Mr. Wonderful

by Daniel Smith

  “So this is what you’re taking away from the house? Uncle Jeff got the moose head and some pictures and you’re taking these, Grandpa’s old papers?”

  “That’s right.”

  “Are they worth something?”

  “They’re priceless.”

  There’s a knock at the door and in walks Claire. She wants me and Dad to do a milk and coffee run downtown. Both of us offer to go alone but Claire suggests we both make the trip together—that way Dad can show me around downtown Juniper. Didn’t have the heart to tell her I’ve seen downtown and I hope they’ve applied for nuclear war disaster relief.

  So me and Dad head out for the cobblestones. Along the way he takes me to some of his favorite little haunts: the house where he and his first wife spent their early years. Like everything else in town, it’s pretty rundown but he tells me some stories about picking her up on one of their very first dates: “I had to step over her father’s body to get to the door: he was lying there on the porch three sheets to the wind,” he says.

  “Wow. Classy. Good for you she wasn’t like her old man.”

  “No, she wasn’t. She had other issues, but alcohol wasn’t one of them.”

  After we pick up the groceries, he takes me way out of town, past the grass airport where Grandpa used to keep his little plane. We drive down a dirt road for a mile or so, nothing but pasture land all the way to the horizon, until we get to this old, abandoned frame house at the top of a hill. We get out and walk around a little. In the distance I can see a herd of cattle grazing. The wind whips up pretty good here at the top of the hill, making this bleak little farm house feel even more isolated. “That’s where we first lived when we moved to Juniper back in the late 50s,” he says.

  “Could be a good place for a horror movie now. Killer Cows.”

  “Dad had just finished his internship in Dallas, so we didn’t have the money for anything better than this.” He points to a dirt road stretching far off into the west. “He used to get us up every morning and make us jog that road down and back with him. It felt like boot camp. I was so relieved when we moved into town.”

  We get back in the car and head back toward town. “Was it tough growing up with Grandpa?”

  “You had to play by his rules. And his rules did not bend. But he had a good heart. He just didn’t show it very much.”

  “Where is Grandpa?”

  “What do you mean? He’s at the funeral home.”

  “I want to go see him.”

  “Now? You’ll see him at the service.”

  “Just take me to see him, Pops, okay?”

  He gives me a weird look, but drives us up to the Foster Funeral Home, one of the few buildings in Juniper that looks to be in good condition, freshly painted, and eager to show off its prosperity. I guess there’s always money in the death biz; hell, everybody’s a potential customer. We go inside and this guy Tim, who looks like he’d con your mother out of her life savings if you gave him half the chance, talks with Dad privately a second. Tim keeps looking out of the corner of his eyes at me like I might be a criminal or something. Finally, Dad turns and points me toward the room where they’re getting Grandpa ready. I walk over, shake hands with Tim the Undertaker, and we all go into one of the embalming rooms.

  There’s not a speck of dirt in this crazy, clean room. At the center is a fancy casket with the lid open to the top half of the body. “Your dad says you’d like to pay your respects now,” Tim says.

  “That’s right.”

  “Well, normally we wouldn’t allow that so early, but getting Dr. Fenton ready wasn’t all that difficult, so he’s basically done and we’ve already got him in his casket there. So, if you make it brief, you can go on over.” I look over at Dad to join me, but he shakes his head and stays over by the door.

  I walk over to the casket real slow, not so sure anymore I want to be here. I’ve never seen anyone dead and now I’m thinking maybe this isn’t the right time. But, hell, here I am, and I didn’t get to visit Grandpa before he died. So why not now? I get to the casket and look down. I stand there looking at him lying in the casket, decked out in his best suit, his hands carefully folded, eyes closed—like he’s maybe taking a nap. And then, I don’t know what’s happening, but suddenly I just fucking lose it: at first a few tears, then I’m bawling like a baby, and I reach over and touch his face, his hands. Part of me thinks I should get in there and lie down with him. I even start to crawl on to the top of the casket for a second.

  “Son, what are you doing?” Tim says rushing over to me. I get back down, wipe my eyes.

  “I don’t know. I just wanted to be there with him a second,” I tell him. Dad comes over, a worried look on his face.

  “Let’s go, Danny.”

  “OK.” I follow Dad out of the room, and then straight out of the funeral home. We just get in the car and sit there a second.

  “Anything you want to talk about?” Dad asks. I shake my head no. “You okay?”

  “That was deep, Pops.”

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  At first, Danny and I drive in silence back from the funeral home. I have no idea what overcame him back there. I’d like to think he had a realization about his grandfather or death or both. Maybe Danny has undiscovered depths. Had Dad known what was happening, I’m afraid, he would have freaked out. Finally, I have to break the uncomfortable silence.

  “Seeing my dad like that must have really hit you hard, huh?”

  “Yeah. It’s so unreal to see somebody you know to be lying there in a casket, and people just come by and look at you.”

  “I think the idea is that by viewing the body we get closure on our loss.”

  “That’s not closure; that’s weird. Pure and simple. Life is a journey to me, Pops, an open-ended one, so to see it come to an end like that—stuck ass in some fancy steel casket that people come by and gawk at—just completely freaks me out. I don’t get it. I’m not ready for it.”

  “So you were mainly upset about how this is the wrong way for your story to end.”

  “And for Grandpa. Life’s too personal to end like that.”

  “So no viewing service for you at your funeral?”

  “No fucking way. Stick me in the ground, turn me into ashes, whatever, but not this crazy spectacle.”

  “You okay?” I ask as we pull into the garage back home.

  “Yeah.”

  When we get inside, Corinne greets me with a big hug. “Thank God, you’re here, honey,” I tell her. “I’ve been missing you.”

  “Same here, Bri. You holding up okay?”

  “Pretty much.”

  “Things been happening fast?”

  “I’ll say. Did you get to visit with Claire?”

  “I did. She’s a rock—as usual.”

  “Don’t know how she does it.”

  “She’s been through a lot and dealing with your dad all these years, especially the last few, must have prepared her for this, you know?”

  “I guess.” I notice that Danny and Dawn have wandered off back to their bedroom.

  “Listen, before I forget. Pat Jensen at EMSU tried to reach you. Guess he didn’t know your cell or whatever so he called the house.”

  “What the hell was he calling about?”

  “Well, he heard about your dad and that you flew down here to help out with everything, and he was wondering whether you’ve got your classes covered for early next week.”

  “Of course I do. I texted Gillian and it’s all good. Why, what’d he say?”

  “He’s an ass, Brian. You know that.”

  “What’d he say, Corinne?”

  “I don’t know. Something stupid about ‘we can’t have faculty just wandering off.’”

  “What a total loser. That son of a bitch really wants me gone, doesn’t he?”

  “Just forget him, okay?”

  When we’re getting ready for bed, I show Corinne some of the letters Dad wrote to my mother back during World War II when he was in the Na
vy’s pre-flight training program in Iowa. Mom was finishing up her chemistry degree at the University of Oklahoma. She reads through a couple of them, obviously intrigued. “‘Dear Louise, I know we’re supposed to always keep focused on the task,’” Corinne reads aloud from one of them: “‘I’m in charge of mapping terrain from the air. But sometimes my mind wanders to a certain brown-haired young lady who always brings a smile to my face.’ And this one: ‘All that time in the lab, do you ever look up from your beakers and microscope and wonder what kind of chemistry we might have?’ How sweet.”

  “Amazing, isn’t it? And there’s so much more.” Excited, I scramble over to the little desk—it looks like one from our childhood—that’s still in the room and pick up a couple of dusty, old notebooks. “This is his journal from Sisoguichi, Mexico, when he was working with the Tarahumara Indians back in the 60s. The stuff he saw, the things he did down there.” I flip to a page I had earmarked. “Here: ‘I pulled 23 teeth today. These Tarahumarans have never been to a dentist, so it’s first things first. And then one old man who runs everywhere barefoot—they all run without shoes down there—came to see me. He had a malignant tumor on his neck the size of a peach. He said his wife was really upset about it, crying and angry he hadn’t done anything about it. ‘She made me come here today,’ he told me. So I removed it. For payment, he offered me three chickens—which was quite generous. I told him, ‘I’m doing all this for free. Just go home and kiss your wife and tell her you’re not going to die anytime soon.’ The next day his wife comes to see me and she’s brought me this big chocolate cake she’d made. It didn’t look like much—I think she may have dropped it or something—but I said I would only take it if she’d sit down and eat a piece with me. I don’t think she understood a word of what I said, but she sat there at the little table we had and ate some cake with me with a big smile on her face. It was the best part of my day.’”

  “Wow. That’s wonderful.”

  “What am I supposed to make of this, Corinne? It’s like I’ve uncovered a whole other dimension to a man who I thought I knew.”

  “I bet you wish you could talk to him now, ask him all about this other life he had. Does it hurt that you can’t?”

  “A little. It’s like I was cheated out of knowing my father in full.” Corinne’s face suddenly grows dark and sad. “You look upset. Does this bother you?”

  “No. But, well, I don’t know, it’s just that this whole thing with your dad being older than Claire and going so much sooner with all the dementia and so forth. It gets me thinking about, you know, us.”

  “I’m not going out like this, Corinne.”

  “You can’t know that, Bri. It can happen to anyone. And you’re like 11 years older than me. In all likelihood, I’ll be left alone for the last part of my life.”

  “Unless you find somebody else.”

  “I’m not going to be out chasing men in my 70s and 80s.”

  “No, they’ll be chasing you.”

  “Stop it. I’m talking about something real here. What if you go out like your dad, and then like Claire I spend the last year of it wiping your butt, reminding you of who I am, and wondering if you know who and where you are in the world? And then I’m all alone.”

  I pick her up and give her a long kiss. “I will do everything in my power to live long and healthy. I can’t imagine not knowing who you are because I can’t live without you.”

  We end up having some of the best sex in years.

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  For breakfast, several of us get up in time to help Claire prepare yet another of her magnificent meals. While she creates a delicious spinach and goat cheese omelet, Dawn puts her restaurant skills to work making a tasty breakfast casserole. Meanwhile, Corinne and I make sure everyone is well caffeinated with plenty of hot tea and coffee. Everyone else arrives just in time to eat: Jeff and Rhonda drive over again from Dallas, and Claire’s sister Francine and Danny don’t get up in time to help. Francine’s nearly 80, so I understand her need for sleep; Danny, well, he’s never made early rising at priority, or even a reality. I notice that Dawn and Corinne get along awfully well—some kind of unexpected bonding has happened between them. Maybe Corinne finds Dawn’s disarming frankness and out-there personality somehow a refreshing tonic for her own buttoned-up legal world. Dawn is certainly solicitous to me—asking about the classes I teach, do I like the students, how I’m going to resolve things at EMSU. I can’t tell if this is genuine interest or part of a general suck-up to our family, one that she may envision joining.

  Claire sits across from Jeff and me at breakfast. She’s clearly beginning to make financial and practical decisions for herself and the rest of us. When Jeff says he and Rhonda are thinking about going to spend a week at Dad and Claire’s lake house near San Antonio, Claire surprises us all by announcing that she’s putting the lake house up for sale. Apparently this is something she and Dad had been planning for some time. Over the years, we’ve all spent dozens of weekends down there—a small, but beautiful three bedroom ranch home on the lake, surrounded by all the golf, tennis and boating you can imagine. The realtor, Claire says, believes the house will sell for close to $500,000. And then comes the even bigger surprise: “Robert wanted you two boys to get the proceeds from the sale. So that should come to about $250,000 for each of you.”

  Stunned, both Jeff and I just look at her a moment. “Wow. That is so generous, Claire,” I point out.

  “That’s great, but why not just leave it in the family for a while instead of selling it right now?” Jeff asks. Always leave it to Jeff to find his wonderfully prepared porridge still missing something.

  “For the last couple of years, we stopped going down there due to Robert’s issues,” Claire observes, “and with Brian and Corinne living up in St. Louis, they haven’t been able to get down there much either. It’s not good to have an empty home just sitting there.”

  “I think you made the right decision, Claire,” I say, throwing Jeff a warning glance. “Will you be staying here in this house?”

  “For the time being. A lot of memories here, as you can imagine. But I’m keeping my options open. Might go live with Sis, right?”

  “Wish you would,” Francine says with a smile.

  “We’ll see.”

  Later in the morning, Corinne and I take a long walk around town, in part to get away from so many people and clear my head before the grave side service this afternoon. We walk over to the modest frame house we lived in when we first moved into town—that is, before Dad built the big brick home next to the clinic. The house, like most in Juniper, is now a shambles, but since no one’s there we walk a step or two into the backyard where I spent many of my waking hours playing catch with Dad or Jeff or neighborhood friends. As we stand there, a singular moment comes rushing into focus: the day Dad decided that his youngest son, Jeff, desperately needed, as we’d say today, to man up. So he ordered us both to put on our boxing gloves and took us out into the backyard. There I, the bigger and stronger older brother, was instructed to “pound him good, make him put up a fight.” So for the next few minutes—but which felt like an eternity—I chased Jeff all over the backyard hitting him in the head, stomach, anywhere, with Dad following with a 8mm camera and egging us on: “Come on, boys, FIGHT! Jeff, quit running. Stand up and punch him back!” Jeff was whimpering and, if Dad had looked closely at me he’d have noticed that I was on the verge of tears myself at having to box my little brother into submission. When I tell Corinne about the ordeal, she shakes her head: “I don’t know what’s worse—that he made you fight your little brother or that he filmed it?! It’s like he had his own family Fight Club.” It wasn’t that bad. Or at least from the distance of more than 45 years it doesn’t seem so unfeeling. He didn’t want me to actually harm Jeff; I think he just wanted Jeff and me to know that hurting (and fighting back from it) is part of living.

  We walk over to the old Nor-Tex cottonseed oil mill. Fifty years ago this was still a booming busin
ess, a prime place in northeast Texas for cotton growers to take their cotton. I remember senior class trips out to the oil mill for “career days”: a couple of dozen bored high school students wandered around what seemed like an enormous mill operation—a half dozen red and silver aluminum warehouses linked together with huge refinery pipes. The mill stunk to high heaven—the processing of cottonseed oil is not a pleasant thing to behold—and I remember us holding our noses and asking the mill workers how they dealt with the smell. “You get used to it,” they all said with a smile. Meanwhile the manager regaled us with work opportunities there. The clear message was “we don’t expect you kids to go to college and become anything special. Working here would be just fine.” Now it’s a rusty ghost-like relic of a one-time booming cotton ginning business. Danny says when he drove into town and saw it, he thought it would make an excellent location for a horror movie.

  As we walk back toward the house, I can tell Corinne is thinking about something. She gets that faraway look in her eyes and scrunches up her forehead as if she’s pondering something difficult or painful. It turns out she overheard Claire’s conversation with us at breakfast about selling the lake house. And she’s as shocked about it as I am. “What will you do with the money, Bri?” she wonders.

  “Have no idea. Still processing the whole thing, to tell the truth.”

  “It sure makes your decision about the, you know, buy-out, a little easier.”

  “Yeah, maybe.”

  “Jeff seemed sort of pissed that she’s selling it.”

  “Yeah, well, he can afford to ignore the money. Plus he loves the free vacation down at the lake.”

  “Hope you guys don’t start fighting over it. Of course, we can sure use the money.”

  “I thought we were going to get rich on your murder case.”

  “Are you kidding? Elise barely has enough money to cover basic legal expenses.”

  “Yes, but think of the fame that will come your way.”

  “You’re a funny man, Brian Fenton.”