500 Acres and No Place to Hide

by Susan McCorkindale

  Just like that, I think to myself, and nod.

  “Cancer sucks.”

  I take a breath so deep it feels like I’ve inhaled the whole left side of the breakfast menu. The glare of the fluorescent lights and the eau de deep fryer “fragrance” Mc-Donald’s is known for are making me nauseated. But what’s worse is watching as a single, perfect tear slides down my son’s left cheek, and then as he wipes it away with a swipe so fierce it actually leaves a scratch.

  “You might want to think about cutting your nails,” I offer, handing him a tissue.

  Clutching the Kleenex, he considers his fingers for a moment. “Me, with short fingernails?”

  “You, with short, clean fingernails,” I suggest.

  He cocks his head and gives me a small smile, the scratch filling and highlighting the red in his Marine Corps hoodie. “Could be a whole new normal for me.”

  “Could be, dude.” I reach out and brush his bangs out of his eyes. “And who knows? Maybe you’ll even get another haircut.”

  The words hang there as he ever so slowly places my empty coffee cup, his drained container of chocolate milk, all our napkins, wrappers, and the receipt on the tray. “You know, Mom,” he says, before turning to walk to the trash, “there’re only so many new normals a person can take at one time.”

  Now it’s my turn to try not to cry. He gives me an inch and I, typical mom, go for a mile. Of course he can have his hair. Hell, I don’t care if it’s butt-length by next football season. I don’t care if he highlights it, perms it, sticks hotpink extensions in it, or has it done up in dreads. If it makes him happy, I’m happy.

  “I was just kidding, Cuy,” I whisper, slipping into my coat as we walk out the door. “Long nails and long hair are the way to go.” He looks at me like, “Yeah, right.” “Really. I think you should give Troy Polamalu a run for his money.”

  “You do?”

  I nod, and he hops in the car, happy.

  He’s right, of course. Too many new normals will make you nuts. Not to mention desperate for a good antacid, and a much better place to have breakfast.

  Top 25 Things I’ve Learned in the Past Few Months

  25. A “Whipple” has nothing to do with toilet paper. Unless, of course, you have only Charmin on hand to wipe your eyes, blow your nose, and hyperventilate into when the surgeon gives you the news that it’s too late to perform the one procedure—called a Whipple—that could truly prolong your husband’s life. I was lucky. I had Kleenex and a shoulder to cry on. My sister-in-law Nancy’s. And she’s down one really cute Three Dots tee because of it. Waterproof mascara, my ass.

  24. When your kid says, “Mom, Dad’s lying on the bed funny,” you’re going to the hospital.

  23. You can make a ninety-minute trip in forty-five minutes. But only if you’ve had enough chardonnay.

  22. As soon as you notice a fence board’s come down, get up off your exhausted ass and fix it. Otherwise you’ll find both goats and a steer out in the road, and a sheriff’s deputy at your front door. Eventually the cow will make its way back, but the goats will require rescuing by a good-size Good Samaritan who’ll carry them—one under each arm—back to the goat pen, then offer to put you and your husband on his church prayer list.

  21. If you’re on one prayer list, you’re on them all. Now, that’s a blessing.

  20. The only thing tougher than being told your husband is sick is telling your kids. (And breaking the news to your folks is no fun either. Trust me, you will say, “I’m so sorry for having to tell you this,” at least six times in the course of the conversation.)

  19. If you can run out of pain medication over the weekend, you will. Check your supply on Thursday, Friday at the latest, and get refills. An empty bottle is never a good discovery, and making it on a Sunday, when you may or may not find an open pharmacy, just means you’d better have enough bourbon.

  18. Four Tylenol PM will buy you six hours of peace. And one hour of vomiting.

  17. Not even a top-of-the-line—I’m talking two hundred dollars from the Frontgate catalog—hammock can hold a heifer. And it wouldn’t have had to if I’d fixed the damn fence board.

  16. If you tell your kids they’re babysitting Dad, and tell your husband he’s babysitting the kids, you can go out with the girls and get back before anyone’s the wiser. Of course, they’ll all still be up, each having refused to be ordered to bed by the other. But hey, if you’ve had enough baked Brie and Carr’s Table Water crackers, it won’t matter.

  15. People who tell me my husband looks good are lying. But it’s only because they love me. And I love them, too.

  14. A certain voice mail system can hold over one hundred messages. And you have to delete them one at a friggin’ time. What, you people can’t come up with a “clear all” option?

  13. “It must be tough taking care of Dad twenty-four /seven” is code for, “I need you, too, Mom.”

  12. Waking up to the sound of footsteps on your roof does not mean you’ve slept straight through to Christmas and Santa Claus is real, but rather that the nice people who’ve called once and stopped by twice offering to fix and clean your gutters before half fall down and the other half become full-fledged tree farms have decided to ignore your “Oh, you’re so sweet but really, it’s okay; I’ll get to it” response. And that means that last night was the wrong night to decide putting on pajamas wasn’t worth the effort.

  11. Sometimes you’ve just got to nap.

  10. I could never be an IV drug user. It took the nice visiting nurse more than sixty minutes to teach me how to “administer hydration” (which, you should know, is a euphemism for Suzy Gets to Stick Needles in Hemingway), and another ten to convince me to do it with my eyes open.

  9. You can actually forget which friend has your child. That’s why God invented cell phones.

  8. Reading really funny books and laughing out loud in the chemotherapy infusion center is perfectly fine. If you’re the patient. Caregivers should stick with Nicholas Sparks novels, reference manuals, and those twenty-six-page treatises that come with prescriptions.

  7. Campbell’s Chunky beef soup poured over rice can suffice as dinner. It’s more gross than gourmet, but you have to like a meal that goes from can to consumption in under eight minutes. The kids love it, and it leaves me more time to drink. Which leads me to . . .

  6. Wine poured over ice can suffice as dinner. And if you’ve ever spoken to me at six thirty in the evening, you know it has.

  5. The medical personnel coming in and out of Hemingway’s room saying cancer this and cancer that really are talking to us.

  4. Being too tired to run out and close the chicken coop will result in unwanted guests. And wake-up calls from raccoons, not roosters.

  3. The kindness in Fauquier County is immeasurable.

  2. Nurses rock.

  1. When all else fails, laugh.

  Chapter Thirty-seven

  LOOKING FOR DICK IN ALL THE WRONG PLACES

  This is what happens when the elderly attempt to text. Or at least it’s what happened when I tried, in my advancing age, to read a text without my reading glasses, in the car, cruising 66 at sixty-five on the way home from the hospital on the Tuesday before spring break.

  I heard the phone do its little chime jingle thing, and I scrambled to find it in my bag. My cavernous, bronze metallic Michael Kors bag in which I could carry at least six chickens and a rooster if, you know, they couldn’t walk and wouldn’t mind helping me find my cell from time to time.

  Hem was next to me, in the passenger seat, napping, and I didn’t want to wake him. He was worn out from the long trip, his treatment, and the news that his latest CT scan had revealed a spot on his spine that would require further investigation.187 I was exhausted from the long trip, his treatment, and the news about the spot188 that meant more trips and more treatments, not to mention more opportunity for him to continue torturing me with his plans, God bless him, to add turkeys to our flock of ill-humored hens.

&nbs
p; “We’ll just buy a few, Suz,” he cajoled sleepily. “Three, maybe four, tops.” He yawned, put his seat back, and pulled his Giants cap over his face. “We’ll do the organic, free-range routine, and then, in the fall, we can butcher the biggest one and have it for Thanksgiving.”

  “We can butcher?” I repeated, turning so quickly to look at him the car lurched into the left lane, missing a bright green-and-white Lawn Doctor van by about a blade of grass. “We?”

  We wouldn’t be butchering anything. Rip Van Winkle here would be too tired, and I’d wind up standing in the coop alone, freezing, and wondering if it was possible to talk a turkey to death. ’Cause that I could do. But wield an ax? No way.

  My stupid cell jingled again and I flipped it open. I know I should get one of those Bluetooth thingies with a headset, but the fact is they scare me. They look like bugs, for Pete’s sake. Every time someone walks by wearing one, I have to stop myself from running up, throwing the person to the ground, and screaming, “Cicada!” and, “I’ll save you!”

  In any case, I didn’t recognize the number attached to the text, but I figured it had to be a friend. Why? Because, from what I could see—and I couldn’t see much without holding the phone right in front of my face, which, as you can imagine, makes it pretty tough to drive and is probably the number one reason they came up with the whole Bluetooth thing in the first place189—the note mentioned Cuyler and the possibility of his dog-sitting one Saturday.

  A Saturday at our house, with no racing back and forth to the hospital? Fine. Dandy. We’d do it. I replied, “He’d love to,” while we got gas, and by the time we breezed through the McDonald’s drive-through for a large vanilla milk shake for Mr. Van Winkle, who’d awakened a tad peckish and in need of sustenance to fuel the pastured turkey pitch he immediately recommenced, I’d forgotten the entire exchange.

  Two nights later, the phone rang. Cuy answered upstairs, and I heard him say, “Um, sure, I’ll do it for you. Uh-huh. Uh-huh.” And then, “What’s the dog’s name?”

  The dog? Oh, my God. It’s about the dog I said he’d watch. Holy cow. I totally blanked on that text. I raced to the foot of the stairs to catch the rest of the conversation. “Yes, I’ll be here. See you Saturday morning. Can’t wait to meet him.” And then Cuy hung up, walked to the top of the landing, and looked down at me.

  “So, Mom, did you plan on telling me I’m dog-sitting Dick?”

  At the word dick, Casey, who’d been busy chatting on Facebook, let out a howl they could probably hear, well, at Dick’s house. “Cuy,” he teased, “you’re dog-sitting a dog with a dick, or his name is Dick?”

  Never one to miss the chance to chime in, Hemingway pulled his nose out of his book long enough to lob his two cents: “Don’t be ridiculous, Case. He’s not going to watch him with his dick. He’s going to use his eyes, right, Cuy?”

  Casey snorted and mumbled something about changing his status, and Cuy glared at me. “Mom, what were you thinking?”

  “I was thinking you’d want to watch the dog. I didn’t know his name was . . . questionable.”

  “It’s not questionable. It’s Dick!” He rolled his eyes and took the stairs, two at a time, toward me. “They’ll drop him off Saturday morning, and pick him up next Friday.”

  A week? Dick the dog will be here a week?

  More eye rolling, this time accompanied by head shaking and several sighs that spoke volumes, one of which was obviously entitled, Dude, My Mom’s a Moron. “Mrs. Wyatt said she sent you a text. But you probably got it in the car, couldn’t read it, and forgot about it. Right?”

  I nodded. Well, at least now I knew whose dog I’d agreed to watch. And I did get the Friday part right.

  “We’ve got to work on that, Mom.”190

  “Do you think Dick will bring his dick?” Casey bellowed from his bedroom to no one and everyone. He just couldn’t let it go. And why should he? His father’s just as bad.

  “Yeah, Sue,” hollered Hem, “all the other dogs are bringing theirs!”

  “Thanks, hon. Thanks, Case. Sam Kinison would be proud.” And then I turned to Cuy. “Come on. Let’s go talk Dick. I mean, about Dick.”

  Oh, dear God. This was not going to go well.

  In the end, it was really no big deal having a fourth dog in the house. Particularly since I made them stay outside the house until Hemingway threatened to call the Humane Society. I don’t get it. A little lightning never hurt anybody.

  Anyway, in the end, it all worked out.

  But first I had to survive the middle.

  Now, just to fill in the blanks a bit, Cuy, who was supposed to be watching Dick, had really been doing, if you’ll pardon the expression, dick. Why? Because the day after Dick arrived, Cuy took off with my girlfriend and her two sons for a stay on the Shenandoah River. He had his Xbox controller, half a dozen video games, a fishing pole, bait, a bathing suit, and enough junk food to positively impact Frito-Lay’s second-quarter P&L.

  And I had Dick duty.

  To be fair, Dick, a small, wiry beagle pup with huge pet-me-feed-me-let–me-sleep-and-poop-wherever-I-please eyes, looked nothing like a penis. And yes, I expected him to. I mean, why name a dog Dick if he doesn’t actually resemble one? There are other perfectly good names to pick from, like Max and Spot and Duke and Roscoe and even Richard, which, of course, leaves the doggy door wide-open for calling the dog Dick when he behaves like one.

  In any case, little Dick got along just fine with our three perpetually dirty farm dogs. Grundy, our easygoing German shepherd/Lab mix; Tug, our purebred and impetuous golden retriever; and Pete, our squat, red-haired hound who can best be described as a cross between a bratwurst and a water buffalo.191 They spent the majority of their time getting muddy, drinking from the cow manure–filled streams, and attempting to fornicate. With one another. Throw in some togas, a couple of kegs of beer, and a visit from the police, and it could have been pledge week here in the wilds.

  Even the routine during Dick’s visit was pretty much the same as it is every day. I got up in the pitch-black before dawn darkness and tripped over the dogs strewn like land mines all over the bedroom rug. Then, after doing my best not to break my neck on the stairs with all four “out of my way, I gotta pee!” pups accompanying me, I let them out, made coffee, and let them back in again. It was all working perfectly until the morning of Hem’s bone scan.

  You remember the further investigation of the “spot” I mentioned earlier? It was scheduled for the Thursday during spring break. Casey would be helping to replace fence boards on the farm he worked at last summer. Cuyler would be away with his friends. And our band of merry mutts would be locked in the kitchen.

  Or they would’ve been if they’d returned from relieving themselves.

  At five thirty that morning, I let four dogs out. At five forty, I let two dogs in: the easygoing Grundy, and the desperate-to-eat Pete. I figured Tug and Dick would be right behind them.

  I figured wrong. Very wrong.

  By quarter to eight, there was still no sign of either dog. If they didn’t materialize in fifteen minutes, we ran the risk of being late for Hem’s ten-o’clock appointment. And that was a risk I wasn’t willing to run.

  My husband, on the other hand, was only too happy to postpone the entire endeavor.

  “If they’re not back, I’m not going.” He was staring out the kitchen window, scanning the fields for his favorite four-legged, cold-nosed blonde and his petite playmate, and watching a dozen or so “girls” grazing in the pasture behind our house.

  “You’re kidding, right?” I stopped tossing his anxiety, nausea, and pain pills into my purse, but not before considering helping myself to a handful. “You’re going to put off a test because our dogs are out digging up groundhogs or humping one another or whatever?”

  “One of them’s not our dog.”

  “But they’re together. They’ll be back. They always come back. No matter how hard I try to dissuade them.” I smiled.

  “What if they
don’t come back? Do you want to call the Wyatts and tell them we lost . . . lost . . . What’s the dog’s name?”

  “Dick. Dick the dog.” At the D-word, the two of us cracked up. I know it’s juvenile, but I don’t care. I’m just happy that in the midst of all the sickness and the stress and the tests and the fear, we still find stuff funny. “And in any case, we didn’t lose him. He’s just out for an extended stroll.”

  I decided to give the dogs ten more minutes and behave like it was business as usual. I gathered Hem’s X-rays and the scan orders, stuck them in a folder, and put them in the car. I grabbed two bottles of water, his book, and his reading glasses, stuck them in his backpack, and put it in the car. Then, since it was a little chilly, I decided to start the car. I turned the ignition and the engine roared. Loud. Really loud. Way too loud for a Dodge Durango.

  But not too loud for a Dodge Ram pickup truck. Specifically our Dodge Ram pickup truck, a glistening silver behemoth with more than a little resemblance to the Coors Light train, which suddenly streaked past me in my rearview mirror, Hemingway at the helm.

  God forgive me, I thought, but when I catch that man, cancer will be the least of his concerns.

  I jumped out of the car and ran after him. Sure, I could have taken the Durango, but I didn’t think high-speed pursuit of a man wearing a fifty-microgram Fentanyl patch (which, in English, means Caution: Mega Amounts of Pain Medication. Can Cause Memory Loss, Drowsiness, and Stupid Decisions. DO NOT OPERATE HEAVY MACHINERY. McCORKINDALE, THIS MEANS YOU!) was the best approach.

  Luckily he didn’t go far. He stopped right before he came to the cattle guard, which was good, because I was wearing high-heeled boots, and hopping that thing in those things would’ve meant the end of several big things I had planned. Like a career in the Ice Capades.192 And kicking my dog-addicted husband’s butt.

  “What are you thinking?” I shouted, limping to the driver’s-side door.

  “I’m thinking you look like Big Bird when you run. Or maybe a floppy scarecrow.” He glanced at my feet. “It could be the boots. You wouldn’t wobble so much if you were wearing sneakers.”