Within four days, half the town, after Frank had sworn them to secrecy, had been told of Sam’s imminent demise. Without mentioning names, Bob Miles at the Herald had written a touching editorial about the brevity of life and the inscrutable ways of the Almighty. On Sunday morning at meeting for worship, the women dabbed their eyes and hugged him; the men patted him on the back and raved about his sermon, which Sam hadn’t spent that much time preparing for worrying about his scrapbook. It had been a stream-of-consciousness sermon, with a lot of On the one hand, this…but on the other hand, that’s punctuating his remarks.
“Wonderful message,” Asa Peacock had told him, pumping Sam’s arm like a thirsty man priming a well. “Don’t remember when I’ve heard such fine preaching.”
“Unusually perceptive,” Miriam Hodge noted when she came through the line after worship to shake Sam’s hand.
Even Fern Hampton allowed that it had been one of his better efforts.
On Monday morning he woke up filled with energy and more than a little angry at having flunked out of a scrapbooking class where grades weren’t even given.
He turned to Barbara. “By golly, I’m not going to take this sitting down.”
“That’s the spirit,” she said. “You can whip this!”
“Darn tootin’,” he said.
In the six years Frank had been his secretary, Sam’s vocabulary had expanded to include a number of sayings—“Darn tootin’,” “Goldarnit,” “Jumpin’ Jehosaphat!” and “Yessiree bob.”
He ate a hearty breakfast. It pleased Barbara immensely to note his vigorous appetite.
I’ll show that Hilda Gruber, he thought, while walking to his office. I’ll make the finest scrapbook this world has ever seen! He clenched his jaw, determined to overcome this grave injustice.
He strode into his office, and Frank leaped to his feet. Frank’s strike had been short-lived. Indeed, since last Thursday he’d been unusually solicitous.
“Let me get you some coffee, Sam.”
“Thank you, Frank, but no. I don’t have time to drink coffee.”
He set his briefcase on his desk and pulled his scrapbook from it, arranging it on his desk.
“Is that the scrapbook you’re making for Barbara?”
“Yep.”
Frank marveled silently at Sam’s dedication. Dying of some fearsome disease and all he cared about was his wife’s Christmas present.
Sam glanced at his watch, at the tiny date in the three o’clock window. “I have fourteen days to finish this scrapbook, and I’m going to do it if it kills me.”
Frank winced at Sam’s choice of words.
He stood behind Sam, scrutinizing his scrapbook. “Mind a bit of advice?”
“About what?”
“Your scrapbook.”
“What do you know about scrapbooks?” Sam said, with a snort.
“What do you mean, what do I know? I know plenty. What do you think I did the whole time I was in North Carolina. My daughter and granddaughters are in a scrapbooking class. It’s all we did the whole time I was down there.”
“So what’s your advice?”
“Your lettering is all the same. You need to make it different. Be creative.”
“I thought all the lettering had to be one inch high.”
“Where’d you get that crazy idea?”
Sam hesitated, and not wanting to revisit his humiliating failure in the scrapbook class, said simply, “I read it somewhere.”
“There’s your problem, right there. You read too much. I’ve told you that before. Scoot over and lemme take a look at this mess.”
Frank wheeled his chair in from his office, plunked down beside Sam, and began flipping through the scrapbook. “What’s this?”
Sam smiled proudly. “That’s Barbara giving birth to Levi. Took that picture myself.”
“And what makes you think your wife will want the entire world to see her uterus?”
Sam reddened. “I just thought since it was a special moment she’d want to have it in her scrapbook.”
“Was the first night of your honeymoon special?” Frank asked.
Sam thought for a moment, smiling at the memory. “Very special.”
“Well, then, you have any pictures of that we can put in here?”
“Of course not,” Sam said indignantly. “Besides, that’s a private matter.”
“My point exactly,” Frank said. “Same with the birth picture. We’re all glad you have children, but we don’t want to see their conception or their birth. Jumpin’ Jehosaphat, Sam, what were you thinking?”
“I guess you have a point,” Sam conceded, removing the picture.
By the time Frank had gone through the scrapbook, he’d removed every picture but two.
“This is going to be the world’s thinnest scrapbook,” Sam said glumly.
“You just don’t have an eye for pictures, that’s all,” Frank said. “But not to worry, because I do. Where do you keep your pictures?”
“In a shoe box in our front closet.”
Frank shook his head, nearly overwhelmed by the task at hand. “He keeps his pictures in a shoe box,” he muttered under his breath. “Why aren’t I surprised?” He turned to Sam. “Can you sneak the shoe box out of your house and get it here to the office, or do you need me to do that too?”
“I think I can sneak something from my own house,” Sam said. “I’m not a total idiot.”
Frank rose from his chair. “Tomorrow then. Now you’ll have to excuse me. I have work to do.”
He shrugged on his coat and tugged his hat down over his ears.
“Where are you going?” Sam asked.
“To the scrapbooking store in the city. You don’t have half the supplies you need.”
It was a five-hour round trip, which gave Frank plenty of time to stew about Sam. He worried that he’d been too hard on him, but putting up a gruff front was all that kept him from breaking down in front of Sam. Forty-four years old, two little kids, and he’s dying from a mouse bite, he thought bitterly. There’s no justice in this world.
He bought three hundred dollars worth of materials, money he’d been saving for a new truck. With this being Sam’s last Christmas and all, it was the least he could do.
Frank arrived early the next morning and made coffee for Sam, who appeared a little after eight carrying a toolbox.
“I told Barbara I had to bring my tools to fix the toilet in the men’s bathroom,” he said, lifting the shoe box of pictures from his toolbox.
“Good thinking,” Frank said.
They began sorting through the pictures. “First, we eliminate all the pictures that make her look fat. Women hate looking at pictures that make them look fat.”
“She weighs only a hundred and thirty-five,” Sam said.
“And yet just this Sunday morning she put on a skirt and asked you if it made her look fat. Didn’t she?”
“How’d you know?”
“They all do that,” Frank said. He studied a picture of Barbara standing beside a canoe, then set it in the keep stack. “That’s a nice one,” he said, tapping it with his finger.
Sam smiled. “We were on a camping trip. Before we had the boys.”
“Now here she is sitting in the canoe wearing a life jacket,” Frank said, picking up another picture. “Do you remember what she said when she saw that picture?”
Sam thought for a moment. “I believe she said the life jacket made her look big.”
“See what I mean.” He put the offending picture back in the box. “Won’t be needing that one.”
Frank continued to pull pictures from the shoe box. “How come you have so many pictures of her laying in bed asleep?”
“Oh, I don’t know. I just think she looks cute when she’s sleeping.”
“Women do not like to have their picture taken when they have morning hair,” Frank said. “You’re lucky she didn’t slap you for taking these pictures.”
“So they don’t go in the scrapbook either?”
“Nope,” Frank said, tossing them back in the shoe box.
They worked their way through the entire box until they had a suitable batch of photographs stacked on Sam’s desk.
Frank spread them out on the desk and surveyed them. “Now we have to divide them into categories.”
“Well,” Sam said, pointing to half a dozen different photos, “these are from her childhood, so let’s put them together.”
“Better yet, let’s take this childhood picture of you on your bicycle and this picture of your boys at the beach and put them alongside one of Barbara’s childhood pictures, and we’ll call that section The Lazy Days of Summer and we’ll put a nice summery border on that page.”
“Yessiree bob,” Sam said. “I like it.”
It took them several hours to group the photographs, and by lunchtime they were famished. Sam had skipped breakfast and was so hungry he had a headache. “Think I’ll just lay down for a few minutes and rest my eyes,” he told Frank.
It was all Frank could do not to weep, seeing Sam stretched out on the couch, his body under assault by this mysterious malady.
“How about I go get us some hamburgers from the Coffee Cup?” Frank asked.
“Ketchup only, no cheese,” Sam said weakly. “Say, you wouldn’t have any aspirin, would you?”
“I’ll stop by the Rexall and get you some, buddy. You hang in there, you hear.”
Frank hurried the two blocks to the Coffee Cup and ordered their meal.
“How’s Sam doing?” Vinny Toricelli, the owner of the Coffee Cup, asked Frank.
“Not good at all. He’s laying down over at the church.”
Vinny shook his head. “I just can’t believe he’s got polio. I thought they had that cured.”
“He doesn’t have polio. Who told you that?”
“That’s what Kyle Weathers said he had.”
“That’s not right. I looked it up myself. He’s got some kind of virus you get from mouse bites.”
“I heard about that. Hey, that stuff’ll kill you.”
“He’s in a pretty bad way,” Frank said glumly.
The bell over the door rang as Asa Peacock walked in. “Hey, Frank. How’s Sam?”
“Poorly.”
“Danged cancer. This just makes me sick.”
“He doesn’t have cancer,” Vinny Toricelli said. “For Pete’s sake, get your facts right. He’s got a mouse virus. Who told you he had cancer?”
“Fern Hampton called Jessie and told her he had cancer.”
“Well, right there’s your problem,” Vinny said. “People are running their mouths off without knowing what they’re talking about.”
“How long are they givin’ him?” Asa asked.
“’Til just after Christmas,” Frank said. “He’s making Barbara a scrapbook for her Christmas present, and I think he wants to live long enough to give it to her.”
Asa and Vinny grimaced, their chins trembling with grief. Vinny wrapped the hamburgers in waxed papers and placed them in a paper sack. Frank reached for his wallet, but Vinny held up his hand. “On the house. You tell Sam we’re thinking of him.”
“Can’t do that. I’m not supposed to know.”
“Well, we’re thinkin’ of him all the same.”
“Thanks, Vinny.”
He swung past the Rexall on his way back to the meetinghouse and bought a bottle of aspirin.
“These are for Sam,” he explained to Thad Cramer.
“How’s he doing?”
“Pitiful. You know he lost all his hair.”
Thad shook his head mournfully. “I saw him just this morning, walking by on his way to work. To be honest, I’m surprised he’s still up and about.”
“He’s running on pure willpower. He wants to make it to Christmas so he can give Barbara a gift he’s made her.”
“What’s that?”
Frank glanced around the Rexall. “Promise not to tell anybody?”
“Sure.”
“He’s makin’ her a picture scrapbook. Now, don’t you tell anyone. Boy, if there’s one thing I can’t abide, it’s a gossip.”
“Tick a lock,” Thad said, zipping his fingers across his lips.
He paid for the aspirin and arrived back at the meetinghouse to find Sam asleep on the couch. He considered not waking him and letting him have his rest, but he needed nourishment too. He shook Sam gently on the shoulder. “Wake up, buddy. I got our lunch.”
He arranged two places at his desk where they could eat. Sam devoured his hamburger and ate half of Frank’s, then swallowed two aspirin and within an hour was considerably revived, which gladdened Frank’s heart.
But looking at Sam, with his pale scalp and the bags under his eyes, he still couldn’t help but worry, and he prayed that when it came Sam’s time to go, the Lord would take him quickly and without pain.