Live Like You Were Dying

by Michael Morris

  “So, what are you saying? You’re just not going to do anything about it?”

  “No, not right now I’m not. I’m going to do like the lung doctor suggested. I’m going to wait until I get better before I go under the knife again. I just want to wait awhile.”

  “But Nathan . . . we don’t know how much time we have to wait.”

  I leaned forward and clasped her fingers into mine. “You know what I was thinking about the entire way to the doctor’s office? I was thinking about Mama. She lived the end of her life scared and chasing potions. And what did it get her? A month or two, maybe? If you ask me, it robbed her of a whole lot more. No, I’m not ready to pay that price just yet.”

  Heather looked off into the distance, and when she turned back to me her eyes were filled with tears. “I knew that’s what you were thinking the second you got up and walked out of that doctor’s office.”

  Squeezing her hand, I felt the pulse of her heart. “What if it’s been there since I was born? The doctor said that could be the case. It’s not going anywhere.”

  “Yeah, and what if it hasn’t been there that long? What if it’s . . .”

  “Heather, I’m not going to live like that . . . I won’t live by what-ifs.”

  She nodded and looked up at the fading sky as if she might could find the right words to say. Wiping away her tears, I kissed her right in front of God and everybody on our manicured street. Heather wrapped her arms around my neck and rested her head against my shoulder as she had when we were just kids dating back in Choctaw, Georgia.

  My real life, the life I’d meant to live all along, was just beginning, and somewhere in the back of my mind I memorized the date of that day, the same as I would the birthday of someone I loved.

  Chapter Four

  The next morning, after Malley and Heather left for the day, I washed the dishes and cleaned up the kitchen. I struggled trying to find where everything went. That’s the problem with being a stranger in your own kitchen. I had no idea what I would do for the rest of the day. It felt like I hadn’t been home in years, and I had to learn how to fit back in. Wiping down the table, I stopped to move a project Malley was working on for school: The Places I Want to Visit. I sat down and read through some of her entries: Big Ben, The Leaning Tower of Pisa, The Arc d’Triumphe. Further down on the list she had written the American Girl store, wherever that was, and Six Flags. I held the paper in my hand. Had I not taken my own daughter to Six Flags? Next on the list she’d written The Retro Club in Atlanta. What in the world was The Retro Club? I propped my feet up on the table and read through the list again and again. Reaching for a piece of notebook paper and a pen, I decided to do a little homework of my own. The first thing I would do with my time was to make a list of the places that I’d always wanted to visit, remote places I’d seen as a boy in the pages of National Geographic.

  I struggled to come up with a location to put next to the number one spot on the paper. The practical side of me kept getting in the way. Where would we get the money? Even if I had the money, which place would I want to visit first? I wrote something down but then scratched it out. I wrote another spot down but scratched that out too. The thought of going anywhere other than our yearly trip to Destin seemed insane. We would have to wait until school let out, anyway. But beneath the surface of the excuses, what really fueled the procrastination was anger against Jay Beckett. Even though I understood the pressure of the business world as good as anybody, friendship and loyalty ought to count for something.

  About an hour before Heather and Malley were scheduled to arrive home, I decided to venture into another place that I had not traveled very often. Opening up the pantry door, I saw spaghetti sauce and boxes of pasta. Heather had always said that I never appreciated the time she took to cook and that I thought our food magically appeared on the table. Now it was time to learn her tricks. Besides, I wanted to do it for Malley too. She fancied spaghetti the way most people appreciate fresh lobster.

  Finding where the pots were kept was my first challenge. Finally I settled for the big copper pot that looked like it could be used for washing a load of clothes. I filled it with water, then looked into the box of needle-thin spaghetti. One box didn’t seem nearly enough for a family of three, so I emptied one more box into the boiling water. After putting the sauce on, I stepped back and admired the pots on the stove. That wasn’t too tough.

  A phone call from my insurance agent took only a few minutes, but the sauce that was cooking in the skillet wouldn’t wait. The pan shook and hissed with the scorched smell of burning sauce. When I tried to wipe up the spattered sauce from the edge of the stove, the end of the dishrag touched against the burner and caught fire. I flung the rag into the sink just as the pot of spaghetti boiled over. By the time I put the flame out, the spaghetti had mutated into mounds, filling up every inch of the pot, and even erupting over the edges and onto the kitchen counter and floor.

  Determined not to let Heather come home and find my mess, I pulled out a roll of paper towels from the pantry and placed them on the floor like skis. My ribs hurt if I bent over for more than a few minutes, so I drug the paper towels with my feet until every last drop of water and sauce were off the floor. Picking up the towels with my toes, I released them into the trash as well as any trained circus monkey.

  By the time Heather and Malley made it home, most of the scorched smell had left the room through the open windows. Spraying a can of deodorant all over the kitchen had helped too.

  Malley tossed her book bag to the corner and peeked into the pot. “Did you make this?”

  “Sure did,” I said, standing in front of the refrigerator and hoping that they wouldn’t open it to find the bowls of spaghetti that lined the shelves and inside door. “Don’t look so surprised. There’s a lot of stuff that you don’t know I can do.”

  After supper, I gladly took Heather up on her suggestion to rest and slumped down on the couch with the TV remote. It took a lot of energy to be Chef Boyardee. I didn’t know how Heather did it every day.

  “What’s this?” Malley asked, holding the notebook paper printed with my block letters: THE PLACES I WANT TO VISIT. “Where’d you get that from?” I tried to raise up from the couch, but pain shoved me back.

  “It was on the kitchen counter,” Malley said, looking back at the paper. “Are you copying my homework?” I tried to reach for the paper again, but she pulled it away. “You didn’t get very far.”

  “Yeah, well, it’s silly.”

  “What’s silly?”

  “That list. You caught me building air castles.” I smiled, but Malley’s frown never disappeared. She looked back at the paper and stared so long that you’d think I had listed a book’s worth of places to visit.

  “Okay, where do you want to go?” She sat on the floor next to the sofa, strands of her auburn hair tickling against the shin of my leg.

  “I don’t know. Places I’ve never been to. Places I’d like to see again.”

  Malley reached for a pen from the coffee table. “Okay, name one place more than any other place in the whole world that you want to see.”

  “Any place?” Knowing that my baby girl was going to hold my feet to the fire, I felt like I was signing the answer in blood. The last thing I wanted was for her to think that goals weren’t attainable. “Well, let’s see, now . . . Holster’s Drive-In.”

  Malley turned and squinted. “What?”

  “The Holster Drive-in. It’s where your mama and me used to hang out back in high school. The best chili dogs you ever put in your mouth.”

  “But Daddy, wait a minute . . . we got Hawaii, we got Paris . . .”

  “But none of those places have Holster’s chili dogs. Put it down, please, and while you’re at it, put down Brouser’s Pond too. The biggest bass I ever caught was there.”

  Malley laughed when I stretched out my arms. “I’m not lying to you, now,” I said. “Did I ever tell you what I used to do when I was a kid?” She smiled and shook he
r head. “Every year when Grand Vestal used to set out her garden, I’d help her plow. After we were through I’d take off my shoes and run through the dirt going ninety to nothing.” “What?”

  “I used to run through that plowed field wide open with the warm dirt tickling the bottom of my feet.”

  “Why’d you do that?”

  Suddenly I felt just as vulnerable as the boy I was remembering. “Grand Vestal always said it was my way of connecting with my past, her people who had first farmed the land.” “Sounds like you were crazy to me.” I heard Heather laugh and turned to see her standing in the door of the living room, holding a magazine.

  “Grand Vestal, bless her heart. I love her, but she has some outrageous ideas,” Heather said.

  My grandmother claimed that laughter was the cure for a troubled soul, and that night my girls’ laughter was just what I needed. Malley sat with her arm pressed against my leg, for the first time soaking in the stories about my growing-up days in the south Georgia town. She had visited so seldom that I’m sure to her the clay dirt roads with umbrellas of three-hundred-year-old oak trees seemed as foreign as anything I’d ever seen in National Geographic. Malley leaned against me as I told story after story until I felt homesick for the first time in years.

  I reached for the paper in Malley’s hand, and at the very top of the list, right above the number one spot, I wrote in all capital letters: CHOCTAW, GEORGIA, USA! Malley tacked my wish list to the pink bulletin board in her bedroom. A furry blue tack kept the paper hanging at an angle, next to a handful of crumpled concert tickets.

  Later in the night, while the motor of the ceiling fan in our bedroom hummed, I wrapped my ankle around my sleeping wife’s foot. Heather had always managed the details of the household, paid the bills, and kept Malley happy and secure. Where had I been during all of those times, like when birthday parties were planned? Sure, I’d show up and give the courtesy hug, but as far as knowing what was going to be given to our daughter, I’d always left those details to Heather. I didn’t even know the girls who showed up at the parties. The truth of the matter was, I’d been paying more attention to the names on Beckett Construction’s payroll than the names my daughter talked about at the supper table. Now, staring up at the ceiling fan that clipped away the seconds of the night, I found myself wanting to know everything about my daughter.

  It was four weeks after the accident and the last week of school before summer break. I dropped Malley off at the front of the school and saw Deana Trusville in the car behind me. She was slowly rolling along in her Volvo station wagon, like all the other moms that morning. My truck with the tinted windows and the metal toolbox in the back rolled right along with the best of them.

  A big-hipped crossing guard wearing patent leather shoes and a pair of black pants one size too small blew her whistle and kept the congestion orderly. Just when I approached the double white lines where children were walking with book bags that seemed twice as big as them,

  I made a jump for it. Getting out of my truck, I walked back to Deana’s car.

  She seemed startled as her blue eyes searched me and a crease formed in the space above her pointy nose. Cracking the window and looking back at the traffic guard, she just nodded for me to get on with it.

  “Hey, I’m Nathan Bishop. You probably don’t remember me, but your husband was the engineer I worked with on that plant expansion last year.”

  She blinked and gave a smile, albeit an obligatory one for the sake of her husband, if nothing else. “Oh.”

  “You came with him to the Christmas party my company . . . gave last year. We talked about our daughters.” A shrill whistle rang out and Deana pointed toward her windshield. “Oh yes. Uh, I think the woman wants you to move your truck.”

  “Seeing how our girls are about the same age . . . I was wondering if you’ve ever heard of a place called The Retro Club before?”

  “Yes, I think . . .”

  “Is it a place I could take my daughter and some of her friends without them being embarrassed that I’m there?”

  “Yes, I think . . .”

  “Sir, you need to move your vehicle,” the traffic guard yelled, but I continued to ignore her.

  “I want this to be a surprise, and if I ask Malley’s mama, then the cat’s out of the bag . . . you know what I mean—” Nodding quicker by the second, Deana interrupted me. “My daughter loves The Retro Club. They have preteen night the last Friday of the month.”

  Before I could thank her, Deana rolled up the window and pulled down the sunglasses that held back her blond hair. “Appreciate it,” I said trying to walk as fast as my ribs would let me.

  The crossing guard was shaking her head. “You deaf?” she yelled.

  When I pulled up to the white crossing lane, the brightness of the guard’s orange safety banner almost blinded me. “Life is good . . . try it sometime,” I said smiling. The woman looked at me with the same openmouthed wonder that Louise Finches had the day I jerked the glass door from its hinges. I guess whether you’re off the chart by acting ugly or nice, people are shocked just the same.

  That Friday, after Heather and Malley left, I went to work. At the entrance to our subdivision, I dug up the black-eyed Susans that dotted the edge of the road and put them in a pot that I’d been hiding behind the lawnmower. Not satisfied that there were enough flowers, I drove farther north to the construction site for a new subdivision. To the right I spotted the unspoiled field that I’d scouted earlier in the week. Gold flowers with the center as dark as Heather’s eyes covered an embankment that ran along the ditch next to a barbed-wire fence.

  At the high school, I sat in the parking lot and waited until the bell signaling the first break rang. That was the signal that the coast was clear in the classroom. I got the janitor, Isaac, to let me borrow a wheelbarrow. A group of girls stared and then giggled when I said, “Maybe one day you’ll have somebody deliver flowers to you in a wheelbarrow.”

  Heather was in the teacher’s lounge during the class break, just like her next-door teacher had told me. Easing into the classroom, I began arranging the pots of flowers until the room resembled a country field. Black-eyed Susans covered every square inch of Heather’s desk and lined the rows between the student desks. On the chalkboard I wrote: Why did I do it? Because you’re an A Plus Wife, Partner and Friend. I love You X Infinity . . .

  At the end of the school day Heather called to thank me.

  She called just as the driver of the limousine I had rented for Malley and her friends pulled up to the house.

  “Come go with us,” I said after I told her about my plan. “We’ll swing by and pick you up.”

  Heather laughed. “No, sometimes a daughter just needs to be a daddy’s girl. Go on and have fun.”

  “You know, I didn’t have enough room on the chalkboard to write everything that I wanted to say.” I felt like a young kid talking on the phone to his girlfriend.

  “And what is that?” she asked.

  “Nothing in my life was right until we hooked up,” I said, my voice cracking like an adolescent’s.

  “I know,” she whispered. “I know. Well, go on before you’re late picking up the girls.”

  The girls, as in six girls, were all of Malley’s closest friends. I had called their parents earlier in the week and made the girls take a vow of secrecy. So far so good. I had told Malley’s friends to wait with her by the flagpole. I saw them from the distance and had the driver pull right in front of the flagpole. I watched Malley as the girls started to giggle. She had no idea what was happening.

  “Anybody need a ride around here?” I called out while standing through the sunroof.

  Malley threw her hand over her mouth. “What’s this all about?” she cried between her fingers as the girls started to pour into the limo.

  “This is your night out on the town. Come on. Get in!”

  “I swear, if I get embarrassed . . .” Malley said, looking around.

  “You’ll what?” I
asked, jumping out of the car to help her inside. “You’ll get embarrassed . . . but what if tonight goes down as one of the best nights of your life? Are you going to remember it?”

  She shook her head and laughed. “Daddy, you’re so crazy these days.”

  “Yeah, well, just wait to see how crazy I get tonight,” I said, striking a John Travolta dance pose with my finger up in the air and my legs bent far apart.

  “Oh my gosh! Get in the car!”

  At dinner, I went around the table, saying the names of the girls until they giggled and rolled their eyes. Sitting in the restaurant where I’d taken Heather on our anniversary, I swelled up when I heard the girl sitting next to Malley turn and whisper, “My dad’s never done anything like this.” At The Retro Club near downtown, the sign at the ticket window read “12- to 14-Year-Olds,” but judging from the size of the boys who looked like they’d been corn-fed, I was glad that I’d come. Inside, the lighted dance floor vibrated from the songs of the seventies and eighties. A DJ who couldn’t have been more than nineteen wore a headset and stood on top of a center platform. He nodded to the beats of songs that I recalled from my days as a boy at the skating rink. Under the floor, colored lights pulsated with the rhythm of the music that blasted from overhead speakers. The girls took off to the dance floor, worming their way through a flood of kids. Joining the other parents at the edge of the dance floor, I wondered what I would have thought if my own father had escorted me to a place like this at Malley’s age. “Waste of money,” I could almost hear him say at the very suggestion. Right then while watching my daughter toss her hair and laugh, I was pleased that I’d turned out to be more like my mother. In the past few weeks, I’d told Malley that I loved her more times than I could count. When I was growing up in my dad’s household, it seemed that the word love was as difficult for him to speak as a foreign language. We were as different as the moon and the sun, and I was determined to pave a completely different trail with my child.