by Cronk, LN
Coming from Laci (who could overlook just about anything), this was a true testament of how bad things actually were.
“We can hire someone to come in and do it,” I promised. “It’s just that this is not how I want to be spending my time.”
“And this is?” she smiled at me.
I grinned back, but then I stopped and searched her eyes for a moment.
“Are you disappointed?”
“Disappointed?” she asked, propping herself up on one elbow. “Are you kidding? I hate decorating and stuff!”
“You do?”
She nodded at me emphatically.
“Then why did you agree that we should fix up the house!?” I cried.
“Because I thought that’s what you wanted to do,” she answered, meekly.
“Laci!”
“What?”
I just shook my head, exasperatedly. How had I not realized before now that I needed to figure out what Laci wanted to do and then make it seem as if it was my idea.
“I think we should visit the kids,” I finally said. “One at a time. We’ll start with the youngest and work our way up.”
“You want to go to Australia?” she asked, excitement growing in her voice.
“Ay, Mate!” I said in my very best Australian accent. “Let’s ring up Marco and tell ’em we’re flying across the big pond!”
“Don’t talk like that,” Laci said with a mortified look on her face. “You have a terrible Australian accent!”
“Blimey,” I replied.
~ ~ ~
BY THE END of the first week in February we’d mapped out most of our plans to visit the kids. In the end, we decided to wait to go to Australia until Easter since Marco wasn’t going to have much time off until then. Three of the girls lived close enough that we could go visit just for a day or two anytime we wanted, and we bought tickets to fly to California to see Grace at the very end of the month.
Dorito’s wife, Maria, came from a small town only about an hour east of Cavendish. Since her family still lived there, Dorito and his family came home often enough that it wasn’t really necessary to plan a trip to Mexico. I still wanted to go down there, however, so that Laci could visit the orphanage, but before I could make any definite plans (I was leaning toward summer . . . after Grace’s wedding in June), Dorito called with plans of his own.
“Hi, Dad!” he enthused as soon as I answered my phone.
“Hey, Dorito,” I said. “What’s up?”
“Remember how we’ve always talked about going salmon fishing with Tanner in Alaska?”
“Uhhh, I remember that you and Tanner have always talked about going salmon fishing in Alaska and that occasionally you mention bringing me along when you realize that I’m standing there listening and feeling left out.”
“Dad . . .” he said, sounding wounded.
“Truth hurts, doesn’t it?”
“Dad . . .” he said again.
I decided to let him off the hook.
“Are you seriously thinking about going?” I asked.
“Yeah,” he said, the excitement returning to his voice. “Ten days – this July. We can catch the end of the King season, the beginning of the Sockeye season, and that’s right when the Halibut are coming into the bays to spawn.”
“You’ve already talked to Tanner about this and planned it all out, haven’t you?”
“Well,” he said hesitantly, “I talked to him.”
I paused for a minute.
“I . . . I don’t know, Dorito,” I finally said. “I don’t really want to leave your mom for that long.”
“Mom could come down here!” he insisted. “She could spend some time with Maria and the kids and visit the orphanage–”
“You’ve already planned it all out with her too, haven’t you?”
“I might have mentioned it,” he admitted.
I closed my eyes and sighed quietly. It had started already . . . the talking behind my back . . . conspiring with one another . . . planning my entire life out for me.
“I don’t suppose Marco can come?” I asked.
“No,” he answered.
“Okay,” I said. “So it’s you, me and Tanner?”
“Yeah,” he enthused. “Ya wanna do it?”
“Absolutely,” I said. “Let’s go.”
A few days before Valentine’s Day I announced to Laci that I wanted to go shopping.
“Okay,” she said, nodding and getting up off of the couch.
“No,” I clarified. “I want to go by myself.”
She stopped and looked at me, alarmed.
“I’ll be fine,” I told her. “I promise.”
“But I . . . I thought you weren’t going to drive anymore,” Laci said, looking dismayed.
“Well, I wasn’t,” I admitted, “but this medicine’s working so good that I think I’ll be fine. I’m pretty much back to my old self.”
I’d been on the Coceptiva for about three weeks now and I just knew that I hadn’t been having any more problems.
“Why can’t I go with you?” she asked.
“Because I’m going to buy you your Valentine’s present and I don’t want you to see it.”
“I won’t look,” she promised. “I’ll take you wherever you want to go and you can go in all by yourself and I’ll just wait in the car.”
It actually wouldn’t have really mattered if she’d gone with me, but I was getting really sick of being constantly chaperoned everywhere I went. Plus, I couldn’t remember the last time I’d had a few unsupervised minutes to myself.
“No,” I said, shaking my head. “I don’t even want you to know where I get it from.”
“Then you can have Tanner take you,” she suggested, “or Jessica.”
“I’ll be fine. I want to go by myself.”
She looked at me
“I . . . I don’t think you should be driving,” she said, shaking her head slightly. I took a few steps toward her and put my hands on her arms.
“This medicine’s working,” I told her again. “I can feel it. I’m back to my old self again. I’ll be fine.”
“David,” she began, but then she stopped. She looked as if she might cry at any moment.
“What?”
She held my gaze.
“You aren’t back to your old self,” she said quietly.
I looked at her, trying to register what she was saying.
“What?” I finally asked, trying unsuccessfully to keep the alarm out of my voice.
“You aren’t back to your old self,” she said again, gently.
I looked back at her for a moment and then dropped my hands from her arms. I stepped away from her and walked to the couch, sitting down. She followed and sat next to me, putting one of her hands on mine.
I didn’t say anything for a minute. I just closed my eyes and rubbed my forehead with my free hand, trying to make sense of it all.
I had been sure . . . so sure that those little blue pills had been working. But now? To find out that they really hadn’t been?
I was at a complete loss for words.
“What have I been doing?” I finally asked, looking at her. I didn’t really want to hear the answer, but I knew that I needed to know.
“You haven’t really been doing anything,” Laci admitted.
“I’ve been forgetting things?” I guessed.
“Well, no,” she hedged, “not really.”
“What then?”
“You just . . . you just haven’t been yourself.”
“What do you mean?”
“I don’t know,” she said, giving me an evasive shrug. “You’re just acting different.”
“What am I doing that’s any different from what I usually do?”
“You’re just . . . your personality is different,” she finally said, reluctantly. “I don’t really know how to explain it.”
“My personality is different,” I repeated slowly.
“Yes,” she nodded. “And I�
�ve been reading about how one of the symptoms can be a change in personality.”
“My personality isn’t any different!” I cried.
“Yes it is!” she argued. “I don’t know if it’s the Alzheimer’s or if it’s one of the side effects from that medicine or whatever, but you’re definitely acting different.”
“Like how?”
“Like . . .” She hesitated before telling me. “Like you’re not as upset about things as you normally would be.”
“Upset about what things?”
“About everything that’s been happening,” she said. “About being diagnosed and everything.”
I looked at her. “Huh?”
“Normally,” she explained patiently, “if you were to find out that you had Alzheimer’s disease, you’d be upset. You’d be acting more . . . more unhappy . . . more depressed.”
“I was upset!” I cried.
“Yeah,” she admitted, “at first. But now you’re not.”
“So because I’m handling things well I can’t drive?!” I exclaimed.
“I’m just saying that obviously something weird is going on,” she said. “You’re not yourself!”
I looked at her in disbelief, hardly able to believe what I was hearing. It was all I could do to keep from laughing out loud at her.
“Would you like for me to be grumpy?” I asked her seriously. “I can get grumpy real fast.”
She looked at me, quizzically.
“Laci,” I said, smiling at her and pulling her toward me. “Come here.”
I sat back on the couch and put my arm around her, kissing her on the forehead.
“This is me,” I told her. “This is totally me.”
She looked at me uncertainly.
“Really,” I promised. “Look. I’m sorry if I have been so unpleasant to live with for the past thirty-three years that–”
“I never said you were unpleasant to live with!” she interrupted.
“Just unhappy and depressed?”
“I never said that!”
“Yes, you did,” I argued. “You said that I was unhappy and depressed.”
“Well . . . just when something’s wrong.”
“And how am I the rest of the time?” I asked. “Jovial?”
She couldn’t help but smile.
“So anyway,” I went on, giving her a smile back, “I’m sorry that I’ve been such a terrible person to live to live with for the past thirty-three years, but just because I’m not unhappy and depressed doesn’t mean that I’m symptomatic.”
I could tell that she still wasn’t convinced.
“Look, Laci,” I said, shifting on the couch and so that I could look at her directly. “I made a decision . . . a conscious decision that I was going to accept this and have a positive attitude about it.”
“Really?” she asked quietly.
I nodded and she looked at me suspiciously.
“But that’s not really like you,” she noted.
“No,” I admitted. “You’re right. It’s not.”
“So why the change?”
Laci looked at me expectantly, but I was hesitant to go on. I couldn’t tell her that the reason for my attitude change was due to a sudden revelation that things were going to be a lot easier on her if she didn’t have to put up with my griping and complaining. If I did, she wasn’t going to believe that the change she’d seen in me was genuine . . . that it was real.
But it was.
My cheerful demeanor may have started out as a simple attempt to make things easier for Laci, but it hadn’t taken long for my attitude to actually change. I’d heard the old saying before for my entire life: Happiness is a choice, but I had never believed it before now (or at least I had never tried it). Now I knew that it was true, however. No matter what’s going on in your life, you can choose to be happy.
But how was I going to explain this to Laci?
“Every time God does something in my life that’s not what I want,” I began carefully, “I always fight Him on it . . . right?”
She nodded.
“But eventually I figure out that He knew what He was doing and I can see how He was in control and everything and then finally, I come around, you know?”
She nodded again.
“But it usually takes me a really long time to get to that point,” I said. “Right?”
“Right.”
I looked at her for a moment.
“Well,” I finally said, quietly, “I don’t have a really long time anymore.”
She looked back at me and didn’t say anything. Her eyes started shining with tears.
I pulled her closer and went on.
“I just want to go ahead and jump right to that place where I realize how much God loves me and where I know that everything that’s happening is going to work to good. Do you know what I mean?”
She gave me a tiny nod.
“I want to be happy,” I said, squeezing her. “I want for us to be happy.”
She gave me a small smile.
“What do you say, Laci?” I asked, smiling back. “Do you want to be happy with me?”
She gave me a bigger nod and a bigger smile and then she wrapped her arms around me and buried her face against me.
And after that, I got to drive.
~ ~ ~
ON VALENTINE’S DAY I made pancakes for Laci (which was rather disastrous, but I think she appreciated it nonetheless) and I served them to her in bed. She bravely attempted to eat several bites and then I promised her she could have some cereal after she opened her presents.
“I got you something too,” she said, anxiously leaning over to set the tray on the floor and resurfacing with a package.
I took it from her and unwrapped it. It was a journal with a picture of an elephant on the front and a pen attached to a leather tab.
“What’s this?” I asked.
“Remember that old movie we saw . . . The Notebook?”
“No.”
“With James Garner?”
“No.”
“Where his wife had Alzheimer’s?”
“Was it a chick flick?” I asked her.
“Not really.”
“Because if it was a chick flick, I can pretty much guarantee you I won’t remember it.”
“Maybe it was,” she admitted.
“So what about it?”
“Okay,” she said with growing excitement. “Well, it’s this really great movie . . . as a matter of fact, we should watch it again–”
“I only have three to twenty years left, Laci. I’m not going to spend any of it watching a chick flick.”
“You could read the book . . .”
“Do you wanna get to the point here?” I asked her, whirling my finger in a “speed it up” fashion. “My brain’s not getting any younger.”
“Okay, well, anyway, she has Alzheimer’s, but before she gets bad she writes down all this stuff she doesn’t want to forget and then,” Laci said, “after she gets bad her husband reads it to her all the time to remind her of all the things she wanted to remember.”
“What kind of stuff?”
“Well,” Laci said. “She wrote down all about her husband and how they fell in love and everything.”
She looked at me expectantly.
“So I thought maybe you’d wanna do that,” she went on, tapping the cover. “See? It has an elephant on the front. You know – ‘an elephant never forgets’?”
“You want me to write down how we fell in love?” I asked her skeptically.
“No, it doesn’t have to be that,” she said hastily, “it can be anything. You can write down whatever you want – anything that you don’t want to forget.”
“Uh-huh,” I said slowly.
She looked disappointed.
“But, I mean, don’t feel like you have to use it or anything,” she went on. “It was just a thought. It’s okay if you don’t like it.”
“No, no,” I said. “I think it’s a great idea.”
“Really?” she asked, brightening up.
“Oh, yeah. As a matter of fact, I think I’m gonna write something in it right now.”
“Really?” she said again. She looked quite happy now.
“Uh-huh,” I nodded, pulling the pen out. I tilted the journal so she couldn’t see what I was doing.
“There,” I said, closing it when I was done.
“Can I see what you wrote?” she asked.
“No!” I said. “It’s private!”
“But . . . if I’m going to read it to you one day, I’m gonna have to see it anyway.”
“Well, okay,” I finally conceded. “I guess you can hear it now.”
She nestled closer to me and I started reading what I’d written.
Dear Dave-
The first thing you need to know is that you have a beautiful wife. Her name is Laci.
Laci looked at me and smiled. I smiled back. Then I kept reading.
Ever since you were a little boy, she has been trying to drive you crazy. Well guess what? She's finally succeeded!
Laci swatted at me and I laughed.
“You want yours now?” I asked, reaching into the nightstand on my side of the bed and pulling out an envelope.
“No,” she said, crossing her arms at me. “You’re not my Valentine anymore.”
“I-bet-you-know-what’s-in-here . . .” I sang, tipping the envelope back and forth.
Laci – who neither wanted nor needed anything – was a particularly difficult person to buy presents for. Once I’d finally struck upon something that she really liked (buying items through a Christian organization – in her name – to give to impoverished third-world families) I’d stuck with it. Last year I’d bought a cow or something and she’d really seemed to like that, so I’d gone with livestock again this year.
“Fine,” she said, not able to resist finding out what I’d bought and snatching the envelope out of my hand. She ripped the envelope open and pulled out a sheet of paper.
“Oh!” she said happily. “A sheep!”
“Not just one sheep,” I informed her. “Six sheep. That’s practically a whole flock. A whole flock of sheep that are walking around with the name ‘Laci’ shaved into their sides.”
