Suburban Renewal

by Pamela Morsi

  “Nate!”

  He opened his eyes, sat up, turned down the music and pulled the plugs out of his ears.

  “Hi, Dad,” he said. “I didn’t know you were coming home.”

  I was surprised that he seemed so uninformed with what was going on in his own house.

  “You know your grandfather is in the hospital?” I asked.

  “Oh yeah, sure,” Nate said with genuine concern. “How’s he doing?”

  “I don’t know, I’m just now going out there.”

  He nodded.

  “What’s the deal with the wall in the living room?” I asked.

  His eyes widened.

  “Didn’t Mom tell you?”

  “Yeah, she told me you got drunk and knocked a hole in the wall,” I replied. “But that doesn’t tell me why it’s still there.”

  He just looked up at me, clueless.

  “This is my house, young man,” I told him. “You knock a hole in my wall, then you go to the lumber yard, get some gyp board, replace the drywall, tape it, float it and repaint it. That’s what men do when they screw up, they go back and they fix it.”

  His jaw fell open.

  I didn’t bother to explain any further. I walked out of the room, went back to pick up my duffel which I carried out to the sunporch. It wasn’t much of a master bedroom, but it was all we had. I felt like I was covered with some kind of travel sludge and decided I had to shower before I went to the hospital. I put away my clothes as best I could, wrestled some clean jeans out of the little armoire that Corrie was using for a closet and walked back through the house to the bathroom. The door was closed. I knocked.

  “Leave me alone!” Lauren responded.

  The response was so mean, I assumed it wasn’t for me.

  “Sugar, I need to take a shower,” I said through the door.

  “Oh, Daddy,” she responded, surprised. “I thought you were Nate. I need fifteen more minutes.”

  “Fifteen minutes?”

  “I’m doing my bikini zone and I just put the hair remover on. I can’t move for fifteen minutes.”

  “I need to get to the hospital,” I pointed out.

  “Sorry, Dad, but I’ve done this before,” she answered. “It takes the full fifteen minutes.”

  I just stood there for a long moment staring at the door. Then I shook my head. I walked back into the front of the house, through the living room to the sunporch. I tossed my clean jeans on the bed. Picked up the car keys and headed for the driveway.

  It took me twenty minutes to drive to the hospital, another ten to find a parking space, and even longer than that to locate the floor that Doc was on. I almost missed Corrie as I walked past a little alcove with an angle of uncomfortable-looking chairs that resembled box crates with seat cushions. She was all alone.

  “Hi!”

  Corrie looked relieved to see me and even jumped up and hugged my neck.

  “I got here as soon as I could.”

  She nodded. “You still smell like an airplane,” she told me.

  “I wanted to shower,” I told her. “But there was some kind of bikini emergency and I couldn’t get into the bathroom.”

  She was sympathetic. “It’s that time,” she said. “Two teenagers in the house is always a challenge. But getting used to one bathroom is an adjustment.”

  “How’s Doc?” I asked her.

  She shrugged. “His color is a little better, I think. He’s conscious most of the time now. He can’t move his leg at all and his arm only slightly. But he tries to talk. The nurses say that’s a good sign. Mom’s in with him now. The room is so small and there’s only one little seat, so we take turns. We don’t want to leave him alone. The doctor told us that at this time, his attitude is everything. He has to want to get better. I know that scares Mom. He hasn’t really seemed interested in anything since Mike died.”

  “At least he reopened the drugstore,” I told her. “I didn’t think he’d even do that.”

  “He’s just letting it drift away,” she said. “He’s not fighting for customers, he’s hardly trying to stay afloat.”

  “Sometimes you just lose hope,” I told her. “It happened to me. When I wasn’t working, I had to force myself to get up every day. I just lost my way. It happens.”

  We sat down and she leaned her head over on my shoulder. I wrapped my arm around her.

  “And now I’ve asked you to do it all over again,” she said. “Once again you’re hanging around Lumkee looking for a job.”

  “At least this time it was our choice,” I told her. “And there are more jobs to be had now. I’ll find something. Maybe something I’ll like a whole lot better than being gone all the time.”

  I pressed a little kiss on the top of her head. She looked up at me and smiled.

  “It’s good to have you home,” she told me. “Did you see Nate at the house?”

  “Yeah, I told him to fix the hole in the living room wall.”

  Corrie glanced at me curiously. “He doesn’t know how to do anything like that,” she pointed out.

  “Then I guess he’ll ask for help or read a book or look it up on the Internet,” I said. “He’s a smart kid. He can figure it out.”

  “How did you decide to handle it that way?” she asked me.

  I shook my head. “I didn’t really decide,” I admitted. “I just saw the damage and I thought how displeased Gram would have been if she’d seen it. And then it just sort of followed, how would Gram have handled it, if the culprit had been me. It was almost like she was speaking through me. I wasn’t angry and I didn’t take any of the weird guilt stuff I feel about Nate in the room with me. It was just Gram and her words and how she would have handled Floyd Braydon’s boy.”

  “And it worked?”

  “I think that remains to be seen,” I told her. “But at least we’re heading in a new direction.”

  In a few moments Edna came out. I hugged her and she clung to me. “I can’t lose him, too,” she told me. “What will I have to live for?”

  I could have reminded her that she had a daughter who stood by her through everything and two healthy grandchildren, but I was sure she didn’t mean it as a real question.

  “Hang in there, Edna,” I told her instead. “Doc is going to need you. You can’t fall apart.”

  Immediately she raised her chin and straightened her shoulders, as if infused with determination.

  “You’re right, you are absolutely right,” she said. “What good will I be if I turn into a sappy puddle? I despise women who are all heart and no gumption.”

  In that spirit it was decided that she should go home and rest. I insisted that Corrie go with her.

  “Doc and I can handle tonight by ourselves,” I assured them.

  I introduced myself to the CCU staff and they directed me to one of the narrow, glassed-in rooms that ringed the nurses’ station. It was a small space made more so by all the equipment built into the wall above the bed.

  Doc looked old and frail as he lay there. He was always so neatly groomed and dressed. Now he was tied into a rumpled hospital gown, his thin hair was mussed, revealing a lot of previously hidden balding, and without his glasses, his face looked sharp and bony.

  His eyes were open.

  “Hi, Doc, how you doing?” I asked him.

  “Sam?”

  I could clearly make out that word. And the surprise in his tone.

  “I know you didn’t think you were going to see me until Christmas,” I told him. “But I just finished up and came home early.”

  He took that statement in, examining it for a long time before responding.

  “I’m going to die, then? They sent for you because I’m going to die?”

  It took me a minute to understand what he was saying. His words were slow and slightly slurred, but I listened carefully and finally understood him.

  “No, no,” I assured him. “I came home because the family needed me.”

  If it had been my mother-in-law lying
there, or Corrie, I probably would have left it at that. But my time with Mike had convinced me that men prefer the truth. Once we’ve got a handle on that, we can deal with whatever it’s going to mean.

  “The doctors don’t know yet if you’re going to be all right,” I told him. “So far, so good. They say twenty percent don’t make it through this part. That means eighty percent do.”

  He gave me a weird, slightly off-center grin.

  “When I talk to them,” I said, “I’ll tell them to be straight with you.”

  “Thanks.”

  He closed his eyes as if the conversation had exhausted him. There was a small metal chair on one side of the bed, near the privacy curtain that could be drawn across the glass. I walked over there and seated myself.

  “You tired?” The question came from the bed.

  “No, Doc,” I answered. “It’s been a long day but, amazingly, I’m feeling pretty good. Must be getting my second wind.”

  He struggled to respond and finally got the words out. “Wish I’d get mine,” he said.

  I chuckled.

  We sat there together in the silence. His eyes were closed.

  “You find those pills?” he asked.

  I sat up straight in my chair. Even in the middle of the hospital with medications coming and going every minute, I didn’t have to ask him what pills he meant. I knew immediately.

  “I didn’t find the pills,” I told him. “But I found out what happened to them.”

  From beneath the sheet, his good arm came out and his hand beckoned me closer.

  “Tell me,” he said.

  I scooted closer and took his hand in mine.

  “Not tonight, Doc,” I told him. “When you get stronger, I promise, I’ll tell you everything.”

  His expression was hurt and disappointed.

  “Tell me tonight,” he said.

  I hesitated. The whole thing was speculation. I didn’t know anything for sure. Except what seemed to be the obvious conclusion. I had never voiced it aloud. Never let myself put the pieces together. There was too much pain and regret to express.

  But Doc was in pain. From the stroke and from the loss of his son. Doc was still grieving. If voicing my suspicions gave him a reason to stay here on earth and find out the truth, then that was reason enough to speak out.

  I sat down beside him and shared what I knew and what I suspected.

  His eyes widened and he drew a gasp of indrawn breath.

  “You think she killed him?” he asked me. “With Mike’s help? You think Mike set it up?”

  “There’s no way to know,” I told him. “Unless she tells us, and why would she?”

  Doc was smiling. It was a crooked smile, a damaged smile, but he was smiling.

  “Isn’t that something?” he said. “Poor Cherry Dale. Not a man in this town willing to defend her. And our Mike comes to her rescue from the grave.”

  Corrie

  1995

  The New Year began with things going very well. My father was in physical therapy and recovering slowly. Mom was transporting him to and from the rehab center twice a week. She’d wanted Sam to drive them, just as he had for all of Mike’s appointments, but Doc flatly refused.

  “If you can’t drive me, then I’ll get the senior citizens transport,” he threatened, knowing Mom would be humiliated to go in the big gold bus with all the “really old people.” “Sam’s too busy to fool with my troubles. And somebody’s got to watch the drugstore.”

  The drugstore didn’t truly require that much watching, but Dad wanted to keep it open. We hired a part-time pharmacist. She came over every afternoon to fill the day’s prescriptions. She was a cute young girl in her twenties. She was Korean-American, which I thought really added a nice bit of diversity to Lumkee’s old Main Street.

  I pushed Lauren to manage the store after school. We needed the help, of course, but more than that. I wanted her to get close to Hye Won. A bright, hardworking woman was just exactly the kind of role model I wanted for my daughter. And if Lauren got interested in pharmacology, that would just be icing on the cake. What she mostly did was visit with her friends at the soda counter and read all the fashion magazines on the sale rack.

  A new big home-improvement store opened and Sam was hired. It was a good job with decent pay and stock shares. And, most important, it was ten minutes from the house. He worked the four-to-midnight shift, Friday through Tuesday, which freed him up to spend most of his days working at the drugstore.

  It also made him eligible for an employee discount, which we really needed. Since Nate’s introduction to drywall repair, he had suddenly become our personal house restorer. Carpentry work was all new to him and he found he had a knack for it. And it kept him close to home. Paint and lumber were not cheap, but Sam gave his son a reasonably free hand in doing what he could to get the house in shape. The work seemed to give him a sense of accomplishment and spur his creativity. He was good at it and, surprisingly, methodical and meticulous. The kid who could never bother to iron a shirt would painstakingly plane a board to a one-thirty-secondth tolerance and sand putty until all imperfection virtually disappeared.

  “This is wonderful,” I told Sam one night, crowded together in our little narrow bed on the sunporch. “He likes construction and it is obviously an outlet for his artistic side. He could be an architect or a…”

  Sam put a finger over my lips.

  “Don’t even start thinking it,” he admonished. “The worst thing that we can do is try to push Nate in any direction. He’s so determined to be contrary that he’ll go against us no matter what it is.”

  I don’t know when or how Sam had become so wise a parent, but I’d learned to trust him on it. I was the one taking all the psychology courses, but he was the one who always seemed to know just the right thing to say to the children. Even Dr. Muldrew described Sam as the nurturer.

  Mike’s friend, and my former doctor, called me one day to ask how I was doing, how things were going. I told him that we’d never been able to get Nate to talk to a counselor.

  “He found something wrong with everybody I suggested,” I explained. “He just wouldn’t go. He’s doing better now. But I still worry about what goes on inside him.”

  “Well, there’s still plenty of time to find out,” Dr. Muldrew said. “Why don’t you try family therapy.”

  “Family therapy?”

  “The whole family is in the room together,” he said. “That way no one feels really singled out. In that kind of environment, Nate might be prompted to share at least some of what is going on inside him.”

  I talked to Sam. He liked the idea, but he wondered how we would pay for it. With both of us working full-time we were fortunate to have health insurance, but neither his company’s plan nor the school system offered any mental-health coverage beyond hospitalization. With our financial situation as precarious as it continued to be, there was no way we could make a long-term therapy commitment.

  “Why don’t we ask Dr. Muldrew if he could take us for a few sessions,” Sam said. “We can see how this family therapy works and maybe he can teach us how to hold them ourselves.”

  That’s exactly what we did. We set three one-hour appointments for family therapy with Dr. Muldrew. He tried to teach us how to focus on what one another was saying. How to get past any initial feelings of anger that might crop up. And how to negotiate together for a reasonable solution to problems.

  We didn’t focus on Nate. In fact, in the sessions with Dr. Muldrew, the time was almost completely dominated by conflicts over who should be cleaning the house. I was teaching all day, taking graduate courses and studying in the evening. So I felt that my time was better utilized in things other than vacuuming and scrubbing toilets. Lauren was going to class all day and working in the drugstore afternoons. Sam was working the drugstore all day and his real job all night. Nate was in high school and did work around the house.

  “And besides,” he admitted, “I don’t know anything about h
ousekeeping and don’t want to learn.”

  What Dr. Muldrew had us do was figure out how we could manage it fairly together. We drew up a list of all the tasks and then had everybody pick until they were all taken.

  By session three, Dr. Muldrew was just sitting and watching us.

  “You have to make a commitment to do this,” he told us. “If you don’t schedule meetings and have them every week and have everybody in attendance, you’ll be back to where you started.”

  We decided Wednesday night was the best. Everybody agreed they would be there. The first night I arrived late and got quite a surprise. The house smelled of spicy cooked meat. Nate and Lauren were already at the kitchen table, laughing in high spirits.

  I walked in and Sam, wearing his cook’s apron, walked over to give me a kiss.

  “I thought if we had something to do with our hands,” he said, “the talk might go easier.”

  “Plus, everybody in town is hungry for tamales,” Lauren said.

  I shook my head, but I could hardly fault him.

  “I could eat a couple myself,” I admitted.

  The evening session went great. Lots of worries were vented. Plenty of grievances were aired. And dozens of hojas were smeared with masa.

  Later, as Sam and I lay in bed together, I told him what a good idea it was.

  “Let’s do it every time,” he said.

  I grinned at him, though I knew he couldn’t see it in the darkness.

  “Are we back to tamale day, Mr. Braydon?”

  Indeed we were. Sam no longer delivered. If you wanted tamales, you came down to the drugstore to get them, because we couldn’t afford to feed the whole town on Thursday night. Sam began charging two dollars a dozen. Nobody seemed to mind paying. Our life was good.

  On a beautiful sunny morning in April, I’d just gotten my class through their morning meeting where we greeted one another and shared the legislatively mandated moment of silence. The children started doing their “jobs,” such as getting news, choosing a poem to read, or filling in a crossword puzzle on their table. Just then, Mrs. Wiley, the assistant principal, unexpectedly came to my classroom.