Jolene savored Broker’s brief phone message as she ate a quick Healthy Choice microwave dinner. Earl had been moved on down the line. A broken arm. She’d skip the flowers.
Monday, Hank would go to the nursing home, and the vigils, hanging on his every breath, would finally end. Which left the question of Hank’s extended care.
She remembered Allen’s unsaid promise. If it comes to that, I can help.
God, she couldn’t bring herself to think about it directly-but she so wanted to be free of them all.
So she paced in the kitchen and fantasized that her hair was long again and that she was reclining in a salon with other women waiting on her, doing her hair and her fingernails and her toes.
Things were moving ahead, so why was she so edgy? Why did she have this gummy metal taste stuck to the roof of her mouth? Her thoughts felt flimsy, like puzzle pieces jumbled in her skull.
Nervously, she analyzed the sensations and concluded that all the tension and sleeplessness had made her thirsty. She wanted a drink. The dry colors in her head would swell up, go fluid, and run together. Smooth and easy.
So she kept busy. Another trick she’d learned from Hank. She checked all the baby monitors in the house to make sure they were working. Then, in a frantic lurch of mood, she craved a cigarette.
For half an hour she rummaged through the house-drawers, cupboards, the pockets of Hank’s clothes still hanging in the closets. Nothing. Not even one of Hank’s stale Camels. Back in the kitchen, she paced and got weaker. Get in the Accord, drive to the Cenex store up on 95. It would take about seven minutes. She’d have a pack of cigarettes. Twenty diversions.
A cigarette would be bad but it would blunt the deeper urge.
Or would it just lower her resistence so it would be easier to take that first drink? Dammit. She needed more willpower.
But you weren’t supposed to use willpower, you were supposed to work the program, which was basically learning to delay gratification through talking a lot to other people. You were supposed to displace. Because willpower was an idea that got you off alone in your head and. .
Whack! Jolene kicked the Kenmore refrigerator.
Bullshit.
It wasn’t drinking that had her shook up. Goddamit. Hank had turned the TV on and off.
He was in there watching them.
She stared at the circular stairway leading down to the lower level and Hank’s room. She had to go down there and feed him, change him, stay ahead of the bedsores.
He’d turned on the TV for her.
But not for Allen and Garf.
Really spooked now, she had this image of her nerves like pink toothpaste all squirted out of the tube. Like her life now, after Earl and Stovall. No way could she put it back the way it was.
Well, screw this. Hank would have to fly solo for fifteen minutes. She grabbed her car keys and headed for the garage. Ten minutes later, she was sitting in the parking area of a Cenex station inhaling a Marlboro Light.
Nicotine turned cartwheels in her clean blood. It helped.
But not much.
She drove back to the house, parked, walked out of the garage, and shivered in a gust of suddenly cold wind. On the porch, finishing her cigarette, she amazed herself. On one hand, she was losing her mind. On the other, she was turning into a suburban ditz who didn’t want her house to smell like cigarette smoke.
Her house. Stay with that.
She went in, brushed her teeth, swished with Scope. In the middle of this task she realized she really was alone in the house. No music in the basement. No Earl.
Now, with things getting tricky, she suddenly missed him.
No, she missed his function in her life.
But Jolene’s whole idea was not to depend on men anymore. Right?
So, you’re going to figure this out on your own.
Your house.
Your money.
Your life.
No men allowed.
All you have to do is hang on through the weekend. Milt will come to the rescue. This time next week you’ll be visiting Hank in a safe, secure nursing home.
It’s going to be all right.
He had receded far into himself and his vision turned black at the edges, tunneled, like looking the wrong way through two telescopes. The enthusiasms of simply tapping the TV controls on and off a few times had left him mentally drained, and now his fingers were like cold batteries, dead. It was a revelation. He’d had nothing to use to measure his strength before. Now he realized how little energy he had left.
And he saw it as a finite amount, nonrenewable.
And he saw something else. Something approaching with a calm, unhurried tread. A blur of color flickering into the edge of his vision. His heart and lungs were strong but his brain was flaming out.
Dying.
Everything he did from now on had to count.
Jolene steeled herself and entered Hank’s room, determined to be businesslike. Just do the work. She believed in holding up her end of the deal. The deal had been for better or for worse. She could handle two more days of worse.
First she cleaned excess saliva from his mouth with the suction wand. Then she changed his wet diaper. As she fed him through his tube and added water to the IV drip, she watched him carefully for signals. He seemed almost asleep, eyes barely open. Lazy, dreamy, tired.
Dutifully, she stripped off his gown, brought in a dishpan of hot water, and gave him a sponge bath. She checked the incision where his gastrostomy inserted for leakage or infection. Then she rubbed his wasting body down with baby oil, shaved him, and trimmed his hair. She clipped his fingernails and toenails, and swabbed his gums and teeth with a sponge dipped in mouthwash.
She talked to him as she put his diaper and clean gown back on, as she struggled turning him, to put on clean sheets half a bed at a time. Just practical little asides. “Now I’m going to roll you over. Now I’m pulling on your gown.”
Then she swept around the bed, taking great care to get all the hair and clippings. When she was finished, she removed all the cleaning materials. She took the old sheets and clothes downstairs to the laundry room and put them in the washer. She armored herself with reassuring smells of hot water, Spic ’n’ Span, and Tide.
Feeling stronger, she returned to the kitchen, poured another cup of coffee, and stood, studying the restaurant-style stove. It was a regular flame thrower-must have cost eight grand, but Hank had insisted on getting it. He’d spent another hundred grand remodeling this house. He’d bought the new Ford for himself and the Honda for her.
And didn’t renew his fucking health insurance.
That’s a drunk for you.
Jolene looked around at the new granite counters, the tile floor, the new cabinets, the river scene out the windows.
Hers someday. Hell, it was hers now. She shook her head. Nothing lasts, Hank used to say. But they’d barely had even the first part of nothing.
She put on her coat and took her coffee out on the deck and lit another cigarette and pictured a happy mob of nicotine assassins stabbing the air sacs in her lungs.
She inhaled, exhaled. Dropped her head on her chest.
She’d have to sign over a deed on the house to Milt, as security, until they got through probate court. She could live with that.
Then the wind came up so frigid it must have blown in from North Dakota. Jolene hugged herself and her heart quaked in her chest like a dry leaf. She snubbed out her cigarette and hurried through the patio door into Hank’s room to get warm. She sat on the edge of his bed.
“I never lied to you, Hank. I told you I’d make you happy for a while, which, you’ll recall, I did. I also told you I’d probably take you for every cent you had.”
Jolene held Hank’s wooden right hand in both of hers and said, “You laughed at me when I said that. But you know what, honey? I guess that’s exactly what I’m doing.”
He knew he should hoard his reserves of strength; the effort to move his finger was like shoveling steel. Fire discipline, he told himself, reaching back to his most primitive survival instincts.
But she was right there, her warm flesh on his, and he could smell her lily body wash and he couldn’t resist.
So he tickled her damp palm with the tip of his right index finger. A sly, unmistakable wiggle.
Electrocuted, Jolene did not actually scream this time; it was more like a long gasp as she jumped off the bed, ran from the studio, through her bedroom, and up the stairs into the kitchen. She leaned with both hands braced on the counter until she caught her breath. She stared at the phone. Allen? No, she’d called him before and Hank had stopped his tricks.
That meant something, maybe.
Besides, Allen was an overeducated nice guy and right now she needed a little more red meat.
She snatched a card down from the bulletin board-the one Phil Broker had given her-and reached for the phone.
Amy answered the phone next to the couch, thinking it might be the sheriff’s department again. She thrust the receiver at Broker. “For you, and she’s shook up.” Too ladylike to smirk, Amy curled her lip slightly.
Broker took the phone. “Hello?”
“Broker, something really weird is going on,” Jolene blurted.
“Calm down.”
“It’s Hank. He’s. . doing things.”
“Hank’s doing things?” Broker repeated and Amy caught his goose bumps.
“What things?” Amy asked, huddled at his shoulder, head-to-head, with her ear against the receiver.
Jolene said, “The night before last, Earl left the TV clicker in his hand, like a joke. And I heard the TV come on and I went in there and he turned it off and on twice.”
“Jesus,” Broker and Amy read off the same page, eyes locked.
“. . the thing is, I called Allen and he came over and I remembered the cat had been on Hank’s lap, and Allen thought it was the cat, you know. Except it wasn’t the damn cat because about three minutes ago I was holding his hand and he very deliberately tickled my palm.”
“Tickled?” Broker wondered.
“Goddammit, tickled. The way guys do. You know? Wanna fuck, like that? Tickled!”
“Let’s get over there fast,” Amy said, her face absolutely electric.
“You sure?” Broker said.
“What’s going on?” Jolene yelled.
“Hold tight, we’re on the way,” Broker said.