23
You and Me, the Labor
Corey’s Labor Ready assignment was ending. The project was done. His super was having him clean the new windows with acetone. Landscapers were planting trees along the curbs. UMass was a Division One school and Molly was running in the postseason, thinking about next year. When she returned to Quincy to see her father, she was tan and conditioned and seemed to have been painted in brighter colors. Her long reddish-gold hair whipped behind her. She hugged her girlfriends and drove away with them amid a great celebratory energy. Hiking down the shore with his tool belt, Corey leaned in the window of their car and bumped her fist. He said his job was ending. She told him not to be shy about talking to her father. “Don’t let him scare you. He likes helping people. You should call him.”
“Think you can use me now it’s getting warm?” he asked her father.
“To be honest, I don’t know.” But Tom offered to show him around his worksite.
He picked Corey up on Sunday. The snow-white Ford shone in the sun. Corey jumped aboard. A mug in the center console was filled with ballpoint pens and a bone-handled folding knife. A Navajo dreamcatcher hung from the rearview mirror. A die-cast skull was glued to the dashboard—a gift from Molly—her dad liked the Grateful Dead. Tom was wearing a do-rag and a lime-green safety shirt in double extra-large. His well-worn boot hit the gas and the truck sped away from the ocean.
They took the Yankee Division Highway inland past the South Shore Plaza, then the granite cliffs. They drove into a town. A white sign in Massachusetts style: Entering Dedham. The Ford roared along, the radio playing Neil Young. They were cruising by old warehouses on a country road—heavy construction equipment in dusty lots, blocks of stone, piles of lumber, hills of sand against a background of trees.
Tom was telling Corey how he’d gotten his job. “When I got laid off, I sent out my résumé. These guys called me in. They’re the second-largest commercial HVAC company in New England. I’d subbed for them in the past. They knew me. They said, ‘We want to give you what you’re worth.’ We shook hands.”
After they’d hired him, he’d had to prove himself. He’d passed his licensing exam within a year. It had taken six months of studying at his kitchen table. Then he’d graduated to running jobs.
Tom pulled up outside an industrial hangar, turned the truck off and continued talking with his keys in his hand. He said they’d given him this vehicle that he and Corey were sitting in, and a laptop computer with Bluebeam on the hard drive, a type of software allowing him to size tin with the click of a mouse.
“They pay for my gas. All I do is turn in my receipts.”
He got out of the Ford. Walking slowly, faded green tattoos on his arms, he led the way to the hangar. They were surrounded by rural silence, tall trees, sunlight. He entered the combination in the key case, unlocked the doors, let Corey in. The inside was cavernous and cold and smelled like wet cement. Construction materials were piled everywhere: iron I-beams, coils of cable, sheets of green glass, machines waiting to be installed. Tom pointed to a mountain range of silver ductwork.
They walked deeper in, stepping through the frames of uncompleted walls. Another room. A plywood board that lay across a pair of sawhorses. It said Tom’s Table in Magic Marker. A roll of blueprints. Wooden crates on the floor, mock-ups for his rooftop units. Tom got down on his knees and demonstrated how, by measuring carefully, he laid them out on the floor exactly where they would go on the roof above their heads: blue tape for cold air, red tape for hot.
“Want to see what this place’ll look like when it’s done?”
They left the site and drove to a sister factory, which was nearing completion. When they went inside, the lights came on, illuminating a pristine white-walled stadium. The machines had been assembled into a series of production lines. High overhead, Corey saw Tom’s ductwork in the ceiling—high pressure, medium pressure, low pressure—coming through the walls, dividing and subdividing in perfect lines like the complex of pipes in a pipe organ, a giant system that descended in scale down to the registers in the clean rooms.
There were no doglegs.
“No,” said Tom. “It’s got to look perfect and it’s got to work perfect—or you’re going to have to have a tech come out every weekend.”
The project above their heads had taken fifty man-years of labor, counting all the men and time. Tom had gotten it done ahead of schedule. The owners had a blackboard in their office that showed everybody’s jobs. He’d seen it. “If you’re in the black, it means you’re on-budget. All these guys are in the red, but I’m always in the black.”
The plant was going to manufacture powdered substances for the vitamin-supplement industry like Gloria’s vanilla protein powder or Corey’s Gaspari muscle-builder shake from GNC.
“I’ve tried the chocolate,” Tom said. “It tastes good.”
They went outside and walked around the hangar. “Construction is a stressful business. The numbers are huge. Each one of those rooftop units you saw is twenty thousand dollars and we’ve got ten of them.” He walked slowly, head down in the sun, boots crunching in the dirt.
“Thomas!” someone called out when they were crossing behind the hangar. It was an electrician at work inside a caged area where high-voltage lines connected. They went over to talk to him through a fence.
“Working on a Sunday?”
“Wiring the boxes. We’re putting the big switch in tomorrow. Who’s your buddy?”
“This is Corey. He’s interested in what we do.”
“If you’re interested in construction, stick with Thomas,” the electrician said. “He’s the man.”
“I know he is,” said Corey.
“I’ve been telling him we show up on time and get it done.”
“That’s what we do. That’s why we can make it fun. We get it done, then we can have fun with it.”
“We’re always doing something. Remember the mug? We’ve got this mug we give people. It says Biggest Sanchez of the Year. A Sanchez is a guy who sleeps with your wife. He’s like a Jody in the military,” Tom explained. “And another thing is zip ties.” As a joke, they’d zip-tie each other’s equipment. They zip-tied each other’s feet to ladders. If they didn’t like a guy, they crawled under his truck and zip-tied his drive train. You’d see him go halfway down the street and stop. He’d think something was wrong with his transmission.
The men laughed. A short, broad man, wearing all his safety gear, fall-protection harness, yellow hard hat, cowhide gloves and safety glasses, his many tools kept neatly around his waist, the electrician, whose name was Victor, gave an impression of unusual competence and judgment allied with good cheer. The thing that rose out of the cage above his head resembled a cubist sculpture of a vacuum cleaner several stories high. It drew air out of the factory and ran it through a filter and, if necessary, shut down power to the entire plant to prevent a dust explosion. The high-voltage lines six feet above his head could fry you.
They took their leave of him. “Nice to meet you, Victor,” Corey said.
“He’s good people,” Tom confided on their way back to the truck. “It’s taken me years to get guys like him, guys who are reliable. They’re not easy to find.”
And Tom looked after guys like that and kept them busy. If he had to send a guy home, he bought him McDonald’s on his own dime. He didn’t like to send guys home, but sometimes he had to for the budget. “I see all the money on the job. You know what the cheapest part of any job is?” He poked Corey in the shoulder. “You and me. The labor.”
“I’d do anything to work with you,” Corey said.
They climbed back in the truck and drove out of town without talking. Tom picked up the highway. Corey looked out the window, feeling the strange high-speed sense of stasis, the hovering stillness in relation to the other traffic moving seventy, seventy-five miles an hour. They seemed to crawl beneath the Braintree cliffs as they headed for the shore.
Tom started talking again as they were driving into Quincy. He said not everyone loved him. A persistent issue was coordinating the elements of a major installation. Not infrequently, the other trades would fail to work with him. They were supposed to miss each other, but if a plumber didn’t read the blueprints, his pipes would run into Tom’s ductwork. In these conflicts, the other tradesman would lose. “I tell guys, ‘Look, you can do your own thing, but you’re only hurting yourself, ’cause I can’t move my stuff. Look at the prints. I told you exactly where I was going to be, this many feet above the floor.’ ”
Due to his perfectionism, Tom said, he had fired a lot of guys. One day he had fired a weightlifter, a steroid head. “He was a bad electrician. He came back to the site looking for me. People said he had a gun.”
Nothing had happened; the cops had taken care of it.
They were heading down the Adams Shore.
“Last fall, when Molly was about to go away,” Tom continued, “we went to Walmart to get her stuff for school and we ran into this other guy I’d fired. He’s this dirtbag who does meth. He was with his wife. He didn’t see me, but she did. She goes, ‘There’s the asshole who fired you.’ I thought we were going to throw down right there. I went to sporting goods and got a baseball bat and put it in our cart. Molly’s like, ‘Maybe you ought to calm down, Dad.’ ”
They passed the DB Mart. The ocean appeared. A minute later, they were pulling up in front of Corey’s house on Sea Street.
Corey reached across the cab and shook Tom’s hand.
“Thank you. It was great seeing what you do.”
“I know you’ll find something. You’re a smart kid.”
“I can try the union again.”
“Something always turns up, usually. You just gotta be at the right place at the right time.”
“It’ll be fine.”
“Molly was taking business administration for a while. She wanted to start a business for me, so she could run it. She thinks if I’m not stressed out I won’t drink.”
Tom sat still a minute longer.
Of his daughter, he said, “Ya know, there’s all kinds of extras you gotta deal with, even with the scholarship. I never went to college, so I didn’t know what they were gonna be. Fortunately, they’ve given me a bump, so I can pay for whatever she needs. I tell her, ‘You do what you gotta do and we’ll work it out. The money’ll be there for you. I guarantee it.’ ” He struck his t on this last word.
They climbed out of the truck. The sun was in the high blue sky over the ocean. Joan was sitting on Corey’s steps in her white jeans, smoking a cigarette.
“Joan, this is Tom. He’s like my uncle around here. Tom, this is Joan. She’s like my aunt.”
On hearing his name, Tom, who had been drifting towards the beach, made a show of redirecting his body’s momentum and changing course for Joan.
“Hi,” Tom said. “I’m his neighbor.”
Joan stood up, tiny by comparison with him, and said, “How do you do?”
She stood erect and put her shoulders back and smiled under her black bangs. Tom looked away at the ocean and held his car keys.
“Working on a Sunday?”
“I’ve been showing him around my job site.”
“What do you do?”
“I’m a construction worker. We got a couple of plants we’re working on over in Norwood. Corey wanted to see what we were doing. I do the ventilation. Heating and air-conditioning. They call me a tin knocker.”
“You get a lot of work making everything green nowadays?”
“You mean, environmentally friendly? Yeah, that’s not what we do, usually. There are guys who do that. Like retrofitting. We’re more like a new construction company, so when we build something, it’s already up to what the government wants.”
Joan cocked a hip and took a smacking puff off her cigarette.
“The politicians probably have all the technology already, am I right? Every time they start talking about global warming, I keep waiting for them to do something. I thought we were gonna have solar-powered cars by now. I thought I’d be flying one of them fighter planes from Star Wars. Right? They probably have those, I bet. They’re probably keeping them so they can go fuck up ISIS and not tell anyone.”
“They’ve got technology they don’t tell us about.”
“They better. It’s getting crazy out there.”
“The question is, are the liberals going to let us use it? Not to get into a…” Tom looked at Joan. She looked back at him and laughed. He put his hands up. “I mean, I dunno what your politics are. His mom is probably pretty liberal. I don’t want to start World War Three.”
“Nah, I’m all about defending ourselves. We’ve got to.”
Corey went inside to check on his mother. Tom and Joan stayed outside talking. Through the window, he heard her say she was from Oakland. She’d seen James Hetfield of Metallica in the early eighties when he’d been barely older than a kid. Hetfield had just been getting started, but he’d been wild and it had been something to see him rock.
Mother’s Day had passed. No card this year. It seemed better not to commemorate it. It was the second anniversary of Gloria’s diagnosis, the beginning of the third year of her disease. Her physical therapist told her to get a lanolin sheepskin. Now Gloria spent her days in the black thronelike chair, wearing soft white pajamas, the sheepskin underneath her to reduce friction on her skin.
The social worker paid a visit at the end of May. Dawn sat on the futon with her folder and her purse. She wore a sleeveless turtleneck. Her spotted arms had meat on them. She saw the wheelchair’s Mafia Boss license plate. “Good!” she said. “You’re decorating. You’re making it your own.”
“That was my son’s idea. He’s at that age.”
A nurse arrived while Dawn was there. She had come from Beth Israel to give Corey’s mother passive range-of-motion exercise. She put Gloria on her back and lifted her legs one at a time. In shorts and sneakers, Gloria resembled a football player lying on his back on the sidelines getting his legs stretched by an assistant coach before going on the field.
The nurse turned her on her side and rubbed lotion on her back. She moved her to the chair and tilted it into a deep reclining position and hovered her hands over Gloria’s face and body without touching her. There was total silence in the house. She was directing prana at the patient. The nurse was a burly woman with an accent—a Jew from the Ukraine. What she was doing made Gloria fall asleep.
Dawn finished shuffling papers and tapping the screen of her BlackBerry. She gathered up her things, her purse and folder. As she was leaving, she said, “I left some paperwork for her when she wakes up.” The nurse turned on the social worker and put a finger to her lips.
The nurse had covered Gloria with a blanket, which hung down, hiding the chair, so she appeared to be floating horizontally with nothing under her, as in a magic trick. Corey began to ask a question and the powerful nurse silenced him as well.
He tiptoed up and whispered, “What technique do you use? Is it a form of yoga?”
“It’s like that,” she said.
The Ukrainian visited his mother periodically for a while. Then, for reasons he didn’t understand, she stopped coming. She had a rare skill. Every time she came, she soothed his mother enough to let her sleep.
He went to one more court appearance before the summer. Shay had managed to convince the court how sick his mother was. The judge continued the case until the fall. When they met again, Corey would likely get a conditional discharge. Shay explained what that meant in the courthouse lobby: Stay out of trouble and the charge would go away.
“Go home, take care of your mother, go to the gym. Just don’t break any more car windows. Stay away from your father.”
Adrian was sitting in the Mercury in his kneepads, his smell filling the car. They drove north out of the city, traveling over the water on the high iron bridge and exiting in Chelsea. They drove by docks and down an industrial road: train tracks, a power plant behind a concrete wall, power lines and capacitors. The road curved. Long low factory buildings, a meat-processing plant, refineries, diesel trucks. No skyline. A sign that said Topless. A cocktail glass with a woman in it. A concrete pillbox with no windows called King Arthur’s Lounge. The establishment was Mafia-run, Leonard said. “You’re going to like this.” Adrian rubbed his hands. They parked in a car-filled lot surrounded by a rusted fence, corrugated sheet metal, dumpsters. The wind bore the scent of fuel oil. A beat came through the walls.
Inside, the club was drenched in red light. A fat white guy on a stage in the back of the room was rapping: “Get up on the mothafuckin’ floor!” They paid the cover. A young girl with big breasts in a pink see-through nightie took Adrian’s money.
“How are you tonight?” he asked.
She deadpan-stared at him.
“Do you not like talking to customers?”
“Do yourself a favor, go sit down.”
“There’s a part of the brain that controls anger, the cingulate gyrus. Yours could be getting too much stimulation.”
“Get out of my face.” She made a hand-twirling gesture as if she were pulling something out of her hair.
The bouncer had tanned Mediterranean arms, an anchor tattooed below his elbow, and wore pleated gray slacks and dress shoes. His wet hair had comb tracks in it. He asked the girl, “Everything cool?” She made a hand-chopping gesture and walked away.
Leonard and Adrian sat at the bar. Women were pole dancing on a stage behind the liquor bottles. Others were climbing on the bar itself, crawling from one customer to the next, squatting in front of them. The bartender was wearing a black brassiere.
A dancer stopped in front of Leonard. “Hey, what’s up.”
“The sky.”
“Haha! That’s funny.”
Leonard held out a dollar to her and put it on the bar. She leaned over him and put her breasts in his hands while staring down at him.
“Hahaha!” She laughed. “You like that, huh?”
“How do you know?”
“I can see you do.”
“Do you like it?”
“Oh yeah, baby.”
He slid his hand up her leg to her crotch. She let him feel her.
“Turn around. Wink your ass at me.”
“Haha! You’re crazy in the head.” She turned on her hands and knees on the bar. “Is it winking?” She looked over her shoulder.
“You did it.”
“See? I can make it do anything I want.”
He held her hand. “Would you like to take a ride with me after the show?”
“You know I can’t do that.”
“Take a ride with my young friend here.”
“He’s with you?”
“Take a ride with us, and we’ll get you something nice.”
“What’ll you get me?”
“A party.”
“I can’t.”
“Why not?”
“I can’t just go somewhere with you if I don’t know you.”
She moved over to Adrian. “Your friend is sweet. He’s so nice! Are you nice too?”
Adrian said, “I’m the mean one.”
Since he made no move to touch her or tip her, she forgot him and cat-crawled down to the next group of patrons and performed for them. They were enthusiastic. She saddled her legs over one man’s shoulders and he began to perform oral sex on her right there in the bar, while she smiled down at the top of his head and made eyes at other people in the bar’s mirrored walls. When she smiled, wrinkles stretched from her jaw to her ear. She was missing a tooth.
Everyone watched silently, solemnly, in the loud music. The black-bras-wearing bartender watched. A spectator in the crowd stuck his tongue between two fingers and wiggled his tongue.
The man continued performing oral sex on the dancer. The dancer clapped and pointed her leg at the ceiling.
Adrian said, “I can’t believe he’s doing that.”
A blow struck a wooden surface loudly. They turned: The bouncer had a nightstick—he had struck something. He was making a furious cut-it-off gesture and was shaking his head and pointing: “There’s cops right outside at the fuckin’ Dunkin’ Donuts.”
The bartender put her hand on the bar and slapped it to get the dancer’s attention.
“Ya gotta stop.”
The dancer took her legs off the man’s shoulders.
The bouncer came over to the man, who had long sideburns, and told him, “No more.”
Adrian looked at Leonard. “You did great with her. You almost got her in your car.”
“Can you believe she lets strange men put their filthy hands on her?”
“I wish I understood why she was letting us touch her. You only gave her a dollar. It can’t be the money. Or is it? I wish I could understand what makes a woman do that. Why is she willing to let you feel her up for a dollar, and another woman, I could take her out for a twenty-dollar date, and she wouldn’t even think of letting me look at her naked? It just doesn’t make sense.”
“She’s on something.”
“Really?”
“Of course she is. Look how happy she is. That’s drug-induced. Drugs change everything with a person.”
“Why does she need drugs? Imagine being able to walk into a bar and have strangers buying you drinks all night!”
“That’s the way it is for women.”
“Maybe I can train myself to not want more than this,” Adrian said, looking at the nude women standing above the men on the bar. “Yes, that’s what I’ll do. I’ll be satisfied with this.”
“You can have more than this. This is just the beginning.”
The bartender approached and Adrian and Leonard stopped talking as she collected the money off the bar into a child’s plastic bucket, the kind that comes with a shovel.
Later, long past midnight, they were sitting in the Mercury somewhere on the shore, the engine idling, the two of them staring out the windshield. The headlights seemed defeated by the darkness as if they were deep in the ocean, looking out a porthole, seeing nothing but flecks of plankton.
Leonard asked if he’d enjoyed his lap dance. Adrian said it had made him feel so much better. He was pleased. The evening had been a success. Not all his evenings had been so grand. He cleared his throat and employed his nasal voice to say, “I told you how I got the clap, didn’t I?”
“Yes, you did. It’s dirty in there. What were you thinking?”
“It’s one of those things I had to learn.” Adrian cleared his throat. “I guess my father wasn’t the best friend to me. That’s why it’s so great I’ve met you.”
In June, Corey got on a major construction project in the North End, thanks to Tom. It was going to be a high-rise. The pay was union scale, which meant Corey was starting at eighteen an hour. Tom would not accept a thank-you, just told him to make the most of it.
He got up early and drove into the city and parked at Haymarket. Guys were there already, trucks parked on the sidewalk, traffic cones on their hoods, pulling tools out. One took off Corey’s hard hat and showed him how to adjust the band. The union men were simply looking for the chance to build something; they were poor; they had to pay for trucks and tools and buy their gas. It wasn’t a way to get rich.
They lined up for an OSHA-enforced warm-up session. In boots and hard hats, they did stretches—tricep, hamstring. When it came to the splits, most could barely get their legs 30 degrees apart. They had to do the standing quad stretch. Guys were losing their balance, their butt cracks showing. The sun was up. It was warm and going to be hot. A breeze chased through the site, carrying the smell of coffee and bread from the North End. The site was in the middle of the street and the roads split around it going towards Charlestown. The city came to an end here and the road went around a corner and on the other side of the corner there were more sites. The whole area was under development. You could see the ant farm of high-rise construction next to the TD Garden and the Zakim Bridge, men in hard hats moving on precast concrete floors, vertical framing, flyouts, a welder producing a smoking blue-white light.
For the first week, he spent most days shoveling dirt in a wheelbarrow and running it over a bridge of boards, which bent under him. He plugged in the lifts at night. He met a woman on the crew from Roxbury, who had a gold nose stud and drove a Bobcat. “I show and prove,” she said. She was another Joan—racially mixed, confident and well adjusted.
His first day, the heavy wheelbarrow flipped him off his feet, and he got thrown head over heels—exactly as if he’d been tossed with a judo throw. He landed on the concrete slab, his hard hat flew off, the wheelbarrow flipped and dumped out its mountain of dirt. He set it upright, shoveled the dirt back in, and carried on. No one laughed; everyone was working. The summer was coming, he loved the job and the men. The pay was a godsend. His mother thanked him.
Joan said, “I like him in his tool belt. I bet he gets the girls going. Hey, I think you dropped a nail. Why don’tcha bend over and pick it up there, blondie.” She began calling Corey “The Workin’ Man.”
After his first check cleared, he went to Stop & Shop and bought spaghetti, ground meat, tomato paste and vegetables. Joan made a big pot of spaghetti and meat sauce and they all ate a feast together, gathered around Gloria in her chair. For each bite, Corey wound the spaghetti on his mother’s fork and fed her.
He came straight home from work in the afternoons, bringing the vigor of the construction site home with him. He got his mother up and out of her chair. He helped her go outside. She went for a short walk, one step at a time, with her walker. She went to the seawall and looked out at the beach, covered in smooth stones, wearing big sunglasses.
The wheelchair was supposed to be a way to extend the patient’s range. It should have been there for her to sit in when she got tired. But Gloria’s chair wasn’t portable. It was big, heavy, hard to maneuver. One had to take off the leg rests, remove the special seat cushion, which had been laboriously constructed in the workshop at Beth Israel, and collapse the frame to take it outside. Even then, the task of fitting it through the doorway placed one at a mechanical disadvantage and required strength and balance. Corey prided himself being able to do it. (He was surprised to learn that Joan could do it too.) Then one had to carry it down the steps. Furthermore, it was fragile and expensive, which mitigated against rolling it on gravel.
Without the chair, his mother couldn’t stay outside for long. She’d get tired and have to head inside. She’d be too tired to take the stairs. Corey would pick her up and carry her inside. But for her, it was humiliating to be carried.
As a result, for increasingly long periods, she was staying continuously indoors, seeing no one but Joan and Corey, the clinic staff on her monthly outings to Longwood, and the social worker. This was bad for her mental health, but it was a trend that would only continue as she got sicker.
In early summer, inspired by his construction job, Corey wanted to build a wheelchair ramp or a set of walker stairs outside the house. They’d be three feet wide with three-and-a-half-inch risers instead of standard seven-inch risers. He went to Lowe’s and priced the supplies. But the project cost too much, plus he’d have to get permissions from the state. Dawn got involved, claiming she could get funding from Share the Care, but she wouldn’t find an answer to anything until after the summer had passed.
To offset the monotony of her life, as the summer progressed, Gloria lived increasingly online. She spent entire days indoors sealed in with the air conditioner running, watching videos nearly around the clock. It was a model of addiction. It left her feeling empty and needing more of the same.
“I should pull myself out of this in the time I have left,” she said. “Life is a gift. I’m not using it.”
She made an effort for several days, but it petered out.
Corey said, “I see what’s going on and I’m worried about you.”
She became deeply upset. First she turned cold and told him sarcastically she couldn’t be as good as he was. Then she grew silent and he could tell she was weeping. He kneeled by her chair and held her skeletal arm.
“I can’t do any better! I tried! I tried!”
“We’ll just get through it—any which way we have to.”
At night, Gloria ate dinner in her Mafia Boss chair with her prison fork.
Joan came home after dark, and she’d sometimes sit with Gloria and go through her book collection, asking about books or CDs or paintings she used to have. “Do you remember that painting of the lady in the shower?”
“I lost that somehow.”
“That was a good painting.”
“Gone with the wind.”
Gloria’s physical condition remained the same throughout the summer, at least to the naked eye, though it had to be assumed that, at the molecular level, her motor system was continuing to deteriorate. Sitting in her chair in shorts, her exposed legs twitched as if hammers in a piano were striking the wires. But rather than reading about medicine—whether Western or Eastern or homeopathic—she looked at paintings on the Web. YouTube had slideshow videos of artworks set to New Age music, Gregorian chant, Sicilian folk music, Vivaldi and the like.
“Listen to that!” she said, her eyes closed, shaking her head with wonder, a feat she could still perform.
A night breeze came from the marsh side of the house, through the kitchenette window.
At this moment, she seemed to have stopped denying her fate. Nor was she angry. She was something else. One day, when Corey was carrying her downstairs so she could take a walk, she asked if he believed in miracles.
“I think anything’s possible.” He raised his chin at the ocean. “The fact that the universe is the way it is, that life is this way. Who could have predicted anything in our lives? Yeah, I think a miracle is possible.”
“Do you think I could go into remission?”
The days got hot and muggy. At night they ran the AC on high in Gloria’s room to keep her cool.
Even with Corey’s paycheck, the electricity bill was hard to pay. They had another air conditioner in the back of his closet but didn’t run it. Hers was the cold room. Everyone in the house went to Gloria’s room for a drink of cool air. As she got sicker, Joan had stopped sleeping in the same bed with her. She slept on the futon—Leonard’s old bed—with the living room window open, the rare car going by, lighting up the walls, then the crickets in the darkness.
For all he thought he was doing, he wasn’t vigilant; he was failing to see everything he could do. He could have built the ramp, but didn’t. It wasn’t the social worker’s fault he failed. He could have done yogic breathing and used prana to bring his mother peace.
Why didn’t he? Good question. The disease, stress, arrogance, impatience, blindness.