The Lavender Hour (6 page)

Ashley was right, though, about me. I never spent a lot of time thinking about the particulars of my dream match. When girlfriends asked what my type was, I'd laugh and say male. But recently—running on the beach or in the evening while working
on a bracelet—I would find myself daydreaming about a man I could truly imagine at my side. He stood tall and had raven black hair. He drove a truck.

At night, too, I continued to dream about Luke. In one, we were in a boat that carved a wide wake in the sea behind us. We were laughing. It was ridiculous, of course, like mooning over a movie star. And just as far-fetched. I still hadn't met him in person. I was swooning over a photograph. I chalked it up to an excess of hormones and the mystery of the as yet invisible Luke. I reconsidered Faye's suggestion that I get a vibrator.

O
N MY
way to Nona's, I detoured for my daily run to Dunkin' Donuts. Inside, I filled my Thermos with French roast and on impulse ordered some cranberry muffins—the hydrogenated-shortening, heart-attack-in-a-box kind that the Food Police are always ranting about. Right after my operation, I had been vigilant about what I put into my body. I had cut back on meat and alcohol, eliminated artificial sweeteners. As time went on, I had become less disciplined and slipped back into my old, bad habits. Still, thinking about the fat, I almost put the carton back on the shelf, but then I remembered something else from Bernie Seigel's lecture back in the autumn, a story about a woman who was furious when she learned that she had cancer. “I don't smoke,” she told him, as if bringing up a bargain she had struck. “I stopped eating ice cream years ago.” As I remembered it, Seigel's point was that there was no surefire prophylactic against illness and death and that it was better to eat an occasional ice cream cone that brings joy than give it up and be angry. Good point, I thought. Maybe that was one of the tricks I was learning in starting a new life. Enjoy small pleasures.

A bucket next to the register was filled with daffodils, six stems to a bunch. On a whim, triggered no doubt by my earlier conversation with Ashley and my sister's picture of spring in Richmond, I bought two bunches.

When I arrived at the Ryders', Jim, the hospice health aide, was already there, earlier than usual. People think the volunteers are angels, Faye told us during our training, but it's the health aides who are the real saints. The rest of us get the credit, but they're the ones who do the heavy lifting. The messy stuff of daily life. This whole program wouldn't work without them.

I parked by the curb so that, when Jim left, he'd be able to back his green Jeep out of the drive. Nona met me at the door. Her face was splotchy, her eyes swollen and red-rimmed, and the sight unnerved me, for, like Faye, Nona was old Cape Cod stock, stoic and sensible, emotions held in check. Immediately, I feared the worst and my heart rate quickened, but then I heard the sound of conversation from the other room. Jim was saying something, although I couldn't make out the words. There was a pause and then deep laughter. I took a breath. Not a crisis then. Nona was simply worn out. I tried to imagine what it must be like to have your only child be dying, but it was too painful to contemplate.

“We could sure use some sun,” I said.

“Welcome to April on Cape Cod,” Nona said.

I often felt like I was saying the wrong thing, talking about the weather while, in the next room, her son was dying. In training, we'd been told that ordinary conversations gave families a break from the constant sorrow and brought normalcy to their days. I knew—from experience—that this was possible, and yet it still felt odd to converse about things like the weather. There was another burst of laughter from Luke's room. We both turned and looked at the closed door.

“Jim's good for Luke,” Nona said.

“I know,” I said. I felt a stab of envy, and then felt small and mean-spirited.

In the kitchen, Nona spent a few minutes combing the cupboards for a vase to put the daffodils in, all the time muttering about how Marcia had made off with everything that wasn't nailed
down. According to Nona, the divorce was a nightmare, and Luke nearly lost the house over it. I thought that, in some way, she blamed Marcia for Luke getting cancer. Earlier she had confided that Paige still held her mother responsible for the divorce. Finally Nona unearthed a water glass large enough for the job. Watching, I noticed, not for the first time, how deformed by arthritis her fingers were. I thought of all the work caring for Luke entailed, even with hospice help. Again, as I had been the first time I saw her, I was swept by a desire to fold her in my arms and comfort her. I held back.

“This was sweet of you,”Nona said, as she put the flowers in the tumbler.

“It isn't anything,” I said.

“I never see a daffodil but that I don't think of my mother,” she said.

“Did she like them?”

“You should have seen our yard in the spring. It was a carpet of yellow. Just a carpet. One year, there was even a picture in the Cape Cod Times. There must have been a thousand bulbs in that yard, and she planted every one herself.” She set the flowers on the table and crossed to where I was standing and gave me a quick hug. This was the first time we had embraced in the three weeks I had been coming to the house. Then she pulled away and sat at the table. “We had a fight,” she said.

Her words were so totally unexpected that I wasn't sure I'd heard her correctly. “What?”

“We had a fight. Last night.”

“Who?”

“Luke. And me.”

“Oh,” I said. Words flashed through my brain, the precise phrases of glib sympathy we had been trained to withhold. Don't worry. Everything will be fine. It wouldn't be fine. Everyone knew that.

“It was so stupid,” she said.

“Arguments sometimes are.” I thought about Ashley and the foolish things we clashed over.

“It was my fault.”

“Do you want to tell me what happened?” A safe question. Neutral.

“It was stupid,” Nona said again, shaking her head. She looked fragile and every minute of her seventy years. “It was about the damn inspection sticker.”

“Inspection sticker?”

“For his truck.”

I waited.

“It expired last month.” She took a little breath.

“And…,”I said. We had both lowered our voices.

“Well, he's been all upset about it. There isn't a day goes by but that he doesn't harp on it, saying I need to get it taken care of.” She pulled a tissue out of her pocket and wiped her nose. “Leave it to me to say the dumbest thing. I told him there was no point in spending thirty dollars for a sticker when the truck was just sitting in the driveway not going anywhere.” She looked over at me. “I probably shouldn't have said that. But I kept thinking of the cost. Thirty dollars. I know it might not sound like a lot, but money is just melting away here.”

I reached out, touched her shoulder, nodded.

“Well, Luke just started yelling at me. He said why didn't I go the hell back to Wellfleet. He said he didn't need me just hanging around waiting for him to die. He told me to forget about the goddamned sticker, he'd get someone else to take care of it.” Nona twisted the tissue in her fingers. “There I was worrying about thirty dollars. What does it matter?”

She looked beaten, exhausted, heartbroken. The last weeks would have been hard for anyone, but at Nona's age, the unrelenting burden had to be harrowing. I knew from our training that the stress of constant care often led to illness or early death of the caregiver.
At that minute, I wanted to go straight into Luke's room and tell him that he had no excuse to be cruel to his mother, that she was doing the best she could. All the wrong things, of course. For the first time, it occurred to me that it made sense that most of the volunteers were retired. They had more experience in life and knew how to handle tricky situations. I struggled to think of the exact right thing to say, but before I could come up with anything that seemed right, I heard the door to Luke's room open and then close. Jim came into the kitchen, his arms full of soiled sheets. I watched the effort it took for Nona to pull herself together.

“Hey, Jessie,” Jim said.

“Hi, Jim.” He was short and solid. James Cagney with a pony-tail.

“Nice shoes,” he said, nodding at my paint-stained and worn-out Nikes.

“Yours, too.” His Doc Martens had to have been born sometime back in the eighties.

He crossed to the basement door and dropped the sheets on the floor. “So, Nona,”he said, “did you hear about the Buddhist who refused Novocain during his root canal?”

Nona shook her head.

“He wanted to transcend dental medication.”

“That's terrible,” she said, but for the first time since I arrived, she was smiling.

“Ya like that, huh?” He crossed and stood behind her, placed his hands on her shoulders, and began to massage her neck. She sighed softly.

“Did you hear about the skunk that went to church?” he said. “He had his own pew.”

Nona and I rolled our eyes, groaned.

“Bad,” Nona said.

“Pitiful,” I added.

“What are you talking about? That's my best stuff.” He kneaded Nona's shoulders. “You ladies are killing me here.”

I looked at Nona and froze. Whenever I let a word like that slip into the conversation with her—death, kill, dying—it seemed to hang in the air sparking neon until I could cover it with a spew of words. Jim let them out as if they carried no more weight than any other ordinary, run-of-the-mill words. Faye had the same natural way about her. I doubted I would ever attain that kind of ease.

Jim's pager beeped. He checked the number.

“Okay,”he said. “You two can beg me all you want, but I've only got time for one more, then I've got to run.”

Nona and I looked at each other, shook our heads.

“This guy and girl had sex,” Jim started, glanced over at me. “I don't know if you're old enough for this one, Jess.”

I grinned. “Chance it.”

He grinned back. “If you insist. So he said, 'If I'd known you were a virgin, I'd have taken more time,' and she says, 'If I'd known you had more time, I would have taken off my panty hose.'”

While we were laughing, he leaned over and kissed Nona on the cheek. “See you tomorrow, sweetheart. You've got my number if you need anything before then.”

“Honestly,” Nona said, after he left, “if he was seven inches taller and twenty years older, I'd make a play for him.”

“He's gay, Nona,” I said, although—sexual preferences aside— Jim had started to look pretty good to me, too.

She looked surprised. “Do you really think so?”

Before we could get into the specifics of Jim's sexual orientation, a car pulled into the drive.

“There's Helen,” she said, and sighed. “I know she means well, but sometimes I don't feel like getting out.” She sighed again and ran a hand over her hair. “I must look a mess.”

“You look fine,” I said. She did look a little better. Jim medicine.

She fished a tube of lipstick out of her handbag and smeared some on. It was a vivid magenta, as much a mistake as the coal-dyed hair. “How cold is it out?” she said.

“It's raw.”

She chose a jacket from the coat pegs by the back entry. I got up and picked up the sheets Jim had left by the basement door.

“Oh, leave those. I'll do them when I get back.”

“It's no bother.”

“Please,” she said, “just leave them.” It was as difficult for her to accept assistance as it was for Luke. I had told her that volunteers were to help in any way. Clean. Do laundry. Run errands. Write letters. Nona always refused. She said I was doing enough just coming by and giving her a break for an hour. Pigheaded pride, Lily would call it. A Cape Cod native's stubbornness, said Faye, who saw it reflected in herself.

“Plant a potato, get a potato,” I said.

“What?”

“Just noticing that Luke came by his obstinacy naturally.”

“Don't you be getting fresh with me,” Nona said, but she was smiling. That smile made me feel as if maybe, for the first time, I was doing something worthwhile.

A
FTER SHE
left, I had the customary moment of anxiety at being alone with Luke, but with each visit, it was becoming easier to control. I washed out my cup, wiped down the Formica, listened for sounds from his room. I wondered what joke Jim had told him that caused that deep and surprising laugh. Personally, I thought men's laughter was just about the sexiest thing. God, talk about grim to no prospects. Now I was getting turned on by a short, gay nurse and a dying man. The fact was, I was so horny even widowers with halitosis were starting to look good. Like I said, I'd been giving serious thought to Faye's suggestion about a vibrator.

At the window feeder, a pair of blue jays were feasting. Below, a chipmunk was munching on sunflower seeds that had spilled on the ground. On impulse, I opened the box of muffins, crumbled one. I unlatched the window and tossed the crumbs to the chipmunk, spread a few more in the feeder. Completely wasteful of good food, but it cheered me up and in an odd way gave me hope. I left
the rest of the muffins for Nona. Until that morning, when she told me about not wanting to spend thirty dollars for an inspection sticker—what had she said? money was just melting away—I supposed I hadn't fully appreciated the toll Luke's illness was exacting on this family.

Ignoring Nona's instructions, I picked up the sheets Jim had thrown in the corner and took them down to the laundry. I swallowed against the smell of sour sweat and stuffed them in the washer, then measured out detergent, set the water temperature to hot. When the cycle clicked in, I checked out the basement. It was cluttered with fishing gear, paint cans, lawn furniture. A white enameled picnic table and some plastic yard chairs were piled by the steps leading to the bulkhead. There was a coffee can on the floor by the water heater, placed to catch the drips of a slow leak. One corner of the basement had been converted into a gym with a set of free weights and workout bench. I pictured a dark-haired man in cutoffs doing reps, building up biceps, carving out a six-pack. I crossed to the bench. The weight bar was cool beneath my fingers. I lost track of time, standing there and staring at the bench, and then became aware of the creaking of floor joists overhead. Luke's dog, I thought. I had encountered the Lab once or twice when Nona brought him to the kitchen to let him out before she left, though mostly he stayed with Luke or just outside Luke's door. I switched off the light and headed up the stairs, heard a woman's voice from some daytime talk show. I was halfway across the kitchen before I realized it wasn't a TV program but a real voice coming from Luke's room.