Authors: J. C. Gatlin
“I can’t
believe you could write such beautiful poetry,” she gushed. “It’s so unlike you.”
“You make
me a better man,” he said, kissing her. It was all the explanation she needed.
Their
first summer after high school, that first summer as adults, was the best time
of her life. They had fun. They made love. And they made plans for the future.
But the end of summer brought devastating news: a routine X-ray showed a
suspicious shadow on her mother’s left breast.
It was
nothing, Kim was told. The doctors were being overly cautious. And the way her
mother worked out, took care of herself and ate properly, it had to be nothing.
It certainly couldn’t be cancer…
But
it
was
cancer. And her mother grew seriously ill.
Kimberly
and her father focused on her mother's health and comfort. It consumed Kim’s
attention and Ross couldn’t handle it. He moved on to another girl with more
time on her hands and less drama in her life. Kim didn’t care. She didn’t have
time to care. She wasn’t going to let cancer take her mother…
But it
did, in the space of a few months.
Nor did
it stop there. As the disease
ate
her mother from the
inside out, it also ate away at her father’s soul. He was no longer the
headstrong family man who built furniture and bird houses in the garage, loved
the Florida Gators, pre-dawn fishing trips and his wife and daughter.
When the agent for the insurance company came knocking on
their door, her father refused to speak with him.
He didn't want to talk about final benefits and told the
man to get out of his house.
The agent
was understandably surprised, and he left the check on the kitchen table. It
sat there long after the man left, and for days until Kim couldn't stand it any
longer.
She
pleaded with her father to get help and dragged him to grief counseling.
Together, they talked to a patient, understanding psychiatrist named Natalie,
who was a widow herself. She had the brightest blue eyes Kim had ever seen.
“Your
mother's in a better place,” Natalie told them. But it offered little comfort
to her father.
His heart
withered when mother died, leaving an angry, brooding shadow of the man that
was. Like his mood, he now sought the dark. All the blinds remained
shut
, the doors locked and their home became a silent and
dusty memorial. Her father found every photograph of her mother that was ever
taken, and he taped them to the walls. He stayed up all night watching their
wedding and vacation videos. And when he finally lost his job, the fridge sat
empty until the electric company eventually turned off the power.
Still,
the insurance check sat on the kitchen table, untouched.
Kim met
with the grief counselor again, alone, and confided in Natalie all the details
of her father's downward spiral.
“You need
time to mourn and heal,” Natalie told her. “You can't do
that
and
take care of your father at
the same time.”
“What are
you suggesting?” Kim leaned forward in the plush chair across from the
psychiatrist.
“Get away
for a few days.” Natalie's bright eyes enlarged like saucers. “Do you have
family you could visit for a while? You know, to relieve the stress?”
Kim
nodded, thinking of her
Grampa
.
After
ensuring the cupboards were stocked with cans of tuna and tomato soup, and her
father was as comfortable as possible, Kim left their dark home to stay with
her grandfather. He was heartbroken as well, and mourning the loss of his
daughter. Kim knew that. But she also knew that he wasn’t about to let her see
it.
Sitting
her down, he smiled at her and offered, “Life won’t get any easier, darling.
But you’ll get a hell of a lot stronger.”
When Kim
returned home a few weeks later, she found that the power had been restored,
the refrigerator was full again and the bathrooms clean. The darkness had
lifted. Not just within the house, but within her father too.
Even the
insurance check that had been collecting dust on the kitchen table for the last
few weeks had finally disappeared.
Kim was
elated and thankful for the change. Her father was a new man. And to celebrate,
he took her to dinner.
With Natalie.
“The shrink?”
Kim
couldn't believe it.
“She's a
widow,” he answered. “And she's surprisingly good for me.”
Natalie
made dinners and would set the table in the formal dining room. She used
Mother’s good china. She reorganized the kitchen and redecorated the family
room. All her mother’s knickknacks gradually disappeared, one by one. Mother
could never convince her Dad to join the health club, but somehow, Natalie did.
And then grocery shopping together.
Then
salsa dancing.
A friend spotted them together late one night at the
Danceteria
and told Kim all about it.
Every
little disgusting detail.
And it
didn't end there.
Kim came
home one afternoon to find their framed family portrait that hung proudly over
the fireplace mantle was replaced with a water color painting.
“That
portrait is over ten years old,” Natalie shot back. “You all have Eighties hair.”
Kim
didn’t care. The water color painting came down and the framed family portrait
went back up. But it was a futile attempt to hold onto the past, and Kim knew
that. And, she knew there was no stopping the inevitable.
“We’re
getting married,” her father told her, in the formal dining room, over a dinner
served by Natalie on her mother’s good china. “Your mother would want me to be
happy.”
Happy?
Yes.
Replacing
her
with their trusted shrink? Moving into
her
home and
into
her
bed with
her
husband before her corpse was even cold and
buried? No.
Kim was
inconsolable. Until that day, she had wondered how she would ever go away to
college and leave her home and her father. Now she counted down the days till
she would pack-up and leave.
Once she
did, she didn’t look back.
The day
after the wedding, Kim moved into the cozy townhome with her
Grampa
. He needed help with chores around the house, and
needed someone to take care of him ever since
Nanna
passed. He paid for her to take some classes at Stillwater University.
Life was
good here. She made friends with a crazy redhead named Mallory, who lived in
the townhome next door. And Zeus loved to terrorize the little Pekingese that
lived in the townhome across the parking lot. She also enjoyed the University;
she could walk there from the townhome. In fact, she could walk almost anywhere
in town – to the grocery store, to the bookstore, to the downtown restaurants.
That was one of the things that she loved most about charming Stillwater. She
was happy here. And even though she missed her mother and thought about her
often, she felt like she was putting her life back together and moving on.
Still she was lonely, and she missed Ross.
That’s
why,
one fall afternoon while she studied in the library,
Kim was so surprised to find another poem slipped inside her school books.
Again, it was beautifully written.
“Oh, Love
rips the heart in pieces,
When
distance fills the empty creases
Of time
And days become
long stretches
Of pain
and wretches
Of
torment
When our love ceases.”
Kim
promptly stood up in the quiet library with a noisy, boisterous rumble and ran
to the large windows. Gazing outside, she looked down on the campus to find
Ross standing there on the grass. He was waiting for her with flowers in hand.
She
rushed out the library, bolting down the stone steps to the lower level and
rushed to the doors. Then collecting herself, she calmly stepped outside and
approached him. She suppressed a smile to coldly acknowledge him.
“I made a
terrible mistake,” he pleaded. “Can you ever forgive me?”
Of course
, she said silently in her head. Out loud, she wanted to
make him suffer a little. “We shouldn’t even be talking,” she told him, hitting
him on the shoulder. “After what you did, I can never forgive you.”
But she
did, and that led to passionate make-up sex in the dark, empty auditorium. The
four o’clock Dramatic Arts Class interrupted them, but they snuck out undetected.
Ross moved to the small college town to be
with her. She introduced him to her grandfather and to Mallory. Zeus was happy
to see him again. He found a job downtown at Eddy’s garage and even enrolled in
a couple of classes at the University.
Kim and Ross
dated again, like they were recapturing that magical summer. Everything was
going great, until one fateful night when they couldn’t agree on a restaurant.
He wanted pizza. She wanted Italian. They both wanted to end the relationship
for good.
Kim raged
home, furious, vowing to never speak to him again. But when she reached the
dark townhome, she knew immediately something was wrong. Zeus was upset and
barking. And
Grampa
was lying on the linoleum floor
in the kitchen, unconscious.
It was
bad.
Really bad.
She asked the landlord to help and
they rushed him to the hospital. Doctors said that her grandfather had suffered
a stroke. He would need round the clock care, and would have to live in a
nursing home. Kim was distraught over the news.
She
watched over him at the hospital. Both the doctors and nurses urged her to go
home and to get some rest, but she refused to leave her grandfather’s side.
“I want
to be there if he wakes up,” she insisted. “We’re all the family we have left.”
And she
watched diligently over him until he was safely moved out of ICU into his own
room and was awake again. But even then, she still spent hours and hours at the
hospital. One night, she dozed off in the chair beside his hospital bed. When
she woke, she found a note in her lap.
“You are
the strongest, most loving woman I have ever met. You inspire me,” was all it
said. She knew immediately who wrote it, and who had slipped it into the room
while she slept.
When she
made it back home, alone, she had never been more thankful to see Ross there,
waiting for her.
“I heard
about what happened,” he said. He kissed her, consoled her, and told her
everything would be okay. The next day, he moved into the townhome with her.
Still,
Ross was constantly up and down about their relationship. He left her, saying
that the only way to keep her was to leave her - because he felt he needed to
work on his temper, or he'd push her too far and lose her forever. That same
night he changed his mind and asked her to take him back.
She did.
And they
moved forward, together. Kim visited her grandfather every day in the old
folks
home and kept her grades up at the University. Ross
worked at the garage downtown, and together they made a life for themselves,
the kind Kim had always dreamed of – minus the fabulous career and penthouse
apartment. Until one day, they were driving to the Dollar Store downtown.
“You
know, there's actually not a lot of stuff really priced at a dollar there,” Kim
mentioned.
“Not
possible,” he said. “Everything's a dollar. That's why they're called dollar
stores.”
“Not true,”
Kim insisted. “It's all a marketing ploy to get more people into the store.”
“Then
they couldn't legally call it a Dollar Store,” he shot back, still trying to
convince her. The fight escalated and Kim didn’t speak to him for three weeks.
Once
again, he left her a note professing his love and asking her to meet him at
Greico’s
Italian Restaurant for dinner. There, he told her
that she was “
The One
” and he couldn't let her walk away.
“I just
don’t believe the sudden change in heart,” she said to him across the table,
her eyes flickering in the candle light.
“It’s not
a change of heart,” he said to her. “I’ve always felt this way, but I was
scared.”
“Scared
of what?”
“Change,”
he said a little too quickly, then scrambled to explain himself.
“Scared of growing up.
Of the next step.
Of the responsibility.”
Kim’s
eyes watered, fearing that once again they had reached the impassable
crossroads. “Growing up and taking on the responsibility is inevitable,” she
said. “It’s going to happen to us whether we’re prepared for it or not.
Whether we want to accept it or not.