I can’t speak for other drunks, not for the reasons they took up drinking in the first place, not for why they’ve quit to spend their Tuesday evenings at A.A. meetings here in the cramped conference room of St. Joe’s Memorial. Lots of folks, I’ve learned, want to cure the deliberate and regrettable drunkenness of their lessers with a dictionary definition and a dugout pep talk, as if sucking it up and hitting the ground running would win sobriety in the next inning. What the lucky sober don’t realize is their surmises are more revealing of their own slippery holds on fortune than of any insights into the alcoholic state of mind. I can’t speak for other drunks. I can only speak for me. I drank to forget the things I cannot change.
“Bonita.” Lois is wrestling with the cheap coffee-maker we keep in the cabinet we share with two other A.A. groups and the Alanon people. “You reading The Twelve Steps tonight?”
“Sure.” I put down my cooler and edge my way around the table crowding the conference room to help her. Her hands are curled by arthritis. Lois uses her fingers like pincers. She’s breaking my heart. “May I help? The snap thing on the dripper is tricky.”
Most people would say thank you very much and move on, but Lois tends a bitterness you have to prime yourself not to take personally. She raises her hands, swatting Beelzebub, and backs from the coffee maker. “You do it then.”
Some gesture of respect is called for. I don’t know the incantations for pacifying a sour old recovering alcoholic. Lois probably wishes she were bellied up to the bar at the Well right about now, except a local arsonist, clearly not of the twelve-step persuasion, tried to burn down Bakerville’s oldest watering hole last month.
“Thank you,” I say. “I’ve got 7-Up in a cooler here, if anybody wants a cold drink.”
“Well BYOB, Bonita,” Lois snaps. “Aren’t we getting fancy.”
* * *
Before my season at New Dawn Recovery Center and before my matriculation to A.A.’s far less expensive outpatient services, I’d always imagined A.A. meetings set in theatres where a cast of penitent comics contrasted the before and after of alcoholism with witty, irresistible compassion. Here in Bakerville, here in our gratifying, dingy corner of St. Joe’s Memorial — the meeting room doesn’t have a single window, let alone a center stage — we meet seminar-style around the table. Anonymity is a principle we can’t enforce and don’t pretend to. Lois is Lois Hensley who was the Bakerville High librarian for thirty years. Until arthritis bound up her fingers, she was also the organist at the Catholic church where, reports have it, no quantity of gin ever flawed her playing. Molly, sailing through the door with an open package of Oreos, crumbs decorating her ample bosom, is Molly Fisher whose husband knocked her around for decades until he backed his tractor into a mineshaft and buried himself in an impromptu grave most everybody in town was loathe to disturb, no matter what the county health codes stipulate. Tip Halleran is our large animal vet: Every rancher in Bakerville worships Tip, the magical quiet of his hands on a tied-down animal, the sad story of his run-away wife. Roberta McCartney, Carla Martinez, Indian Eddie Pete, we’re none of us anonymous.
I’m the youngest in Tuesday meeting. Everybody knows my story and then some. Bonita Walker Tone. Poor little thing lost her mother to a surprise death when she was only seven. No matter how folks tried to help, that girl was born to follow heartache.
“Got your favorites,” Molly says, sliding the tray of Oreos from the wrapper, centering them on the table like communion wafers.
“Great, Molly.” With the empty carafe from the coffee maker, I signal to Lois’s stubborn backside and then the door. “Back in a sec.”
The women’s restroom is at the end of the corridor, past the administrative offices and the lounge. Outside the glass doors of the lobby, Indian Eddie and Tip Halleran are standing side by side smoking, studying their boots as mountain men do. I lift my free hand — not quite a wave. Eddie nods his head.
The foothills beyond the hospital grounds are greening after our long winter. Eddie and Tip may feel as I do. For two cents we’d ditch the meeting to trail the soft slant of sunset balming Bakerville and the mountains beyond. I imagine the three of us, Eddie in the lead, me in the rear, climbing the switchbacks on Prisoner’s Peak in the failing light. The meetings meant to gird us are fragile, what my big brother Lyle would translate into Zen as suffering substituted for suffering. There would be no surprise attached to our default. Disappointment maybe, but no surprise.
In the restroom, I fill the carafe and set it on the shelf above the sinks. I rinse some paper towels in cold water and hold them dripping against my face. Lyle makes a habit of calling me Sister Most Beautiful when he’s not calling me Sister Most Beloved, but I don’t find a hint of beauty in my reflection. A cap of dark, angry curls reaches to my chin. Two days out of New Dawn, I hacked off my waist-length hair with a pair of sewing scissors, but wearing it short didn’t suit me. I looked like a Kewpie doll. I shouldn’t. I am not a perky person. My fair face shares its bony structure with my brother’s. I have bruised eyes for which the ladies’ magazines advocate elaborate cover-up. I don’t need cosmetic support to hide my damage, rooted so deep in me no inventory has yet unearthed it.
I wipe my face again as a toilet flushes. Before I can pick up the carafe and disappear myself, the stall door behind me opens.
“Bonnie?”
“Mrs. Cathcart?” I turn around. I’ve not been taught so, but it seems extremely rude to speak to the mirror reflection of one’s elders, especially when it belongs to a family friend who neighbored your mama and daddy before you were conceived.
“Norma, dear.” Mrs. Cathcart, Norma, drops her carrying bags and papers and wraps her arms around me.
“It’s Mr. Cathcart?”
“I need to trust in Heavenly Father.”
“What’s wrong?”
“He got dizzy, fell outside the barn this afternoon.”
She means her husband Walter, of course, not Heavenly Father. But the image of a stumbling Jehovah, craggy face disgruntled, white locks flying, seats itself uninvited in my head. In just a flash, this Jehovah incites the horrible, embarrassing, inappropriate, childish urge to guffaw that grips people in the split seconds between the receipt of serious news and the resumption of propriety.
The image fades; I don’t laugh. “Do they know anything yet?”
I think Norma’s weeping against my shoulder, but she’s hugging me so tight I can’t see her face. I pat her back. I rub my hand in circles, the way Mama used to do when I’d tomboyed myself into minor injury. I pat again.
“They’re running tests. Depending on those, they may move him down to Stockton.” Cockeyed by our embrace, Norma’s glasses have slid sideways across her nose.
“Can I see him?”
Norma releases me, steps back. “Not now. He’s not… They’ve got him hooked up to all sorts of —” She coughs out a sob. “He’s not speaking clearly.” She looks up at me, a little girl’s question rounding her face. I touch her cheek, push the glasses straight. “The only word Walter says is Queenie, Bonnie. Why does he remember only one word, over and over? Only one word?”
It makes complete sense to me that Walter Cathcart, allowed to remember and pronounce just one word, would choose the name he’s given every Heeler he’s owned over a good lifetime of ranching. I don’t tell Norma this. Instead, I leave the carafe in the restroom and pick up the fallen bags and papers to walk her back to the critical care wing. I settle her into a chair and ask if she’d like a cup of coffee. An Oreo. A 7-Up.
“No, dear,” she tells me. She pulls the Book of Mormon from one of her bags. It’s disguised with a neatly embroidered blue checkered cover, the kind of obligatory project schoolgirls used to sew in Home Ec, but I know it’s the Book of Mormon, Norma’s faithful companion since her surprising late life swap of the Pope for the Latter Day Saints. The incumbent Queenie would give Walter more comfort, but Heavenly Father is Norma’s solace.
“I have a meeting,” I say, pointing. “But I’ll come back when it’s over, okay?”
“You do that, Bonnie.” Norma’s head is bent over her book of spells. “You come back.”
* * *
Indian Eddie holds the door to the conference room open for me. I try not to slosh the coffee water as I pass him. Brushing against his crisp Levi jacket, I smell tobacco and dog and something lighter, minty. The accidental blessing we give each other in these meetings, Lois and Molly and Eddie and all of us, is the grace of sitting in each other’s smell for an hour. When they render the madding crowd, get down with the lumpen proletariat, writers like to sanctify the human reek, once removed, of wooden church pews. They mean to evoke the spiritual, but I can testify you don’t need allegory when flesh and blood folks sit beside you in all their warped glory. In a bus, a hospital waiting room, an A.A. meeting, it’s the firsthand smell that humbles you, makes you kin.
I’ve recounted our meetings to Lyle. Since my brother walks a responsible road that will never detour to recovery meetings, he was sincerely interested in the details. I can’t tell him specifics. Specifics are against the rules. What I describe, what I sink into as easily as I do the chair which, with a small bow, Indian Eddie pulls out for me, is not our principles or our personalities but our smell.
Molly scoots the Oreos across the table toward me. I take two and set them on one of the festive red, white, and blue napkins somebody donated to our supply cabinet shortly after I joined the Tuesday meeting.
Before Lois opens the meeting, I clear my throat. “Walter Cathcart’s in the hospital.” It’s not an orthodox announcement, I know, but each person seated at this table would say what I’m saying now. You can’t live in Bakerville and not adore Walter Cathcart. “Norma’s waiting on tests. I thought I should say.”
“We’re grateful for that, Bonita,” Molly says, looking at Lois. “We appreciate that.”
Lois opens the meeting proper with The Twelve Traditions, the 12 by 12 canted against her curly fingers like a windblown bag flattened on a barbed wire fence. She punctuates her rushed reading with wheezy pauses before each numbered statute. Tip Halleran separates the chocolate biscuits of his Oreo, rejoins them, then separates them again. He’ll do this the whole meeting, dissecting and repairing, working the sugary glue until it turns a dismal gray. I wonder about Queenie, the teenage pup who lives by Walter’s side. I wonder if Norma has given another thought to Walter’s Queenie.
After Lois finishes, it’s my turn. Indian Eddie and Tip always seem uneasy when asked to read, as though the recipe for sobriety is going to slither off the page and strike them good if they don’t get the words out fast enough. I love reading The Twelve Steps, except for the parts about God as we understand him, seeing how He’s not exactly revealed Himself to me in the twenty-seven years I’ve been wearing my mortal coil. Norma’s Heavenly Father, an allowable pinch-hitter in A.A., is just as elusive.
When I read, I’m reminded of my dead mama’s lovely voice, of the bedtime stories she memorized first for Lyle and resurrected for me when I came along, tardy but welcome, a full ten years later. It takes some imagination to turn a laundry list into a recital, but I try. I hope in a small way I sound like Mama, that my voice is tender enough to be convincing to a roomful of folks twice my age. When I reach the final line, the practicing of principles in all our affairs, I raise my eyes to find Eddie watching me. He offers me a smile I recognize as such only because he pairs it with a wink as I’m closing the 12 by 12.
“I’ll see what I can do out at the Cathcarts’,” Indian Eddie says.
“Thanks, Eddie,” I tell him, even though Lois hmmphs at the break in decorum. “I’m heading out there myself.” I inhale, risk Lois’s ire. “We should pick up Queenie.”
“Queenie,” Eddie repeats. “We’ll take care of Queenie.”
* * *
After our meetings, after our meandering testimonials on whatever topic with which Lois, ever the librarian, has presented us, we close by reading The Serenity Prayer. Most groups begin with its reading to steel resolve, but long before I joined the Tuesday meeting, some member — likely Tip, though he says next to nothing week after week — suggested making the prayer our coda. Tonight, after our sparse offerings on letting go and letting God, Lois asks Eddie to read. She’s especially spiteful tonight, our Lois, so she’s earned the forced march of Eddie’s low voice forging its way through the brief lines. Eddie closes his eyes. He’s not reading at all. He’s memorized the prayer; we all have. That’s the point, I’m learning. A.A. wants you to learn certain vital things by rote so they never leave you. Other things are meant to be forgotten, detached, sent on a red balloon up the higher power. Memorizing gives me no trouble. Forgetting is a harder row to hoe.
“Bonita Tone.” Indian Eddie is behind me.
We’re shuffling from the conference room, our modest donations deposited in the round wicker basket that serves as our tithing tray, our farewells curt as if we’re making up for the anonymity we failed to practice in the meeting.
“Want a 7-Up to go, Eddie?” I ask, hefting my cooler.
“No.” Eddie slips his hand inside his jacket, pats around for the unfiltered Camels in the pocket of his flannel shirt. “You going to see Walter?”
“Yes. If I can.”
He nods his head, steps up beside me. “When did it happen?”
“Mrs. Cathcart — Norma — says this afternoon.”
“We need to get out there to feed, then.”
“Yes.”
Somebody from outside, somebody who doesn’t know Bakerville, would advise against nocturnal pacts with a drunken sixty-five-year-old Mexican who sacrificed his social skills in Vietnam. Eddie is not Indian at all. That appellation is some long-gone bar fly’s tag for sorting her drunks into petty stereotypes relieving any exercise of imagination. Everybody expects the drunken Indian. A drunken Mexican, especially one who must have been as handsome as Eddie in his hard drinking days, is a tougher sell. I know Eddie as the sloe-eyed shearer who taught a seven-year-old girl that you could clip a whole flock of sheep without leaving a drop of blood, a scarred but graceful man who sat gently at my mama’s kitchen table and accepted a turkey sandwich and a cup of Earl Grey when the shearing was over. Mama didn’t live long enough to see the worst in Eddie, but she would have made him a place at our kitchen table whatever his state. My mama trusted Eddie. I do too.
A nurse is sitting beside Norma. Eddie slides himself behind me, still patting his breast pocket for smokes. He’s centering himself. He has no intention of breaking any hospital rules.
I kneel at Norma’s knees. “News?” I ask, reading the nurse’s familiar face. She’s a customer at the Tune-Up Shop where I work. She may not recognize me without my coveralls. I offer her my hand across Norma’s lap. “Bonita Tone.”
“Family?” Just one word is all it takes: The nurse drives a Jetta with a chronic front-end shake and a stained baby seat in back. Her husband works for the county, in planning or health or some such. She touches my hand in a limp, damp clasp. “Lucy Cox.”
“Not family.” I pat Norma’s hands, which cradle the Book of Mormon. “Neighbors. Lifetime.” I look up at Eddie. With me squatting, he’s lost his camouflage, so I mind my manners and introduce him against his will, but the way I’ve been taught. “Eddie Pete.” Eddie nods. The nurse looks away. “Norma, Eddie and I are going out to the ranch.”
“Walter’s going to be all right, Bonnie,” Norma tells me, but Lucy’s bland, blonde face gives it away: The nurse is not so sure. “He’s sleeping now.” Norma’s half-smile beseeches Lucy, who’s probably a Mormon too, sistering her prayers onto Norma’s, plying Heavenly Father with a duet. “I won’t go home tonight. He will need me. When he wakes.”
“We’ve put a cot for Mrs. Cathcart in the patient’s room,” Lucy explains, as if she’s auditioning an officious walk-on for General Hospital. Eddie’s courtesy, his silence, is making her nervous. She’s trying to wrap her head around the notion that a sweet old Mormon wife like Norma could confess to being familiar with a motley twosome like Eddie and me.
I stand, touch Eddie’s hand, use my snot voice for the nurse’s benefit. “Norma, we’re going to take care of things at the ranch. Do you need something?”
“I just don’t know, Bonita.” Norma deflates. Whatever animates her is escaping through a puncture wound. “I don’t know what I’ll need.”
I want to put out an all-points bulletin for Heavenly Father. It’s one thing that God as we know Him has never seen fit to explain why my mother needed to die on a freeway in awful Los Angeles when a dozen more eligible candidates are walking around consuming thirty times their share of the earth’s resources. Never having coddled the tenets of any orthodox faith, I don’t expect Him to have a polite conversation with me. But Norma, Norma devotes herself to the ward over in Jackson, volunteers to clean the temple down in Sacramento like a hired hand, orders proxy baptisms right and left for a string of ancestors who could not have foreseen their posthumous disposition. It’s not as if Norma doesn’t act her belief. If Heavenly Father is going to intervene for anybody, surely it should be for one of His most loyal lambs.
“We’re going out to the ranch,” I repeat. Then, because I’ve heard it said in sadder times than these, “God bless you, Norma. God bless Walter.”
* * *
If Eddie does own a car at the moment, it’s not running. He sits on the passenger seat of my Toyota beater, still as stone, self-contained. We make our way from the hospital grounds up the coiling highway to the Cathcarts’ ranch in a grave, unbidden peace. A coyote flashes across my headlights, vanishes into brush like a ghost.
“You’re a good driver, Bonita,” Eddie whispers. His hand is on his pocket again, tapping his smokes.
“Lyle taught me,” I tell him. I could extend the conversation Eddie’s offered: ask him where he’s working, if he’s still renting the modular home on the Morrison property, assure him it’s okay by me if he wants to smoke in my junker. I could tell Eddie I’ve kept the sympathy card he’d sent my family when Mama died, the way the elegant, long-limbed cursive of a drunken sheep shearer mystified me then and continues to. I don’t say any of it. Set on our mission, stripped down to our sober bare bones, we don’t need talk.
We’ve no daylight by the time we turn onto the ranch’s gravel driveway. The house is dark; of course it would be. Walter fell in the afternoon. Norma wouldn’t have run around flipping on light bulbs while she waited for the paramedics. I know where to find the switch for the back-yard floods. It’s on the porch wall, mounted beside the chamfered pine coat hook I made for Walter way back in high school when everybody thought my antics were orphaned high spirits leavened by too much freedom, a healthy recklessness I’d outgrow in good time. I turn on the floods. The lights wash the lawn and Walter’s stinky old cattle truck, the back gate and the road leading to the barn and down to the pond where Lyle taught me to swim when I was young and brave.
“Queenie,” I call. I whistle. “Here, girlie girl. Queenie!”
How many Queenie’s have worked this ranch, I couldn’t say. Their long reign commenced before I was born. Stubbornly, vainly, I’m hoping a Queenie will be here after Walter and Norma, after me. Eddie swings open the gate and loses himself in the shadows beyond the reach of the flood lights. Queenie noses my hand; she’s appeared out of nothing.
“There’s a good girl,” I say, squatting to give her a rough pet around the ears.
Norma insists all the Queenies have been equally good dogs, but this one is special, not quite mine but close. It’s true she belongs to the Cathcarts. Last summer, during Bakerville’s apocalyptic heat wave, after Walter and Norma had fallen asleep in their Lazy Boys in front of a muted T.V. screen as is their habit, I’d whistle Queenie to the edge of the dark pond and swim with her, dog paddling through the algae and the tules, sharing my dinner of watermelon and string cheese on the pond shore. Midnight trysts, Walter said of our dates in a rare, fond commentary. Bonnie’s gonna turn that dog into a mermaid.
“Eddie?” I can’t see Eddie, but Queenie knows exactly where he is. She looks at me. “Eddie?”
“Bonita Tone,” Eddie calls.
“We’re coming.”
Queenie trots ahead, stops and looks back at me. Sometimes when it’s dark enough, you can find your way over familiar ruts by watching the starry sky instead of the worn ground. I step from the circle of light and lift my face, letting my feet track the direction of Eddie’s voice. He’s swung the gate fully open for me.
“Walter was always meaning to wire the barn,” I tell Eddie when I find him beside the stacked hay next to the stalls.
The air is sweet with alfalfa. For all I know, Eddie stacked the bales himself. Like Queenie, Eddie has a way of materializing when an extra hand is called for, when a calf needs pulling or a fence needs stringing. Like a coyote, Eddie can disappear in a blink when the things he cannot change run him to ground.
“I think he moved the cows to the field below the pond,” I say. “Waco’s with them.”
Eddie holds a pair of hay hooks in one hand. “Only eight or nine and the horse to feed, then?”
“Yep. I’ll get the truck.” I slap my hand against my thigh. “Queenie. Board up.”
I walk back to the yard with Queenie at my side. The keys to Walter’s aged Ford flatbed are on the dash. Someday people in Bakerville will have to stop leaving their keys in their cars in an open invitation to bad character, but that day is yet to come. As soon as I open the cab door, Queenie jumps and lands herself in the passenger seat, her hind feet clearing the gearbox like a deer’s. I pull a crescent wrench and crinkled papers, receipts from the Ford’s latest visit to the Tune-Up Shop, out from under her. After three turns, the ignition fires. Carburetor’s still sticking, but Walter never complained. I back the truck around the house, through the halo of light from the floods into the dark toward the barn.
Eddie has two bales on the flatbed almost before I’ve braked the Ford. He hinges the hay hooks into one of the bales and pulls himself beside them onto the bed. Queenie whines, so I let her free of the cab. She hops up beside Eddie.
“Don’t let me back into the pond,” I raise my voice above the rumble of the engine.
“You won’t.”
The rear-view mirror frames Eddie and Queenie, the backs of their heads, their shared perch on the bench of the flatbed. Their fragile posture, the flimsy conviction of man and dog that I am in control, capable of backing a truck downhill in near total darkness, deluges me with a despair so powerful I doubt I should be at the wheel at all.
This reflexive sadness is more than crazy, I know only too well. It turns me inside out and strikes at the oddest of times, often just when I think I’ve reached some somber semblance of adulthood. When Lois’s gnarled claws trump her predatory meanness. When Norma fingers the tidy edges of her camouflaged Book of Mormon. Last week I had to climb from the pit in the Tune-Up Shop and escape to the restroom because Dickie De Vane’s shoes, his ridiculous shoes, made me sob. They looked to be a vestige of somebody’s high school prom from decades ago — not Dickie’s prom because Dickie never went, never finished high school at all. The cracked patent-leather loafers he was wearing over brand new white tube socks took me down. A pair of shoes. A pair of shoes on the feet of somebody who should mean next to nothing to me. I know what I cannot change, but knowing doesn’t make it any easier to detach from the tendrils of gloom, the cloying, insidious melancholy they seed.
I don’t back the flatbed into the pond. I square it up next to the saggy barbed wire fence against which the Cathcarts’ heifers have lined themselves. Queenie’s off the bed and nipping at their heels, as if her hungry cows need to be taught a lesson. Eddie and I break the bales. I slide through the barbed wire and take the leaves of alfalfa Eddie hands to me and lay them on the ground in a long, neat picnic. I nudge their rumps apart, push them into a queue. They’re gentle cows, used to getting their feed from a gentle man.
Eddie climbs through the fence. “Here comes Waco.”
Walter’s palomino gelding doesn’t trot. The horse on which I learned to ride is close to thirty years old. He moves with an old man’s bandy-legged gait.
“How old’s this horse?” Eddie asks, running his hand the length of Waco’s neck from ear to withers.
“Older than I am.”
We’re both stroking Waco, listening to his chewing and the huffing of the cows, too. After I return Eddie to wherever he wants to go, I’ll head back to the hospital and sit with Norma. I’m guessing I will provide more peace to her than Lucy Cox. A friend’s animal presence, even if she’s no Mormon, is probably more powerful consolation than pro forma condolences from a health care professional.
“Bonita Tone, how old are you now?”
“Twenty-seven big ones.”
“All grown up,” Eddie says, his voice low and sad.
“Can’t stop time, can you, Eddie?”
“No sir. Not me.”
“Should we head back? I’d like to sit with Norma.”
Eddie turns. Queenie sits at my feet. “You take Queenie with you. Leave me at the Well.”
The Well’s burnt, I want to say to Eddie. You don’t need to be hanging around with phantoms. But I don’t protest. One of the things I cannot change is Eddie, not his forlorn past or his regular lapses from sobriety. He wants me to leave him at the gutted bar on the four corners of Bakerville, and I will. “Okay,” I tell him. “Thanks for coming out with me.”
“De nada, Bonita Tone.”
* * *
I pull my Toyota next to the Well and put my hand on Queenie’s neck. Full of trust, she sits between me and Eddie as if we have a plan, as if we both know where the road leads. The sick ashy smell of the cold fire rising from the skeleton walls of the bar makes me wish we were back in the Cathcarts’ field with the sweet dumb cows.
“I’ll be at work tomorrow,” I say, working my hand beneath Queenie’s collar. “Maybe I’ll have news.”
Eddie pulls himself from the car, shuts the door, and bends to speak through the open window. “Bonita Tone.” He shakes a cigarette from the spindled pack he pulls from his pocket. “You’re like your mother.” He touches his lighter to the tip of his cigarette. “Somebody should tell you.”
I can’t say that Eddie’s looking to drink tonight. It could be he just wants to sit in the black ruins and smoke, kick his boots around what’s left of the bottles.
“Eddie.” I wipe my eyes. “It’s all the same to me if you’re drinking or not.”
“I know, mija.” Eddie straightens up and backs from the car into the wasteland of the Well. “You too.”
* * *
I park in front of the hospital where the light from lobby doors spills onto the empty walkway. Queenie moves into the driver’s side seat when I leave the car.
“Stay, girl.”
Queenie’s not a barker. She’ll sit as still and silent as Eddie, waiting as patiently for me as Walter does for Norma when he squires her to the home teaching visits which have, since her conversion, become her passion.
For the second time in a single evening, I meet my reflection in the restroom when I wash myself up. I lather my hands and my face, take off Lyle’s old letterman jacket and flap it good to shed the hay clinging to the sleeves. Dog food, I remind myself. I’ll need to go by the Quick Stop to buy Queenie some dog food.
The fluorescent overheads in the critical care corridor are dimmed, as if the theatre lights are going down before the curtain rises. The plastic chairs where I left Norma are empty. At least nobody else in Bakerville is waiting on bad news. It takes a few minutes of walking around, hovering outside doors, before I find a red-haired nurse seated at the end of a bed half-cloaked by butter-yellow curtains. I startle her. She stands and sets a chart on the foot of the bed before she steps to the door to meet me.
“Could you please tell me how Walter Cathcart is doing?” I study her nurse blouse, patterned with rainbows of tumbling pigs. A person could draw the conclusion that madmen design hospitals and everything in them.
“Mr. Cathcart’s stable,” she says. “Bonnie?”
“Trudy?”
“How you doing, hon?” Trudy hugs me. It’s been a day of hugs, coming and going. The social niceties have me running on empty. “How’s Lyle?”
Bakerville is populated by two decades of women who have loved and lost my brother. I remain the beneficiary of their hand-me-down affection. “Lyle’s okay. But I wanted —”
“You wanted to know how the Cathcarts are doing.”
“Well, Walter really —”
“She gave us a bit of a scare, too.”
“Norma?”
“She’s all right. Sympathetic pains. Happens a lot with old couples.”
“So how are —”
“Doc Marshall says they’ll both be fine. Home tomorrow, certainly.” Trudy steers me toward the nurse’s station.
“So Walter didn’t have, like, a stroke or something?”
“No, babe. More than anything, he was probably just dehydrated. Medication he’s taking, he’s supposed to drink a lot of water. He forgot, is all.”
“That’s good news, then.”
“They’re both sleeping. Doc thought it was just as easy to keep them together.” Trudy scoots behind the counter, studies the flashing light on the telephone. She looks up at me and smiles. “Say, you’ve really changed your hair, yeah?”
I don’t want to talk about my hair. Or Lyle. Or the inevitable subject of what I’ve been doing with myself. As much as I appreciate Trudy’s eagerness, right now I prefer Lucy Cox in the role of critical care nurse.
“Can I peek in?”
“Sure.” Trudy curls her finger at me.
I follow her to the cracked door opening to a room square at the end of the wing. Two beds are paired beneath the windows which look out onto the rose garden the Hospital Auxiliary ladies put in. They’ve been pushed together, not so much to make a double bed but close enough that Norma’s out flung arm reaches her husband’s chest. An IV hose is coiled on its hook above Walter’s shoulder.
“Just fluids, hon,” Trudy whispers when I shoot her a look. “That’s all.”
I tiptoe to the side of Norma’s bed. She’s fallen asleep with her reading glasses on. I take them off, but they’re tethered to her neck with one of those ribbony necklaces old ladies use to foil dementia. They leave dents on either side of her nose. I want to rub them away, but instead I fold the glasses and lay them on her chest.
“Good.” I begin to back from the room. “Listen. Will you tell them that I have Queenie? In the morning?”
“Sure.”
“And that the cows are fed?
“Of course.”
“Thanks, Trudy.” I’m nearly sprinting. I want to get out of the corridor, the hospital. Close calls can leave you almost as shaken as the most horrible stuff which does, without fail, come to pass. Close calls are Heavenly Father’s lecture notes, proctoring you for the big exam: Happiness is delusion, so you darn well better pay attention, prepare yourself for the other shoe because whatever’s coming you get to live with forever and ever.
I’m so far down the corridor that Trudy has to pitch her voice. “Tell Lyle hello for me?”
“Yeah.” I hold up a weary peace sign. “Okay.”
* * *
I sit in my car with Queenie until my heart stops jack-rabbiting around my chest. Walter’s dog lays her head on my knee and keeps her mismatched eyes on my face. I repeat the Serenity Prayer ten times in a row, like the Hail Marys on a rosary, until my blood pressure flattens. According to A.A., yesterday and tomorrow are not supposed to count. Even Lyle tells me that I need to practice living in the present, which is just a more exotic rendition of one day at a time. The truth is, the things you cannot change — yesterday’s or tomorrow’s — eat you up with sorrow or dread. Or both.
I put my arms around Queenie and tighten her against my breast. “You want to see Walter, girl?”
We slide from the car and skulk around the front of the hospital. The mountains to the east of St. Joe’s grounds rise as a dark wall; the lights of Bakerville glint like gaudy rings on a clenched fist. Politely, Queenie stops to pee in the rose garden. We edge ourselves up to Norma and Walter’s window. I take Queenie’s front paws and stand her against the sill.
I don’t know whether dogs can smell through glass, whether the shadowy pillows of Walter and Norma appear to their heeler as familiar, beloved shapes. Queenie wiggles her tail and noses my hand. Then, believing the force of her own will can erase the separating pane, she begins to lick the window.
