All the Good Parts (3 page)

PROS

It would be nice. Really nice.

24/7 access to that new-baby smell.

CONS

Money (lack thereof), man (super lack thereof), school (finishing up in six months, but still), immaturity (mine), baby living in a basement (mold? spiders?), imposing on Carly and Donal. It could—dear God—inherit my snorty laugh, pointy elbows, nail-biting habit, strangely off-center widow’s peak, and hay fever. Not to mention bringing some innocent person into a world with rampant unemployment, cash-strapped school systems, standardized everything, Snapchat and Instagram, PCBs in the water supply, drought in California, hurricanes, tornadoes, and tsunamis, bullying, Ebola outbreaks, terrorism, pollution, rude people, pedophiles, GMOs, Grand Theft Auto, cancer, failing infrastructure, trans fats, school shootings, reality television, overpopulation, racial profiling, dying honeybees, earthquakes, traffic light cameras, supermodels, superbugs, and climate freaking change.

Pause. Deep breath.

So many reasons to not force another life into this mess.

I had other, more personal, items to add, but they were even scarier, and my hand wouldn’t write those. I was nearly forty, midlife if my body agreed to hang on for that long. I’d wasted the first half of my so-limited time on this planet holding myself back, content to march a full step behind everyone else, a shadowy figure photobombing other people’s photographs. I watched my friends struggle to gain what I silently wished for, trading my goals for the cool relief of invisibility, the peace of the unchallenged. I made the mistake of thinking life, if I were doing it right, should get progressively easier. What I hadn’t realized was what I thought was a quest for simplicity was really a slow detachment, so steady and continuous I barely felt my own life fall away from me.

Maybe it was time for that to change.

Having a child meant letting go of easy and embracing difficult. It meant being uncomfortable and anxious, insecure and vulnerable. It meant being fully present in the moment and invested in the future. It meant having enough life flowing through my veins that I had some to spare.

I always felt like the kid too slow to move after the piñata burst, scrambling on my hands and knees to pick up the scraps no one else wanted. But I’d felt a shift in Dr. Bridge’s office, an acknowledgment of something difficult yet truly visceral, more pure and undiluted than instinct.

Hand shaking, I picked up my pen again:

PROS, part 2

I’d be putting someone in the world who will be so loved he couldn’t help but put more love out there. I’d give him my love, and he’d give his to another, and they’d give theirs, and so on, and so on, and though our numbers would be small, the feeling wouldn’t be, and it would grow and grow until our contribution to the great reserve of love, keeping us all one step ahead of so much awful, was substantial enough to count.

Later, after the kids were tucked safely in their beds, I found Carly sitting at the kitchen table, eyes closed, hands gripping the stem of a very full glass of red wine. With such busy days, it wasn’t unusual to catch her taking a ten-second break, eyelids blissfully shut, but she looked frozen, like someone had zapped her with a stun gun.

I stayed quiet for a moment, studying her. When I started taking art classes back at St. Monica’s, Carly was my first model. Her glowing skin, sleepy and heavy-lidded eyes, and halo of dark hair always brought comparisons to pre-Raphaelite beauties, and even in the jaundiced kitchen light, her skin retained that combination of rose and gold my paintbrush could never resist. I envied my sister for many things, but never her beauty. It was her only point of vulnerability.

“Hey,” I whispered.

Carly jumped to life. “It’s late, isn’t it?” She blinked at the wine sloshing around in the glass, and then took a moment to focus on my face. “Don’t look at me like that. The doctor says it’s medicinal.”

“I wasn’t judging.”

“Then join me.”

I set my pro-con list on the counter and poured a glass for myself. Realizing my stomach was empty, I grabbed some goat cheese and grapes from the fridge and tossed them on a plate with some crackers.

“Classy,” Carly said as I brought our snack to the table. “Sure beats Fruit Roll-Ups.”

We ate in companionable silence, pausing only to take long pulls from our wineglasses.

“So what are you going to do?” Carly said after we emptied the plate. “Go to one of those sperm banks and pick a rugged, six-foot-three physicist with mile-wide shoulders and the patience of Job?”

“Why would I pick a Ken doll?”

“That’s what smart people do out in the real world,” she said. “You think honestly about your faults and then find a mate who negates them, and together you’ve got a shot at making a kid who has a fighting chance of not replicating your freak show.”

“That’s not what you did.”

“I got lucky.”

“I’ve never been lucky like that.”

Carly opened her mouth and shut it quickly, probably deciding, as I had earlier, to be nice.

She wasn’t going to call me on the lie—I
had
experienced that kind of luck, and, true to form, I’d walked away. His name was Andrew, and he was warm, engaging, fully employed, and desperately in love with me. I know because he told me. Frequently. I flinched at all he offered—a home, family, security, commitment—because I’d felt smothered by all that
niceness
. It zombified me like some kind of mood-altering drug, leaving my emotions fuzzy and indistinct. Andrew broke it off with me when he finally accepted my reluctance and moved to California, where he quickly married and fathered two sons. I’d thought about him every so often in the years since we broke up, but it had been a while since I’d wished I was in his wife’s place. I got a quick flash of his curly brown hair and bright smile and felt a dull sadness that he had come along at the right time for him and the wrong time for me.

“Andrew was ages ago,” I said. “I was a different person then.”

Carly looked down at her wineglass. “I wasn’t thinking of Andrew. I was thinking of Dad. Is this about him?”

It was always Dad, never Mom. She’d passed on before we could escape the black box of adolescence, its darkness shrouding us from everything but the constant turmoil of our daily melodramas. Parents become strangers during the teen years, and the distancing served us well. Mom died of an aneurism while on a girlfriends’ weekend in Kohler, Wisconsin, and by the time her body was returned to us, we’d protected our hearts, and the shift from past to present was painful but orderly, our grief tempered by our youth and its relentless pursuit of the future.

It was different with my dad. I cared for him during the two years lung cancer ravaged his body. I felt his last ragged breath on my cheek, and shut his eyes when he slipped into his final rest. I knew my father in a way even Carly didn’t, and I missed him deeply, as a father and a friend. He was the reason I was in nursing school. Was he the reason I wanted a child?

“Maybe,” I said to Carly. “I don’t know.”

“What do you think he would say about you having a baby if he was still around? Do you remember how he treated me when I told him I was pregnant with Maura? Dad believed in the whole package—love, marriage, kids. But only in that order.”

She was right—he wouldn’t have understood at first. He would’ve yelled or called his priest or stopped talking to me for a week or two. My father was an angry worrier, his fear for our well-being erupting in quick bursts of red-hot fury. A cooling-off period always followed, his love for us dousing the flames. That man was quick to anger and long to love, and I knew in my bones that when the baby came, he’d have been happy for me. He’d have showed up at the hospital with a fluffy teddy bear and a carful of those creepy, toddler-sized Mylar balloons in the shapes of giant rattles and storks. He would have made goo-goo noises and learned how to swaddle. He would have changed diapers, warmed bottles, and clipped those fragile, paper-thin fingernails. He would have done the best he could with a situation he had no real power to control, as he’d always done.

A tear ran down the slope of my nose.

Carly grabbed my hand and squeezed. “I love you and I trust you, but this is
a bad idea
, Leona. You know it is. You’re not thinking deeply about this.”

“Bullshit,” I said, my sorrow overrun by a swift, wine-fueled anger. “Aren’t we supposed to listen to that voice inside of us, the one speaking from the pit of our gut? What if it’s telling me yes because this is supposed to happen? What if I have a baby and it grows up to find a cure for cancer or outdoes Gandhi in niceness or sets the world on a better path like Martin Luther King?”

“As much as I think you are amazing and all kinds of wonderful, the chances of that are . . . not good.”

“Well, forget the world-changing stuff. What if it grows up to be a preschool teacher who knows how to make children feel happy and secure? Or the smiling bagger at the grocery checkout, or the nice lady who gives out lollipops at the library? I might not have it in me to raise a president or Nobel Prize winner, but I know I can make a decent person, someone who holds doors open for people and shovels his neighbor’s walkway after a snowstorm and doesn’t whip out his cell phone during a dinner date.”

She took a large gulp of wine. “What if he grows up to be Hitler?”

I blinked at her. “You think I’m capable of producing another Hitler?”

“What I’m saying is you can’t predict the future. You have no idea what’s going to happen, and you have no idea how fucking scary that is,” Carly said, a strange fire lighting her dark brown eyes. “Everything is unknown with a child. You will be completely powerless, and it will put a fear in you, a horrible, imagination-twisting, unavoidable fear that won’t go away
until you die
.”

Her words should have scared me, but they didn’t. “And yet,” I said, the frustration leeching from my voice, “you’ve done it
four times
.”

She went quiet then. Donal cleared his throat, having snuck in at some point. He stood at the kitchen counter, my pro-con list in hand. He read it, then looked up at me and smiled. “I think you should have a baby, Lee. I don’t think it’s wrong for you to pursue this love. I almost think it’s necessary for someone with so much to give a child.”

“Stop that! She is not having a baby!” Carly got up and poured herself another healthy dose of medicine. “This is crazy talk,” she huffed.

Donal went to her. He carefully took the wineglass from her hand and placed it to the side. Carly opened her mouth to protest, and he drew her into his arms, resting his chin atop her wildly curly hair. “I’ve never once regretted putting four hungry mouths in this house,” he said. “And, though I’ll not be responsible for the fifth”—at this he gave me a wink—“I’ll not mind it as well. We’re all in this life together, are we not?”

“I married a madman,” Carly said, breaking free. But then she kissed him on the cheek, took my list from his hand, and sat down to read.

CHAPTER 3

Nursing 320 (Online): Community Health

Professor Larmon:
Announcement—Please pair up with a study buddy! The midterm will be here before you know it—good nurses plan ahead!

Private Message—Darryl K to Leona A

Darryl K:
I think we’d make an excellent team. Want to be my study buddy?

Leona A:
Really? That’s all you’ve got?

Four kids in the house meant our schedules were pretty regimented. Donal usually left before dawn, so I helped Carly get the kids off to school, and then she dashed off to work while I kept an eye on Josie, squeezing in study time when I could until just before lunch, when Carly rushed in the door and I left for my home-health clients.

It was Thursday, which meant I visited Suspicious Estelle (she always searched my purse before I left), and my favorite of all my clients, Jerzy “Call Me Jerry” Pietrowski, the Polish American John Wayne and partial amputee.

Jerry survived the jungles of Vietnam, the death of his beloved wife, Anna, and a triple bypass, but then he checked into the hospital for hemorrhoid surgery and unknowingly left with a case of MRSA so devastating it nearly did him in. The evil bacteria crawled in through a cut in his arm and got to work, resulting in an amputation just below the elbow. He was doing much better, but he’d lost his right hand, the dominant one, and still needed help with things like shaving and making the bed.

Jerry had given me a key—the only client to do so—and I let myself in the back door of his small bungalow, washed my hands, and readied a warm-water bath for his stump. Home Health Aides took care of the practical needs of our patients, making sure they were clean, fed, and comfortable. We also provided a steady lifeline to the outside world, which was what I suspected Jerry valued most.

“That you, sweetheart?” he called from the living room.

“Yep. Are you ready for me?”

“Been waiting all day.”

He sat in a brown leather Barcalounger, feet up, a bowl of ice cream slowly melting on the TV tray next to his good hand, and some college basketball game on the big screen, the volume turned low.

“Nice setup,” I said, situating myself on the couch next to him, balancing the water basin on my lap. “Looks comfy.” A mountain of crossword-puzzle books, used tissues, and empty Gatorade bottles spilled out from under his raised feet.

“Did you get out today?”

Jerry shrugged noncommittally, his watery blue eyes glued to the game. “I think I took the garbage out. Don’t remember.”

“At least once a day,” I said gently. “Take a walk around the block. It’ll do you good to feel the sun.”

“Sez who?”

“Sez me, and I know better than anyone.”

“So you say.”

I took his right arm in my hands and carefully examined the vulnerable skin at the tip. Jerry was a big man, broad of shoulder and thick of neck, and his arm above the elbow retained most of its muscle. He’d been a swimmer before the amputation, the kind who got up at five in the morning to hit the Y and jumped into Lake Michigan on frozen days in January wearing only a Speedo. He’d threatened to show me the pictures.

“I can take you to the Y if you want to go,” I offered for the thousandth time. “I don’t mind.”

“If you saw me in a bathing suit, it would ruin you for other men.” He laughed at his own joke, and I joined him, though I’d heard it a thousand times, too.

“I’ll take the risk if you will.”

The humor vanished from his expression. “Not yet, Leona. I’m not ready.”

It wasn’t my place to push, but it was my job to keep him healthy. I slid the basin under his arm and guided it into the warm water. “We can go to a different Y,” I said lightly.

“And we can go to Rome, but that don’t make us the pope.”

Jerry closed his eyes as I smoothed some liquid soap over the stump. He was quiet while I washed him, not saying a word until I’d gotten back from dumping the sudsy water into the kitchen sink. He had left the clean towel over his injured arm and absentmindedly rubbed at it with his left hand. “So, what’s going on in your crazy life? How’s that family of yours?”

Jerry was one of my few patients who didn’t like to talk about himself. When we got too close to something he didn’t want to discuss, he always deflected. Sometimes I let him, sometimes I didn’t, but the strain evident around his eyes and mouth told me today I needed to back off. “Kevin is playing tackle football,” I said. “Don’t you think that’s too young? He’s only in fourth grade.”

“Only women put age restrictions on football.”

“Let’s revisit that when I show up in tears because my nephew is laid up with a concussion.”

“He’s a tough kid,” Jerry said, waving his hand dismissively. “Save your worrying for someone else.”

I liked that Jerry felt he knew my family even though he hadn’t met them, but it also made my heart ache for him. I knew he had people in his life, but they didn’t seem to come around very often.

“Speaking of tough,” I said, studying his face, “if I don’t attend to those whiskers, people are going to start calling you a hipster.”

“A what?”

“Nothing,” I said, laughing. “I’ll be right back.”

Jerry’s bathroom wasn’t outwardly dirty but held the unmistakable scent I’d begun to associate with old age and infirmity, a sour, musty odor that overpowered even the heartiest air fresheners. After spritzing the room with some anyway, I found his razor where he always left it, in a cup beside the sink, and the shaving cream in a drawer. Though I had what I needed, curiosity brought me to the medicine cabinet, which, after a glance toward the living room, I slowly opened. Prescription bottles, mouthwash, men’s cologne—it held what I’d expected, arranged neatly, but only on one side. Anna’s half was empty, as if he still expected her to come back someday. Feeling like I’d stumbled onto something very private, I quickly closed the cabinet and returned to Jerry, who had already turned down his collar.

“You ready?”

He nodded once, skin already flushed. “Do what you gotta do.”

When I had to perform an intimate task, one that made a client feel exposed and vulnerable, the best thing to do was keep up a steady stream of innocuous conversation, as though we were sitting on the patio having a casual cup of tea or, in Jerry’s case, sharing a beer. While I carefully shaved his beard, we talked about my new class, some crime novelist he’d recently discovered, and the weather, which had been schizophrenic, unseasonably warm one day and frigid the next—anything but the fact that I was performing one of the most basic tasks a man does for himself because he no longer could.

“Got any plans for tonight?” I asked after patting his clean-shaven face down with a soft towel. “Some big sports game I know nothing about?”

Jerry touched the smooth skin on his cheek, lost in thought. When he didn’t answer, I put away the shaving supplies and began to work on the mess in the living room.

“My son is stopping by this afternoon,” he finally said, voice subdued. “He’s changing around his work schedule to spend more time over here, I guess.”

I smiled at him, surprised. “Paul, right?”

“Yeah. Him.”

“You don’t sound too excited,” I said, shoveling the spent tissues and empty bottles into a small garbage bin. “Don’t you like when he visits?”

“I like it when he comes in the door, but I like it even better when he leaves. Ever feel that way about someone?”

A quick image of Carly sprang to mind—thirteen years old, pretending to organize my closet while digging around for contraband bottles of Boone’s Farm wine. “I think I know that feeling.”

I spent a few more minutes straightening up. I’d seen photos of Paul—he was a large, imposing man, and not too fond of smiling. “I’ll get out of the way before he gets here,” I said, fluffing up a pillow.

Jerry grinned. “Coward.”

I stuck my tongue out at him. “Sometimes a client’s family members can be problematic.”

“Paul is definitely problematic,” Jerry admitted. “Sometimes I wonder where he came from. My wife was the most lighthearted, easygoing woman in the world. I might be a pain in the ass, but I’m not an asshole. However . . .”

I stopped cleaning and looked at him, waiting for the punch line.

“My son is, without a doubt, a bona fide asshole.”

Another beat passed. “Wait,” I said, “you’re not kidding? Did you just call your son an ass?”

“Asshole,” he clarified. “Paul deserves the second syllable.”

“Then I’m definitely not sticking around.”

Jerry squirmed in his chair. “I probably shouldn’t have told you that.”

“Why?”

“Because maybe it would be a good idea if you talked to him for me. You know, on my behalf.”

Ignoring the plea in his voice, I said, “I’m not your lawyer.”

“He doesn’t listen to me, and I need for him to stop being such a stick in the mud. Will you do it?”

I continued cleaning, pretending to mull over his request, but I already knew my answer—
hell no
. Number one in the unofficial rule book for Home Health Aides was to never get involved in a patient’s personal life. Too messy, too dangerous, and too time-consuming. I’d successfully dodged Suspicious Estelle’s gossipy daughter-in-law, and a plethora of nosy, scheming, bitter, manipulative others. Doctors and social workers dealt with family members. Asshole Paul could talk to
them
.

“Can’t. I’ve got to take Maura to the library this evening. She’s meeting a tutor.”

Jerry grasped my hand. “He’s starving me, Lee.”

“What?”

His expression turned completely woebegone, and his sky-blue eyes, lashes still thick and dark, reminded me so much of Josie’s that my defenses collapsed, and I took the bait. I stuck the bowl of soupy ice cream under his nose. “Is this how he’s starving you? By leaving tubs of Rocky Road in the freezer?”

“I’m rationing the ice cream. Go look in the fridge and be prepared to weep.”

Jerry’s well-organized refrigerator contained fresh green juices, three different kinds of salads, another wedge of raw-milk goat cheese—bigger than the one he’d given to me earlier in the week that I’d shared with Carly—and half a dozen tubs from a deli across town, an expensive, locally sourced, organic, we-pretty-much-grew-everything-in-our-backyard kind of place. “Napa Valley chicken salad? Tandoori tuna? You eat better than I do.”

“That isn’t food! Paul had it delivered yesterday and said it’s all I’m getting for the week,” Jerry yelled, his agitated baritone shaking the walls. “I won’t eat that shit!”

I opened the freezer. Three tubs of Rocky Road and a bottle of vodka. Maybe Paul wasn’t such an asshole after all.

I was able to judge for myself a while later. When I heard a car pull onto the driveway, I mumbled some excuse to Jerry and dashed for the kitchen. Peeking out the window over the sink, I spotted a sleek black Mercedes, more than a few years old but well cared for. A man slowly slid out from the driver’s seat. He was huge, Hulk huge, and I half expected his skin to glow green as I watched him extract a leather briefcase from the passenger seat. His tailored suit pulled taut against broad, muscular shoulders, and the collar of his blindingly white dress shirt dug into the back of his thick neck. He tucked a pair of aviators into his front jacket pocket, the glasses toylike in his massive hands, and glanced coolly at his father’s home. Obviously a man who sought to give the appearance of sophistication, Paul Pietrowski’s body had betrayed him. He belonged in a potato field, pulling a plow from a strap around his waist, or in a WWE pay-per-view extravaganza, slamming another brute to the mat.

Desperate to appear busy as he let himself in, I washed my hands again, apologizing when I offered him a damp one to shake. He glanced at it distastefully. “So you’re the home-health aide.”

“Yes. For a few months now. Your father is a lovely—”

“Aren’t you supposed to be in by three, gone by five?”

I glanced at the clock. It was 5:08. “I still have some things to finish up. I’ll be gone soon.”

With a skeptical glance toward me, Paul opened his briefcase and took out a legal pad and Montblanc pen. He wrote
Home Health
at the top of one page, and drew a line down the middle, making two columns, writing
DATE
over one and
TIME IN/OUT
over the other. He stuck it to the fridge with a Dollywood magnet and filled in the first row,
9/27
,
3–5 p.m.
“I’d prefer if you kept a log for my records,” he said, methodically repacking his briefcase. “I don’t want my dad overcharged.”

“I wouldn’t charge him for eight minutes,” I protested. “I’m not petty like that.”

His look said he didn’t believe me. Paul Pietrowski shared his father’s brilliant blue eye color, but that was where the resemblance ended. His features were sharper and more defined but less welcoming, and his neatly cropped, ash-blond hair gave him nearly colorless eyelashes. “Just fill out the time sheet from now on,” he said, and walked into the living room.

Feeling suddenly protective, I followed at his heels. Father and son didn’t hug, but shook hands awkwardly, Paul’s right hand to Jerry’s left. Two meaty paws grabbing at each other like bruisers before a prizefight.