Bridge To Happiness (22 page)

“No, I wouldn’t question you on this. You’ll just remind me I’m color blind.” He laughed, but I still thought something was bothering him. “As I remember it, Spider has approval in his contract,” Phil said absently.

“Oh, he’ll approve these. Trust me. He’s not blind. These images are exactly what we need. They’re night and day from the rest, which look too much like
SkiStar’s
old designs, from a good decade ago. I want the colors amped up, at least two with some dark comic graphics, and completely different color combinations from our board lines. With this
relaunch
and the new sales and marketing campaign, I want to make certain your skis are the ones the buyer’s eyes go to first. I’m going to have graphics to redo everything, but this
Spider O
grouping.”

Phil checked his watch. “It’s almost noon. Let me steal you away. You can come to lunch with Scott and me. He doesn’t know you’re here, right?”

“I didn’t tell him. He’d just try to discourage me, like you did,” I said and walked over to my son who had the good sense to at least look embarrassed. “Let’s go surprise him.”

We passed by Mike’s office on the way to Scott’s. Part of me thought he should have moved in there by now, but I kept silent. Inside his own office, my oldest son was standing with his foot on a chair, while he buffed his shoes, his father’s wooden shoe shine kit open next to him. I stopped because he looked so much like his dad just then. Phil was taller and lankier, and Mickey was the tallest and still trying to grow into his bony feet and hands, but my oldest son and his dad wore the same shoe size, carried the same kind of build, and were the same height and weight.

Not
were.
Had been
. Among other things, death changed your verb tenses.

“Look what the cat dragged in,” Phil said as he walked past me and helped himself to a chair.

“Mom? What are you doing here?”

How did I suddenly become such a pariah? I was one of the people who built this company. I had every right to be there. “I’ll tell you the same thing I told your brother. I work here.”

“Do you think you should be here?” Scott asked tentatively.

“She’s been here working all morning,” Phil said quickly and before I could say anything. “I figure you and I should kidnap her and take her to lunch. By the way, you’re buying.”

“The graphic designs have to get settled. Stop worrying about me, please. Both of you. I really need to be here.” I paused, sitting down on Scott’s desk as I had a moment’s flashback of Mike holding that same shoe brush over the years and another image of Scott when he was six or seven. “I remember when your dad used to give you a dime to shine his shoes. You’d have thought he’d hung the moon.”

Scott set down the horsehair brush. “A few years ago I gave him a hard time about using me as child labor back then. And on being a cheapskate.” He laughed quietly. “Hell . . . you couldn’t even buy a pack of gum for a dime.”

“The money wasn’t the point, although saving might have been. Your dad was determined not to be like his father, so that ritual became bonding time each weekday for just you and your dad. It was important to him that you felt you were special.”

“We needed to feel special to someone. We were traumatized because we could never get you to pick a favorite,” Phil said to me.

“Yes, I know. I was a cruel, cruel mother.”

“And you were just a geeky, shoe-shining kid, Big Brother.”

“You wouldn’t understand,
asswipe
, since you can’t shine canvas.”

“I stopped wearing
hightops
after my wedding.”

Scott laughed then. “Only because of your wife.”

“What kind of little kid actually wants to shine shoes?” Phil said, showing as little interest now as he had all those years ago. Phil and Mike had had their bonding moments over washing the cars.

“Some little kid who isn’t color blind,” Scott said. “When you’re wearing a pink shirt and a red tie with brown pants, Phil, everyone has to refocus their eyes again before they can even try to look down at your scuffed shoes.”

Phillip swung his big feet up on Scott’s desk. “Look at these. My shoes are brown. They’re
unscuffed
and match my pants.”

Scott pulled open a drawer to get his keys, and I placed my hand on his to stop him from closing it. “Is that your father’s wallet?”

My son’s face paled somewhat. I remembered that Scott had picked up Mike belongings when he went to the morgue. “I kept it here because I needed to cut up his credit cards. I keep forgetting,” he said, clearly not admitting the truth. He handed it to me.

Inside, Mike’s face stared back at me from a holographic California driver’s license. “Hand me the scissors, Scott, and we’ll cut them up now.” As I pulled out the credit cards, a hundred dollar bill Mike always carried behind his license fell out and there were smaller bills inside the billfold, along with the ticket stub from his flight to Reno and a business card from some ranch in Sparks, Nevada. Folded in half was a blue Post-it note and a yellow credit card receipt. I opened the Post-it to a list in Mike’s handwriting:

Batteries

drill bit

¼ inch trim

2-penny nails

Bug lite

The receipt was from Ming’s in Chinatown, dated the week before Mike went to Tahoe, and a small, thin green piece of paper was stuck in the crevice of the wallet; it was a fortune from a fortune cookie, and it read:

You will gain admiration from your pears.

There was a heartbeat of silence, and then I burst out laughing. “Look at this.” Of course Mike would keep that fortune with his sense of humor. My boys each put their arm around me and we shared a good laugh

I learned something important about death. You have to remember who and what the person was to you, and to others, and celebrate their uniqueness in this crazy and pain-filled world. Surprisingly, you could still grab something joyous about them even after they were gone, and maybe in that joy, came an instant of peace. I handed the wallet to Scott. “You can keep this.”

“I don’t know, Mom.” He paused, then realizing he did want it, said, “You’re sure?”

“I’m sure.”

Phil winked at me. We both knew why Scott had the wallet in his desk.

“I’m hungry. Let’s go eat,” Phillip said, and he began to pull me toward the door.

“Wait. Where are we going?” I stopped in the hallway.

Phil looked at Scott and at the exact same time both my sons said, “I feel like Chinese food.”

Out the blue,
my grief hit me like a two-by-four when I was at Cummings’ market, standing in the cracker aisle. How could a yellow box of Wheat Thins destroy you? One moment I was okay and the next I was crying so hard I couldn’t catch my breath.

A woman stopped, reached across her cart, and handed me a Kleenex. I took it and when the woman asked if she could help, I shook my head and held up my hand, unable to say, No thank you. You’re sweet but . . . Go away and just let me cry. The woman turned, unfortunately not before I caught that look, the one of pity and confusion and if-only-I-could-help-you. The look of “you poor thing.”

The crying went on for a long time, the tectonic-deep sorrow that shuddered through me like a 7.0 earthquake, all because Mike could polish off a box of Wheat Thins in one sitting.

Some employees from the store stopped, talking quietly about twenty feet away, near the “Ten for Ten Dollars” end caps. Two women started down the aisle, took a look at me crying like crazy, and turned their carts around. It might have been funny if I could have stopped.

A young mother bravely powered down the aisle with a little boy and a toddler in the cart seat. She pulled down cereal and oatmeal boxes from the opposite shelves, tossing them in her cart as fast as she could and not looking at me.

“Why is that lady crying, Mommy?” The dark-haired little boy asked. He looked like he should be singing about his baloney first name.

“
Shhh
, Michael,” she said.

The sound that came from me was the kind you made when someone hit you in the stomach. His name was Michael.

His small hand tugged on my shirttail the same way my boys used to do when they wanted my attention. “Why are you crying lady? Are you out of
Froot
Loops, too?”

I half-laughed, but it came out like a sob and I looked at the frazzled young mother whose shirt was buttoned wrong, (there were jelly fingerprints on it and it wasn’t ironed) clearly embarrassed, both of us, and I tried in the poignant silence to plaster a smile on my hot, burning face, then I nodded to this little Michael.

As the mother hurried them away, the toddler began to whine and the little boy was looking worriedly over his shoulder.

I grabbed two huge boxes of
Froot
Loops, held them up so he could see, and dropped them in my cart.

I wasn’t out of
Froot
Loops. I was
Froot
Loops.

Eventually I went to the small restroom behind the swinging gray doors in the back of the vegetable section, splashed cold water on my face, blew my red nose until I could smell the pine cleaner they’d used in the bathroom. How long could I stand there?

Someone knocked on the door. I quickly rummaged through my purse. Dark sunglasses on, I headed for the checkout, where an elderly woman was counting out her total grocery bill in coins, and the next woman in front of me decided to talk to the clerk about organic cantaloupe, before she actually stopped and handwrote a check, taking her time to thumb slowly through her check register and list the check amount.

Didn’t everyone use debit cards nowadays? You just punch in a password and your groceries were paid.

So instead of the quick retreat I so desperately needed, I stood there, trapped, humiliated at what I felt was my compete lack of control, ashamed and embarrassed and trying to ignore the side-long looks I was getting. Apparently everyone had seen me. I was exposed, a fraud, broken in front of the world, and I wanted to hide. My sunglasses just didn’t do it for me. What I needed was to go back to grocery shopping at three in the morning.

Once outside I closed the car door, buckled my seatbelt, but I didn’t drive home. I closed my eyes and dropped my head back on the headrest. Who was this lost woman living inside of my skin? Where was I going? How could I go anywhere for the rest of my entire life without Mike? I sat with my head back and my mind empty of answers. I needed guidelines, some kind of roadmap on how to go on living my life.

There was a huge, multi-story bookstore on the northwest corner of Union Square, not far away. I headed straight there and never stopped to look at a single handbag. Once inside the bookstore, I took the escalator to non-fiction and headed for the self-help section, Mike’s favorite, where shelf after shelf were there to guide all the poor slobs like me into understanding and coping with life, with my inner self, and with those around me.

Poor slob, poor thing, poor lady, poor widow. The Widow
Froot
Loops. I had to find some way to help myself.

Kneeling down in front of the grief section, scanning the titles, it wasn’t lost to me that I had been working in a bookstore when I met Mike. I opened a few books, sitting on the floor Indian style and skimming them, stopping to read the bold topics.

Recognize the loss. Acknowledge the death. Understand the death.

Understand the death? What a crock. I tossed the book over my shoulder and opened the next one. I was supposed to understand that the man I had loved most of my life was crushed to death inside a car.

Somewhere in this massive obelisk of the printed word, on one of the long shelves of hundreds of books with impossible demands and dismal titles like
Grieving Mindfully
and
The Loss That Is Forever
, there had to be what I needed . . . something easier, more contemporary. Something simple like . . . .
Death for Dummies.