Lost Highways (A Valentine Novel) (24 page)

Now she was eyeing Harry, and Rainey made the introductions quickly, then said, “I want to see Daddy.”

Charlene pointed out a room across the hall. “Don’t wake him, though. The doctor wants him to sleep.”

This was not a big hospital, and things were a lot more relaxed there than she imagined they were in the big city hospitals. She’d known exactly where they were going upon entering, so they had breezed past the nurse at the desk, who had not even looked up.

Right this moment, she dragged Harry along with her. She had a hold of his hand and simply did not let go. She was apprehensive about seeing her father with tubes and cords attached all over the place.

But there wasn’t much. Her father lay there in the dimness, the only thing attached was an IV in his arm. She moved closer and saw he was also hooked up to a heart monitor. It was beeping with a reassuring rhythm, and her father was doing his regular nasal breathing.

Once she reached the bedside, Harry wiggled his hand from hers and moved away. She saw him reach for the record chart, and then she looked back at her father.

Daddy?

She stood there and felt sort of like she used to back in high school, when she would come to her parents’ bedroom upon arriving home from a date. They did not wait up for her but commanded that she come and wake one or the other to tell them she was home. She always woke Daddy, because he faced the door, and all she had to do was touch his hand and say, “Daddy…”

She was afraid to touch him now, afraid she might wake him and cause him to go directly into another heart attack. So she stood there staring at him, studying his features to make certain they were all as they were supposed to be and then watching his chest rise and fall.

She whispered, “I love you, Daddy.”

Harry came back beside her and put his arm around her. “He’s doin’ really good, honey,” he said in a low voice and kissed her forehead.

She studied his face to make certain he was telling her the truth. She supposed she was as uncertain as she had ever been in her life.

He said, “He is. His vital signs are plenty strong and steadily improving.” He sounded confident.

“I want to stay until he wakes up,” she said.

Charlene agreed to trade vehicles, to leave the Suburban and to take Rainey’s rig to her house, where Larry Joe could unload Lulu and Roscoe.

“Will he chase my cats and guineas?” Charlene wanted to know about the puppy.

“I don’t know, so you’d best keep him tied or penned up,” Rainey answered. She really didn’t want to see dead chickens all over the place right after her arrival.

She also suggested that Harry go with her sister and nephew. “You can get some sleep in my bed at the cottage,” she told him, her hand on his arm.

“I’ll stay here with you,” he said, and she leaned her head on his chest for half a minute.

Harry let down the metal side to her father’s bed and pulled a chair over for her to sit on. While he was doing this, a nurse came over, and Rainey thought they might be told to leave and got herself up to argue, but the nurse just looked a little surprised. She saw then that the nurse was Karen Millhouse, a girl she’d gone to school with. The woman had gained about thirty pounds, which made her face even more pleasant than it always had been.

“I imagine it will do your Daddy good to see you here when
he wakes up,” she said in a whisper and patted Rainey’s shoulder. “It’s real quiet in here tonight…plenty of room for y’all.”

Harry slipped out and left her, and she sat there gazing at her father, wishing a lot of things. She prayed some and talked to Daddy in her mind. Harry slipped back in with a cup of coffee for her. A bit later, she finally laid her head down on the side of the bed and slept off and on, coming awake when a nurse or Harry entered, the nurse to check on Daddy and Harry to check on her.

Daddy awoke at four-thirty, his normal time, and he said, “Well, hello, Little Bit.”

“Hello, Daddy.” She took his hand then, at last. It felt rough, like always, but more frail than in the past, which upset her. She smiled, so he wouldn’t know this.

“I’m sorry you got dragged home,” he said, looking mournful.

“I didn’t get dragged, I came flyin’,” she said. “And I guess I’ve been headin’ home ever since I left, Daddy.”

They looked at each other and said a number of things without any words. Maybe right that minute words could not convey what her being there and holding on to his hand could.

Then she guessed her father had had enough of emotion, because he began to shift himself up in the bed and said, “You’d better get out of here, because I have to get up and go to the bathroom.” He pointed to the lavatory door all the way over in the corner.

“Daddy, I don’t think you are supposed to get out of bed…. I’ll get a nurse.”

“I’m gettin’ up,” he said and started plucking at the monitor tabs stuck to his chest. This behavior on his part had the curious effect of alarming her and reassuring her all at once.

She flew around the curtain to get help, but no one was in
sight. She ran out the door and spied Harry—apparently he never slept—a silhouette leaning back against the wall, one knee bent and his foot on the wall, and a cup of coffee in his hand. She stopped, knowing she was interrupting some powerful thoughts.

But then he saw her.

“It’s Daddy—he’s tryin’ to get out of bed.”

He went immediately into the room, where Nurse Karen had already appeared from somewhere. Daddy was setting off all sorts of alarms. Rainey backed away toward the door, feeling overwhelmed and not at all helpful. Then Nurse Karen came flying around the curtain, threw up her hands and said, “I guess your friend Dr. Furneaux can best handle him. He is really a doctor, isn’t he?”

“Oh, yes,” Rainey said with a nod.

As she watched the woman walk away, though, Rainey reflected that she really had no proof of Harry being a doctor.

“Daddy, do you know who my father is? Do you know his name?”

“John Elam,” her father said, looking at her fingernails.

They held hands, her again in the chair beside his bed, while beyond the window, dawn was turning the sky pink and there was the silence that comes just before the sun comes up.

She was a little relieved that he had not said Herbert Longstreet, and doubly relieved that she had held her tongue in Amarillo.

Her father continued, as if going back in time. “He was a little man, but handsome, I guess. He left this state and never came back. A year after he left, he sent a postcard to your mother, told her he was workin’ down Lus’iana.”

“Did he know about me?”

He nodded. “Yes. But there never was a question of how we would handle it. Your mother and I decided, and she made it plain to him. I guess he wanted her to run off with him, but she wouldn’t do it. He never knew your mama, really,” he said with a hoarse chuckle.

“Daddy, why didn’t Mama ever tell me?”

“Now, Little Bit, how was she ever gonna tell you somethin’ like that?” He regarded her with sharp pain in his eyes and a trembling smile on his lips.

“Freddy knew,” she said.

He sighed, in such a way that she had a moment of worry that maybe she was upsetting him. But then he said quite strongly, “Your mama and I handled it as best we could with our limited choices—those bein’ the truth and us bein’ afraid of the truth.”

He looked squarely at her and told her everything. “Your brother knew because he was old enough to figure things out, and because he unfortunately overheard me and your mama one mornin’ discussin’ things. I don’t know if Charlene knew. I tried to get your mama to tell you. She wanted to, but she could not bring herself to do it. She was afraid.

“Can you understand that? To tell you meant she had to admit her great shame and risk how you might judge her, and how it would hurt you. She could not bear to do any of that. You know, and your sister and brother should know, that your mama would have died for each one of you.”

“We know, Daddy.”

He looked again for a long minute at her fingernails, running his thumb over them. “Do not judge your mother. I guess I always wanted to come off good in this deal, but the Almighty does have a way of openin’ our eyes. I’ve come to see my own part of this. I was workin’ all the time…oh, I was
the big dealer, sellin’ cattle here, land there, buyin’ into oil wells and watchin’ them come in. Your mama would beg me to come sit with her in the swing, or go out dancin’.” He smiled. “She was a lively, beautiful woman, and she needed me to attend to her, and I pretty much ignored her. She went weeks without a man touchin’ her, and she just got swept off her feet by this yahoo, who gave her an afternoon of romance that never would have amounted to anything, except she came up pregnant with you. She came to me and told me straight, and said she’d give me a divorce, but she would stay right there where her children were.

“Life don’t always go how you think it will, and even you yourself don’t always behave like you wish you would. If you got the grit, like your mother, what you do is pick up and make the best of what you’ve done. Your mother and I both tried to do that. I’m sorry for so much of what we had to deal with fallin’ over you kids.

“But I’m proud of what your mother and I made. Let me tell you, your mother spent the rest of her life tryin’ to make up for about one hour of foolishness, and she more than succeeded. There wasn’t no one a better wife or a better mother. I didn’t make that plain in the past, but I’m makin’ it plain now.”

Rainey’s vision blurred with tears, and she saw tears run down her father’s withered cheeks. She put her head down on the bed.

He said in a husky voice, “Your mother and I loved each other enough to build on it, and we never regretted stayin’ together, and we neither one never regretted that she had you. When I look at you, I see her. I love you, Little Bit, just like you’re my own. That seems like all that should count.”

“Oh, Daddy…thank you for tellin’ me everything.”

He stroked her hair, and after a minute he said, “I want some
coffee with a lot of cream. Go see if you can find me some, will you, Little Bit?” Just like the Daddy she had always known.

The nurse, a stranger, this time, tried to tell her that her father was in ICU and wasn’t supposed to have anything the doctor didn’t order for him, but Harry showed her where the coffee was, and she fixed up a cup and took it to him.

The Blood’s Country

R
ainey wouldn’t leave her father until someone else was there to be with him. Leaving him in the care of the nurses might have been all right while he was asleep, but now he was awake and agitated, wanting to go home. Rainey supposed that by someone else, she meant Charlene, who, although very uncomfortable with hospitals and sickness, had managed to mother three children and her own husband.

Freddy had never had child; Helen had a daughter, who had left home early. Rainey didn’t think of either of them as caretakers. They were the sort who came to family gatherings and parked themselves on the couch to be waited on.

Rainey was faintly surprised when Freddy appeared at the hospital at barely eight in the morning.

“I was on my way to the store,” he said, the store being what he called his car dealership. “When did you get here? Where’s Charlene?”

“She went home when I came in last night.”

He was frowning at her, as if angry to find her and not Charlene. But she went and hugged him, and he made an effort to respond. Sadness washed over her that he had to make an effort and couldn’t seem to feel naturally toward her. She’d always felt this sadness in connection with him.

“Freddy is just a little prickly,” she explained to Harry, after her brother had gone in to see their father with hardly more than a nod to Harry when she introduced them.

When Freddy came out, he looked surprised to see her waiting. She told him she thought someone should be there with Daddy, and when he gave her that you-are-silly look, she reminded him of how people in hospitals had been known to have received the wrong medication or even have the wrong leg whacked off.

“Dad’s not havin’ a leg cut off, and this is a small hospital with nurses who have enough time to see to their patients.”

“It’s not the same. We know him and what he might want. And one of us should speak with the doctor when he comes.” She really wanted to speak to the doctor herself, but she was beginning to feel woozy from exhaustion.

“Dad obviously isn’t on death’s door, but I’ll stay,” Freddy said. “You go on home.”

She hesitated, not quite certain if she should trust him, not quite believing that he perceived how tired she was.

“I will stay,” he repeated with impatience, “and Helen is going to drop in, too. You aren’t the only one who is capable of taking care of him, Rainey. I may not be the favored late child, but I do know him and what he might need.” He turned and went back through the door.

Harry was gazing at her. He’d heard the exchange. She didn’t know what to say, and she was too tired to come up with something.

“That’s my cottage back there. It was the old farmhouse on this place.”

She pointed at the little frame house, which looked a lot more run-down in the morning sun than she had recalled. Gazing at it, she realized, with something of a quivering in her chest, that while she thought of the cottage as where she resided, what she really thought of as her home was her mother and father’s house. It was there she wanted to go.

When they stopped in the drive in front of Charlene’s brick ranch, Roscoe came immediately, wagging his tail. Harry and she both greeted him joyously. She kept thinking, Well, here I am, and Harry and the puppy with me.

Larry Joe came forward from a garage too cluttered to even get the door down, where he was apparently working on a riding mower. She was struck by how he had grown. She had not noticed at the hospital the night before, but he seemed to have grown so much taller in the time she had been gone. He was seventeen now, she remembered, had celebrated a birthday in July.

“Growing mostly in the feet, is what Mom says,” he said in a deep voice that Rainey found rather startling. “She’s still asleep. I took your mare over to Gramma’s—Dad has everything full-up here, and I didn’t think you wanted to put her in a corral with three others.”

“No, she isn’t used to that. Thanks…you didn’t tie the puppy? He hasn’t eaten any hens, has he?” She looked around, vaguely anxious about possibly seeing blood and feathers.

“Those hens can run under a place in the barn. I hate the dang things anyway. You want some donuts and coffee? I went to the bakery.”

Rainey shook her head. “We’re beat. We’re goin’ over to
Mama and Daddy’s.” She realized she still said Mama and Daddy’s, even though Mama was gone.

She did take time to poke her head into the living room to speak to Danny Joe and Jojo, not wanting to ignore them. Everyone thought the Joe on the kids’ names was for Joey, but Charlene’s middle name was Jo. The kids were watching television, a documentary about the desert. Jojo wrapped her thin arms around Rainey’s neck and said, “I’m glad you’re home, Aunt Rainey.” Rainey almost cried. She went over and hugged Danny Joe, and she thought that, at thirteen, he was sweet to hug her back.

Then she and Harry, with Roscoe in the seat with his nose out the window, were driving away and through town. She had Harry drive, because she wanted to look as they passed along Main Street, to drink it in, yet glad to do so at a distance. She kept the window down, so she could smell it. She pointed out Blaine’s Drugstore where she had worked. Roscoe seemed as eager to see everything as she was.

It struck her that she was as glad to be home as she had been anxious to leave all those weeks ago. Eager to see her parents’ house, the house where she had grown up and still kept returning to, she looked ahead, as if her eyes could see around corners. She wanted Harry to see it, wanted to show him the front porch, where they would sit on a summer night when Mama had been alive, and Mama’s old Motorola radio that Daddy had managed to keep working, and the kitchen that was so good for visiting in, and her bedroom, with the tree close enough to climb out on and to the ground.

She just had to be there.

Around the corner, gazing up the street and there it was, with the big bushes framing the drive. “Lilacs,” she told Harry. “They smell so good in the spring.”

She was out of the truck almost before he had completely stopped, and Roscoe came right behind her. He ran out across the yard and then right up onto the porch, where he sat and watched them approach. Almost as if he had been coming here all along. In fact, she stopped and looked at him, looking hard, because she had the oddest feeling that Mama would be standing next to him.

Then she turned and saw that Harry was observing the house with appropriate appreciation. He smiled at her and put a hand to her back as they went up the stairs and across the porch.

“Rainey…Rainey!”

Turning she saw that it was Mildred Covington hurrying up the yard from the sidewalk as fast as her pudgy legs would propel her. The woman had obviously seen them arrive from her house down on the corner. Although she never admitted her age, Mildred was surely in her late seventies. She always did herself up well, except for that strange habit of wearing knee-high stockings with a dress and ignoring that they showed when she sat down.

“How is your Daddy, Rainey? Have you been to see him? They told me this morning that he was doin’ good, but they wouldn’t let me talk to him. Said he was sleepin’.”

“I was with him last night. He is doing really well. They’ll probably move him to a regular room today.”

“Oh, that is good news.”

Now Mildred was eyeing Harry with high curiosity. Rainey introduced them, and then, rude as it might have been, said, “We’ll see you later, Miss Mildred,” and led Harry and Roscoe into the house, which was not locked, and closed the door after them.

In the foyer, she inhaled the familiar scent—the mixture of Daddy’s Camels and Old Spice and Mama’s rose lotion and lemon furniture polish.

Just then her attention was caught by Roscoe, who went bounding up the stairs. He reached the top and disappeared. There came the sound of his toenails tapping on the wood flooring.

“Well, my goodness,” she said, going up and Harry following.

They found Roscoe in her old bedroom, curled up on the braided rug. Rainey looked questioningly at Harry.

“He followed your scent,” Harry said and continued down the hall to find the bathroom, saying immediately that he was going to take a shower, removing his shirt even as he spoke.

Her eyes landed on his bare, hard-muscled back. She felt a sort of shimmer of possibilities. She was, however, absolutely too tired to entertain them.

Stripping to her bra and panties, she crawled beneath the cool sheets of her old bed, onto the mattress that retained the indentation of her body. She thought that she had not fully appreciated that her bedroom remained just as it had been when she’d moved away. She listened to the water running in the pipes, then heard it shut off, and as she drifted into sleep, her last thought was that Harry was smart enough to choose a bed in one of the other three rooms.

She slept for three and a half hours and awoke to Roscoe sniffing at her face. She reached for him and nuzzled him as he did her, and then she caught the smell of coffee and cooking meat. Slipping into a terry robe hanging in the closet—a little musty but clean—she wondered who in the world could be here cooking, and she thought of her mother in a blue way.

Glancing into the guest room, she saw that the bed was rumpled but Harry was not there.

It was Harry in the sun-lit kitchen. She and Roscoe both stopped and looked at him. He was at the stove, frying ham,
hair rumpled, shirt unbuttoned, as was his habit, showing his tanned chest, and barefooted, too.

“I knew the smell of food would get you up,” he said, glancing over at her.

“You can cook?” So many things she did not know about him, she thought, as she gazed steadily at his chest, which had at the most a couple of hairs.

“I can heat things up.” He gestured to the pan. “Ham slices, toast, opened a can of pineapple. Your brother called. They moved your father to room 215 in the south wing. Charlene will be there about one. Bring your father’s whittling knife and wood when you come.”

“Oh.”

The next second she went to him, wrapped her arms around his middle and laid her head on his warm skin, listening to his heartbeat and inhaling the particular male scent of him.

“Thank you for being here,” she said, while the image of what it would have been like to be alone, drive home alone, be in this house alone, flitted through her mind. She began to tremble. “Thank you for being there all these days, with Neva and Buck and that child, and Leanne and Clay…and for bringing me here.”

He kissed her hair, and then he tilted her head upward and kissed her lips. A kiss that started comforting and gentle but quickly turned passionate, leaving her breathless and throbbing and ready to sink to the floor with him.

“Hey…don’t make me burn the ham,” he said, abruptly letting her go and turning away.

Calming herself, trying to keep her balance, she went to the refrigerator, staring into it until her vision returned and she saw oranges, which she took out to squeeze for an afternoon breakfast.

“Daddy never would abide bottled orange juice,” she told Harry, and upon reflection, she added, “I guess Daddy can be as prickly as Freddy.”

The following afternoon her father underwent angioplasty to clean the arteries of his heart. The doctor came to them afterward in the waiting room and said that all had gone well; in fact, their father’s arteries were not as bad as tests had indicated.

“He’ll be out of here day after tomorrow, but he’ll need to take it easy for a week—not bed rest, but off his feet most of the time. Then I want to see him begin a routine of regular walking. Start slow, of course, but the goal will be to work up to at least three miles a day. I’ll give a sheet of instructions to you when he’s discharged.”

The doctor left, and they all looked at each other.

“Well, we need to figure out what we’re gonna do about Dad now,” Freddy said.

“What do you mean, do about him?” Rainey asked, watching his face.

Freddy answered with all he had been thinking for some time. “Off his feet for a week, which means someone’s goin’ to have to be with him day and night for that week, or he’ll be out and drivin’ down to the café at the sale barn. And he’s goin’ to fight that walking routine. Dad’s never stuck to a routine in his life, and he isn’t about to start just because a doctor tells him to.

“He can’t be livin’ alone any longer, and let’s be honest here. Helen and I both have busy lives and don’t have the time to take care of him. Charlene and Joey have their kids and can’t do it, either.”

Rainey waited for him to mention her, but his eyes passed right over her.

“I think we should think about gettin’ him into Prairie View Manor,” he said.

She looked over at Charlene, who slowly sank down to the blue vinyl couch beside Joey, who’d come in that afternoon. Joey kept his gaze where it had been for an hour, on the gray tile.

Freddy apparently had looked into Prairie View Manor at great length. He went on to extol the attributes of this wondrous facility as if he had memorized the brochure. He told them how Daddy could have a kitchenette apartment and still have people looking in on him, and, if and when he needed it, they had a nursing home facility, too. Helen stood beside him, giving a nod now and again, her expression clearly saying, “Yes, sir, yes, sir.”

When Freddy finally appeared to be finished with his oration, Rainey said, “I’m movin’ back home with Daddy.”

Then she looked over at Harry, who was gazing at her intently, although expressionlessly.