “I think it looks a lot like what you’re describing.”
I rubbed my chin. “I’m not sure I follow, but let’s say you’re right. What does that mean to me?”
He took another long gulp of coffee. “I don’t know.”
I glared at him. “Well, that’s helpful.”
“No, no . . . I understand. It’s not.” He stared at the paper napkin on the table top. “Not yet anyway. But it’s a step. Let’s come back to that. Let’s talk about something else. Give your mind a chance to rest from all this tragedy stuff for a moment.” He stood up. “I’m getting more coffee. You need anything?”
I shook my head.
His massive mug was empty, so he went for more. I rubbed my eyes, thinking about updating Mallory. So far, I didn’t have anything to really tell her. Hey, honey, I almost got beat up in a dark parking lot. I’m now sitting in a donut shop telling a stranger our wacky stories. If she were asleep, she wouldn’t want to wake up for that, and if she were awake, it would only upset her.
I texted. Everything is okay. Still talking. Will be home soon.
Tyree came back to the table with his refill. “You probably have some questions for me. What are they?”
That caught me off guard. He was a straight shooter, though, so he would probably be prepared for whatever I asked. I thought for a moment. “Are you a priest?”
“Nope. I studied Divinity, though. I was considering becoming a priest.”
“What happened?”
“I kind of had a problem with the whole celibacy thing.”
That made us both laugh.
I ran my finger along the side of my soda, causing beads of water to drip off the end. “Tell me about Help For The Hopeful. How did that get started?”
“I was gonna have Help For The Hopeful put on my license plate.” He blew on his coffee to cool it. “You know, ‘HFTH.’ People thought it meant ‘have faith,’ and that was nice, too.”
“What about a vow of poverty? Is there any money in doing what you do?”
“Can be.” He avoided saying more by taking a long drink from his mug.
I shrugged. “Seems like it could take a lot of money to run ads and meet with a constant stream of wackos, plus maintain phones and an office.”
“I said I wouldn’t ask you for any money. We have had a few grateful benefactors who were happy with our services. They have given us some gifts, from time to time.”
I wasn’t grasping it. Tyree put out a hand. “You do a big favor for a wealthy industrialist.” He put out his other hand. “You get to call in little favors for a long time. And they are happy to help because they benefitted.”
I gave him a half frown. “Does the Church know about all this?”
“Well, kind of.” He gazed out the window at the empty parking lot. “C’mon, it’s off track betting, a white lie.”
“It’s a little different from a white lie.”
“That’s right. It is.” He folded his hands and looked me in the eye, assuming a flat, no-nonsense tone. “It’s a gray lie, maybe even something with a little more color than that. So be it. I know that what I do is worthwhile. People benefit, and I get help from people who know people. It all works out. Besides.” His voice softened. “I have a bit of an inside track with The Almighty. A friend does my confessions at a half price.”
“He’d have to.” I shook my head. “I bet you’re a volume customer.”
Tyree smiled again. I was relaxing, and that’s what was needed. A tense mind doesn’t operate well.
“The Church doesn’t directly know about me, usually. In places that are uncomfortable, or places where the Church feels folks are less hospitable, they outsource. Subcontractors, so to speak, so they can keep their hands clean.”
He watched my face. His story sounded as bizarre as mine. “So, you’re like the Church’s CIA?”
Glancing around, he lowered his voice. “Hey, be careful. They have that.”
We both laughed.
“You’re quite the radical, Tyree.”
“Yeah, that radical stuff was all the rage in the 1970’s. Then it kinda went out of style; everybody got into making money. Even us. Damned shame. You got a cigarette?”
I shook my head.
“No?” He seemed disappointed. “Of course you don’t. Figures. I quit anyway.”
That struck me as an odd statement. “When did you quit?”
“This time? This morning.” He folded his hands behind his head and pushed back in the chair, stretching. “When I was talking to miss Margarita at the bar where I misplaced my keys. She said she couldn’t kiss a man who tasted like an ashtray.”
“Margarita? Was that her name or was she a beauty pageant winner?”
“Ah, well . . . Now that you mention it, that’s a good question.” He dropped his hands to his belly. “How do you think your three stories connect?”
“I don’t know that they do. My wife’s friend originally said something about six months ago, that we were jinxes.”
“Nice friend.”
“Well, she was pointing out the bad stuff happens around us, not to us.”
“Not yet, anyway.”
I glared at him. “Thanks for that. Anyway, she said she didn’t want to catch the next disaster when it missed us. Or near-missed us.”
“The bullet would miss you guys and hit her, that sort of thing?”
“Right.”
Tyree took a deep breath and let it out slowly, his eyes fixed on his folded hands. “I think she may be closer than you think.”
My somewhat uplifting feeling vanished. “How’s that?”
“Well, how do you feel about all this? Lucky?”
“Not lucky, that’s for sure.” I shook my head. “No way.”
“Okay, but.” He raised his eyes to meet mine. “Do you feel unlucky, though?”
I thought about that. I really didn’t. “It’s hard to feel unlucky when we’d never been hurt, so no. We’ve just been close by when things happened.”
“That’s your training talking.” Tyree scoffed. “Years of social upbringing and societal norms. You have to move past that. This stuff always happens around the same time of year?”
“Seems like it.” I tugged at my collar.
“Maybe you don’t want to see what’s in front of you.” The words were heavy, like bricks stacking up on my conscience. “That’s understandable. Who would want to see a threat if they didn’t have to?”
He had tricked me, knowing I’d have to answer. Who would want to see a threat if they didn’t have to? I swallowed. “Anybody. Anybody with something to protect.”
He raised his eyebrows, nodded slowly, keeping his eyes fixed on mine. “And what do you protect, Doug?”
“Well, my wife, my daughter . . . my, uh, house . . . ”
“Did you always have these problems? I mean, the whole time you were married?”
“No . . .”
“When did this all start? As far as you and your wife? Have you ever thought about it?”
His words pierced me, ringing in my ears. I pushed my hand through my hair. “I—I don’t know.”
Tyree’s eyes narrowed. “Yes, you do, Doug.”
I could barely speak. “That can’t be the answer.”
Who would want to see a threat if they didn’t have to.
“It can’t be . . .”
“Why not?” Tyree asked. “Why are you afraid to see what’s in front of you?”
“What are you trying to say?” I winced, turning my head away from him. “It can’t be her. She can’t be the cause of all this!”
The room closed in on me. The air grew stale and stuffy.
“When did it all start?” He drove his finger into the tabl
e top.
He wanted me to say it out loud.
Things were falling into place in ways I didn’t want them to, squeezing the air out of my lungs. Sweat broke out on my forehead. “She’s innocent.”
“Who?” He frowned. “When did it start? Say it.”
I glared at him and forced myself to speak, the answer in front of me like a white hot light. “It started when my daughter was born.” It was barely a whisper, but it rang in my ears like a cannon shot. I slid down in my chair, dazed at how it sounded out loud.
“I think that’s significant, don’t you?” Tyree said.
I was a traitor. A turncoat.
Worthless.
She can’t be the cause of all this. She can’t be.
“She’s just a little kid!” I gasped, looking up at him. I was nearing my limit. “She can’t be why this is happening.”
Tyree stared at me. After a long moment, he asked, “Why not?”
The words hung in the air, echoing around in my head without an answer.
Why not?
Chapter 27
I stared at the dead body. “Can I touch him?”
I had never seen a dead person before and I was a little afraid. We stood near the casket, my Uncle Glen and I, peering at a small old man laid out in a dark gray suit.
“You can touch him.” My godfather put his hand on my shoulder. “He was your great-grandfather and he loved you.”
I was eight years old, trying to be brave. My uncle held my hand as we stood in line, waiting our turn to pay our respects. The room was large and nearly full to capacity, but it was very quiet.
Glen spoke softly. “I think he would like it if you touched him on the hand to say goodbye.”
I lifted my left hand and reached into the coffin, extending a finger, easing it past the edge of the lacquered wood.
The only place that seemed touchable was his hand. The rest of my great-grandfather was covered in his dark gray suit, except for his face. I did not want to touch his face. Even at the age of eight I knew that would be disrespectful.
As if in slow motion, I stretched out my arm and touched a fingertip to the back of his pale hand.
It was soft. And it wasn’t cold; it was room temperature, like an expensive, soft leather glove. As a kid, I had seen so many monster movies with Dracula and Frankenstein, I was nearly out of my mind with curiosity, thinking about actually touching a dead person. But that was at home. As I reached out toward the hand of my deceased great-grandfather, the moment was different. None of the drama of movies happened.
He didn’t feel much like a person should. I had anticipated that his hand would not feel warm—in movies they always talk about a dead body being cold. But more than that, I had expected it to be firm. But there was no living muscle behind it anymore to make it firm. And he didn’t flinch or twitch as you would expect a sleeping person to do.
He just lay there motionless.
As I watched, his chest didn’t rise and fall like my dad’s did during an afternoon nap. He didn’t brush my finger away like you might if you thought it was a fly crawling on your hand.
He didn’t jump up and scream, like in scary movies. He didn’t groan and slowly rise up from the coffin, sending everyone running out of the room.
He didn’t move at all.
It was just the hand of a man who had moved on from this life and this body. A nice little man who always smelled like cherry pipe tobacco when we visited him. He would put out dry roasted peanuts and show us the battery operated toy monkey that would dance and bang cymbals.
He was none of the things the movies had shown me that dead people were. And I felt ashamed for thinking such things while I looked at him.
My uncle suggested that we kneel and say a prayer. I silently pretended to say the Hail Mary—one of the few prayers I knew—watching my dead great-grandfather’s body remain so still, so unmoving.
That is how I knew he was dead.
It was the first dead body I had ever seen.
“Finished?” My uncle gently asked.
I nodded.
I didn’t even want to be in that church, much less be touching anything, but I thought it would be neat to tell my friends at school I had touched a real dead body. Enough of my friends watched Creature Feature on Saturday afternoons so this would be a big story on Monday.
Rising, I caught my mother’s eye. I felt my cheeks burn as she smiled at me leaving the coffin. She thought I was paying my respects. She didn’t know I simply had a childish and morbid curiosity about touching a corpse and bragging to my friends about it. I looked down in shame that she would have assumed was reverence.
I remember asking Mom what we were supposed to do at the visitation. She said to be respectful and quiet, and to be sure to go up to great-grandma and tell her we were sorry for her loss. A stream of her great-grandchildren coming up one after the other saying, “Sorry, grandma,” in an assembly line.
When my turn came, I had remembered to tell her that I was sorry. She had lost her husband and lifelong companion. My grandmother, at her side, had lost her father. But in saying the words, it didn’t feel like I was sorry in the way those words usually meant. I had done nothing to be sorry for.
I decided not to bring any of it up at school.
The service began, and eventually my mind went on to other things. But after the next funeral I went to, I never wanted to attend another funeral again.
It was only a few months later. A childhood friend had died in an unfortunate car accident. The hood of a car had flown off and smashed into the car he was riding in, hitting him in the forehead. The boys in the other car had been working on the engine and neglected to properly secure the hood before taking it out for a test drive. It cost my friend his life.
I couldn’t stand the way Kevin looked in his coffin. Swelling and surgeries had changed him. The mortician’s artistry had not been enough to re-make him as he was. He was a kid who had been one of my closest friends, and now he was unrecognizable to me. As an adult, when I think of him now, I first see the stark, glum stranger’s face in the coffin before I can force myself to remember the true, actual smiling face of my young friend.
I could not bear to have my mother’s face and memory ruined for me that way. I would not let it happen. I knew what was waiting for me at her visitation. I purposely arrived late so I could not attend, telling everybody I couldn't catch a flight in time—but that wasn't the truth. I wanted to be elsewhere. Needed to be. And I made sure I was.
It was selfish, but eternity is a long time.
I would remember the smiling face and bright eyes of my loving mother in my own way, not the mock up by a funeral director. It was my parting gift to her, and to myself. I didn’t explain my absence to anyone. The only person who knew I could have made the visitation—but didn’t—was my wife. She silently disapproved but likely had decided that I needed to grieve in my own way and in my own time.
Kevin was supposed to look like on TV. There, when people die, their face just relaxes and they look the same as they did a moment before. But in reality, a face may have gone through trauma from an accident, or swelling. Maybe they had to cut the person’s hair to dress the wounds. Maybe the easy smile that always graced his young face just couldn’t be made to appear, and the haunting, glum face and expressionless mouth would forever be burned into the memories of those who knew him—a cruel thing to do to his friend. Maybe after the gash in his head and days in the hospital, the swollen face with no smile was the best they could do.
But he didn’t look like my friend anymore, and I was not about to trade a lifetime of my mother’s smiles for some stupid protocol.
I knew her dimples wouldn’t be there. Each of her sixty-five year old cheeks would maintain a small crease instead. The makeup would be wrong, the hair . . . I couldn't bear to carry with me for the rest of my life a vision of some undertaker’s poor good efforts. The best that he could do—the best that anybody could ever do—would still be
a far cry from the face I had known and loved my entire life. It would instead be a faded painting of a once vibrant woman full of energy and love and life.
I couldn’t take the image of her lifeless face looking . . . wrong.
I’d prefer to remember her as she was a few years ago, when I took her picture at the kitchen table at Christmas. Smiling and happy, not the face where she was losing her fight to her illnesses. We laughed and joked, trying to get a good picture out of a bad camera—a losing battle, especially with a poor photographer behind the lens.
Then, when she thought we had finished, she made a face. She stuck out her tongue and I clicked the shutter. She was shocked that I caught her, and burst out in a glorious natural smile.
I quickly snapped another shot—the best picture I have ever taken.
And the one where I always thought she looked her best. She had a round face with bright eyes and dimples. She was cheerful and energetic and alive.
I remember the last thing I ever said to my mother before she died. My dad called to tell us that she didn’t have much longer, so we drove up to say goodbye. She lay on her hospital bed, weak, her eyes closed. I leaned in and held her hand, and teased her the way I always would.
“I saw the new kitchen wallpaper, Mom.” I whispered in her ear. “It looks . . . terrible.”
Even though her eyes were closed, she smiled. She couldn’t open them. She was too near the end.
“It doesn't go with the chairs at all,” I said quietly. “When I come back up in a couple of weeks, I’ll help you re-do the wallpaper. When you're feeling better.”
She smiled again.
That was the last conversation we ever had.
Some people might have found it disrespectful. I disagree.
There's a smile people get on their face at the end of a long day. When they’ve worked hard, and they come home and they sit down, and just relax, leaning their head back in their favorite chair. And they could just fall right to sleep, satisfied, with a smile, taking a rest that has been well earned.
That was the smile my mom gave me that day. The smile that comes at the end of a long struggle, that’s looking forward to a rest that has also been well earned.
