I won’t go on about how they did every kind of test imaginable and x-rayed me from head to toe, but I will say, I was mighty glad Destiny was with me when Doctor Birnbaum came in that Friday. He had the most somber look on his face when he sat down on my bed and took hold of my hand, right then, I
knew
something was wrong.
“I’m afraid I don’t have good news,” he said and shook his head like he was real sorrowful. “Those coffee grounds you threw-up, were from your liver.”
Most people think you only
hear
words, but Destiny was watching the doctor’s mouth like she could see the size and shape of every letter.
“It’s symptomatic of pancreatic cancer.”
“What’s the cure?” Destiny asked. She had that kind of pick-yourself-up-and-move-on attitude because she was used to dealing with problems. Me, I’d lived long enough to
know
, there’s no remedy for some things.
“Well,” Doctor Birnbaum said, hesitantly, like he might have preferred to choke down the words instead of spitting them out. “Pancreatic cancer is a tough customer. In some instances, we might try chemotherapy or radiation but those treatments are difficult to tolerate and not often successful in treating this type of cancer. Given Abigail’s age, I wouldn’t recommend either one.”
“What then?” Destiny asked.
“I’m afraid there’s not much we can do.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?” Destiny’s voice got real thin and high-pitched, nothing like the way she usually spoke.
Doctor Birnbaum coughed three or four times, then finally let go of the words. “Pancreatic cancer is almost always terminal,” he said. “There’s little we can do except make sure the patient is comfortable and pain-free.”
“Little? Or nothing?” Destiny was beginning to get the message and her green eyes filled up with so much water they looked like the deep end of the ocean.
I always thought if I got such a piece of bad news I’d break down and cry, or holler about life being unfair, maybe even claim there had been a mistake because such a thing couldn’t be true, but that wasn’t what happened. I just leaned back into my pillow and let the reality of it cover me over like a heavy winter blanket. As the weight of it pressed down on me, I realized that Doctor Birnbaum was trying to tell me in the most kindly way, I was dying. Not maybe dying, but definitely dying. “How long?” I asked, trying to focus on what I needed to know.
“I can’t say definitely. Three months, six months, maybe longer.”
Doctor Birnbaum said he’d arrange for the Hospice nurses to come and take care of me but Destiny told him
she’d
be the one to see to my needs, whatever they might be. By the time the doctor left the room, the poor child was sobbing like her little heart was gonna break. “Hush up that crying,” I told her. “I’m an old woman, Destiny. I’ve lived a long life and a person can’t ask for more than that. Sure as a person’s born, a person’s gonna die!” I tried my best to console her, but she just kept sobbing. Finally, I said I didn’t want to hear another word about dying and such. “Whatever time I’ve got, I want to enjoy!” I told her. I wasn’t ready to think about the being dead part, I was busy focusing on how much more living time I had left; which I suppose was why I never got around to putting things in order the way I should have.
T
o be perfectly honest, my stomach was feeling a lot better by the time I left the hospital, so the two of us went out and had a plate of fried oysters for lunch. I’d already laid down the law about any talk of dying, so Destiny made a genuine effort to be her old self. She ordered us up martinis and told the waiter to bring us another round as soon as we’d finished those. She tried to pretend things were the same as always, but that happy-go-lucky laugh of hers sounded like a sorrowful echo.
That night Destiny went out to get chicken and biscuits from Popeye’s – the doctor said eat whatever I felt like and that’s exactly what I was doing – when she came back she brought her little valise and moved in. I had planned to tell her about the bonds after supper but we started watching
Some Like it Hot,
the movie where Jack Lemmon and Tony Curtis join a girl’s band, and got to laughing so hard we about rolled off the sofa. I didn’t know how many more days of laughing I had left in me, so I wasn’t about to spoil this one by getting onto something serious. The thing about dying is, that even when you know it’s gonna happen, you still insist on telling yourself, there’s more time. Of course, I was figuring on the outside edge of what Doctor Birnbaum said, six months, maybe more. As it turned out, it was a lot less.
T
he very next day, Destiny called up the restaurant where she’d been waitressing and told them she needed to take a leave of absence. Six months to a year, she said. The old guy that owned the place complained and said she should have given him some notice, but in the end he told her it would be okay. I figure he went along with what she wanted because Destiny was a top notch worker and he didn’t want to lose her.
That first week after she moved in, we had ourselves a pretty good time. Mostly we did silly things – like opening three different bottles of wine so we could decide which went better with Frito Lays, or driving down to Macy’s to try on the most outrageous hats we could find. One day we went clear across town to the Le’ Grand Salon to get ourselves a manicure and pedicure. I was planning to have my nails painted
Natural Blush
, but when we walked out of there, Destiny and I both had fire engine red nails. I felt sorry I’d never gone swimming naked, but I didn’t have the least bit of regret about those scarlet colored fingernails.
The following week, I got real sick and that was the end of our running around.
A
half-dozen times I started to tell Destiny about the bonds and what she was to do with them, but there never seemed to be a right time. It’s a sorrowful thing to talk about what to do with your stuff when you’re dead and gone – I didn’t feel much like discussing it and I suppose Destiny didn’t either. I could tell she was hurting; it was in her eyes, even though she didn’t say a word.
That week we played cards a few times and watched a show or two on television, but mostly I slept and she sat on the chair right beside my bed. If I so much as breathed heavy, she’d jump up and ask if I wanted a pain pill. “How about a drink of water?” she’d ask, “Or, maybe a foot rub?”
L
ess than three weeks after I came home from the hospital, I died. It wasn’t real dramatic; I just went to sleep and never again woke up.
People think dying is a painful thing, but it isn’t. Sometime during the middle of the night, I simply stepped out of my old used-up body and became light as a feather. I didn’t have an ache or a pain anywhere and even though I couldn’t see myself, I knew I looked just like I did when I was twenty years old.
Poor Destiny was the one who found it painful. She shed enough tears to fill an ocean. I felt real appreciative that I’d been blessed with a friend such as Destiny, but hated to see her torn apart that way. I was wishing I could put my arm around her and say, “
Don’t cry, honey, I’m still here.”
But of course, such a thing is not possible.
I wasn’t dead more than a few hours, when I remembered about those bonds and knew I should have taken care of business while I still had the chance.
I
t seems to me that God ought to give a person the chance to see ahead to the terrible happenings that are gonna occur after they’re dead; that way people would take greater care in settling their life properly. I certainly would have. Once you’re gone, all you can do is look back and think,
Oh dear, if only I’d written that down on paper.
Of course, it’s too late then.
After I died, Destiny was the one who took care of things. Thank Heaven I’d switched my bank accounts over to her name, otherwise I don’t know how she would have paid for the funeral. Destiny had the little bit she’d saved from her waitressing job at the restaurant and part of what I’d given her last Christmas, but the way money slid through her fingers, even that had dwindled down considerably. There are a million good things anyone could say about a person like Destiny, but being frugal sure isn’t one of them. Why, she could hold onto a greased pig longer than she could a dollar. When she was making arrangements for my funeral Destiny told long-faced Mister Panderelli that she wanted the very best of everything. She turned away from a perfectly sensible oak casket and ordered a steel coffin that Mister Panderelli claimed was vacuum sealed and guaranteed secure. Secure from what? Who in the world would want to pilfer an old woman’s dead bones? From my vantage point, I could tell Panderelli was capitalizing on the poor girl’s grief. Destiny spent twenty-three-thousand dollars on that coffin and then she ordered so many sprays of bright red roses you’d have thought they were laying out Tallulah Bankhead’s first cousin.
She could have taken that money and crammed it into her own pocket, but instead she spent it on me, without any inkling whatsoever that I was still watching over her. Now, that’s pure love, the kind most folks find hard to believe. If the Good Lord Himself had ordered me up a savior, he couldn’t have found a better one than Destiny.
That last year I was alive, I’d gotten pretty forgetful. I’d misplace my checkbook; forget to pay the electric bill, things like that. One time I went to the Bountiful Basket and got to the checkout with a cartload of groceries and not a nickel in my pocketbook. That very day I said, “Destiny, I need you to help take care of my finances and I’m willing to pay for your time.”
She laughed that big round laugh of hers – I often wondered how such a sizable laugh could come out of such a little person – “Pay me?” she said. “Why, I’d be glad to help, but you don’t need to pay me!”
“I insist!” Every time I went to give Destiny any cash money, we’d go ‘round and ‘round. “I’m no charity case!” I said, as if I was real insulted.
“I never claimed you were. But, I’m still not gonna take money for helping out.”
“Then I’ll do without your help.” I could afford to talk sassy ‘cause I knew full well that once I’d asked her to do something, neither hell nor high water would keep her from it.
We dickered back and forth a bit, I offered to pay five-hundred dollars a month; she said she’d take fifty. Finally we settled on one-hundred and that’s when Destiny started writing my checks and taking care of whatever needed taking care of. A number of times when Elliott stopped by to tell me how down on his luck he was, I had Destiny write him out a check for five hundred dollars. “Just make it payable to
cash,
” he’d usually say and she’d do exactly as he asked.
I was pleased with such an arrangement because having a trustworthy person like Destiny to oversee things was worth a lot more than a few paltry dollars. It surely made my life easier and I’m certain having that extra money was a Godsend for her. Right off she bought herself a brand new Westinghouse microwave and a red fox coat that she planned to pay off in installments. I told her, “Destiny, you oughtn’t run up a bunch of finance charges, I’ll buy you that coat outright.” She just shrugged it off and said something about how paying on time didn’t bother her one little bit; then next thing I knew, she’d gone and bought herself a twenty-one inch television set on the installment plan. I was happy to see her get the nice things she deserved. All my life, I’d pinched and saved, always worrying about the future, then before I knew it, I was an old woman with not much future left to worry about and pitifully little to show for all the scrimping. If I had it to do over again, I’d live my life just the way Destiny does. She’s one person who won’t end up with a bunch of regrets about things she didn’t do.
As far as the money was concerned, I had more than I could live long enough to spend. There was still well over one-hundred thousand dollars in the Middleboro Savings Bank, and that wasn’t counting the bonds.
I wasn’t aware of those bonds when Scott Bartell settled up Will’s estate and if I hadn’t gone back to sorting through the boxes a few months later they might have been shipped off to the Salvation Army along with the rest of Will and Becky’s belongings. The bonds were in the very last carton, folded inside Papa’s worn out bible. United States Savings Bonds – ten of them, each one good for one-hundred-thousand dollars.
Right off I knew Will was the one who bought those bonds and I had to believe it was with the money he’d got for the farm. He claimed the United States Government was the only place a person could be sure their money was safe and if you thought otherwise he’d argue you blue in the face. Get him started and he’d go on and on about how he and Papa barely scraped through that first year of the great depression, when the Chestnut Ridge Savings Bank closed their doors and left a bunch of farmers standing in the street, wondering how they’d get the money to pay their bills. “Papa was one of those farmers,” Will would say and then he’d tell how they counted up pennies and made do with the nothing more than the food they grew. “That was the year Papa did not give one red cent to the MethodistChurch,” Will would say to emphasize his point, for everyone knew Papa thought not tithing was as much a sin as thieving or lying.
The day I found the bonds, I counted them at least a half-dozen times. I just couldn’t believe that anyone would pay so much money for a place that destroyed whole families. One-million dollars! It was a figure so big it got stuck in my throat if I tried to say it aloud but all I could think about was how Will and Becky had never gotten to take much pleasure from all those years of hard work. I cried for a long while, then I took the bonds out of Papa’s bible and hid them away for safekeeping.
After that, I pretty much willed the bonds out of my head. A wiser person would have considered their worth, but given the bitter way I’d left Papa and the farm they weighed heavy on my conscience, like an ill-gotten gain. Anyway, once Destiny started watching over my finances, I didn’t have occasion to think about them. For a person who was such a spendthrift with her own money, she was surprisingly careful with mine and would count up every penny. At the end of the month she’d open the checkbook and show how she’d paid the gas and electric, the insurance, the groceries, and such. “Now, this check for five hundred dollars cash,” she’d explain, “that was what we used for household spending money.”