“I don’t know,” I said. “The store is under new management, you know, and I hear the new boss is a real hard-ass.”
She laughed and pulled me by the hand out the door.
We did not talk about what happened the night of the last supper. But I did not feel like a notch on Mickie’s bedpost, as I had with Donna. Over the course of the fall months, I’d had a lot of time to think about Mickie and to consider what had happened that night. I knew Mickie loved me, or at least that’s what I told myself. And I told myself that she’d fled that night because she had felt something with me that she had never felt with any of the others, and it had scared her. Mickie didn’t want to be in love, burdened by the terrible lessons her parents had taught her. She didn’t want the pain. Her knocking on our door that Thanksgiving was Mickie’s way of telling me she loved me. It wasn’t enough, not for me, but I was certain it was also all I would ever get out of Mickie.
30
The following fall, just before the start of my freshman year at Stanford, I drove to the Palo Alto Eye Clinic to see Dr. Pridemore. “What can I do for you?” he asked. My annual visit was not for several more months.
I had given God so many chances to show me his way. I felt betrayed, and never as much as when he failed to answer my prayers that he spare my father the debilitating effects of his stroke. If he would not do that, I knew he would not change the color of my eyes, as I had so fervently prayed when I was just a young boy. I knew now that only science could do that.
“God’s will is not our way,” my mother used to say. And I agreed. I had decided it was not my way. “I’m ready,” I said. “I’d like to try those brown contact lenses.”
PART SIX
HELLO DARKNESS, MY OLD FRIEND
1
1989
Burlingame, California
With more and more damage caused by the earthquake being revealed by newscasters on Ernie’s television, I finally got through to my mother’s telephone. She was relieved to hear my voice and to know I was okay.
“I’m fine,” she said. “The house is fine. Some of Grandma O’Malley’s Spode china tumbled off the display shelf and broke. Nothing that can’t be replaced.”
I rattled off a series of questions. “Do you smell any gas? Did you check the pilot light on the water heater? Do you have bottled water?”
“I’m fine, Sam,” she reassured me. “Stop worrying.”
“Have you reached the rehabilitation facility?” I asked. “How’s Dad?”
My father never recovered from his stroke, which the doctors said had also triggered the early onset of dementia. He became confused easily, especially if there was a break in his daily routine. “He’s fine,” she said. “The facility didn’t suffer any damage.”
“Do you want me to come by and help you clean up?” I asked.
“Don’t think about it. It isn’t much. Besides, I’m heading up to see your father. I want to be with him.” My father couldn’t do much in a wheelchair, but my mother had told me before that she didn’t care. They sat together holding hands. Sometimes she would place a rosary in his fingers and help him move from bead to bead while she prayed aloud. “There’s no place else I’d rather be,” she’d say.
“I’ll call you later. Probably tomorrow,” I said.
I hung up, thinking of that night when I’d learned of my father’s stroke, and the recollection made me realize again how precious life is, and how fragile. One minute you’re celebrating graduation, and the next your father is near death. One minute you’re getting ready to experience a World Series, the next you could be dead under a pile of concrete. Too short. Life was too short to settle for anything less than the love I had witnessed when Ernie pulled into his driveway, the love I had witnessed my entire life, the love Mickie said I deserved.