Road to Bountiful (24 page)

I see the house. It looks different. A new coat of paint, a light tan. The lawn is sculpted. The grounds immaculate. I try to remember what Barbara and Warren do for a living. Something with travel, I think, but I really can’t recall. I must remember to not add my Dakotan “eh?” to the end of sentences. Although she has never said it, I can tell it ruffles Barbara.

Levi guides the car to the curb. This is where it all begins for me. I will go in and see Barbara and her family. We’ll have supper, most likely; inevitably, though, the time will come, the minute will arrive, in which she says to me, “Dad, let’s go take a look at Glad Tidings. I think you’ll be surprised. Let’s run you over there and get you acquainted with the place.”

And I will nod, docile in my manner, and say, “Yes. That would be fine. I’d like to see it.” Then we will go.

Levi clears his throat. He looks at me, then he looks toward the door of Barbara’s house.

“I’ll go too,” he says. “I’ll go with you up to the house.”

“Thank you.”

We slowly climb out of the car and trudge up the walkway, up the stairs toward the front door. I see an envelope taped to the door. Levi walks a little ahead of me and reaches for it. I see the envelope has his name written on it in bold, black letters.

He reads the note, then comes back to me.

“Hmmmpf. Some emergency at work, I guess. Aunt Barbara apologizes. She says that she won’t be here for quite a while. She’s got to get some people out of Mexico. Hurricane is coming in, and they’re all panicking. She and Warren are stuck until late. She wants me to take you to Glad Tidings. She said she called Glad Tidings on her way to work and they’re expecting you. Hmmmpf. Imagine that. Looks like we get to take one more drive together, Uncle Loyal.”

I cannot even begin to tell him how happy that makes me.

My Best Idea Ever in the World

I was not exactly happy about having to take Uncle Loyal to the Glad Tidings Retirement Nursing Home Assisted Living Put-’em-in-a-Box Golden and Twilight Years Home for Old People. Put it this way: I summoned the last of my courage and nerve to get him to Aunt Barbara’s, not to mention sticking my heart on ice cubes. My part was over. My job was done.
Remember, Levi, this was a business transaction, and good businessmen don’t get wrapped up in emotions.
They don’t think too hard about people and their situations. They don’t pay attention to feelings. They don’t get
involved.
If they did, they wouldn’t be in business for long. Look at my dad. Yes, look at him . . . the photographer. I guess he’s stayed in business, but he barely makes a living. Scrapes by. You don’t want to be like him, right?
So don’t get so emotional about this, Levi. Conform. Forget about those things you talked over with Loyal.

My hands might have been dirty, but I was only doing what was expected of me. What I agreed to do.
What I was getting paid for.

Paid for. What I didn’t say to Loyal, and what I hope he didn’t see, was that the check for six hundred bucks, made out to yours truly, was tucked inside the note about the emergency in Mexico. I’ve never told Uncle Loyal I was getting paid for this trip, although he probably knew I was on the Barbara-and-Warren payroll. Anyway, I slid the envelope into my pants pocket, where it felt as though it weighed twenty pounds.

Barbara had also left directions in the envelope on how to get to Glad Tidings. It wasn’t far away.

“The journey’s not over, eh?” Uncle Loyal asks, and there was a hopeful sound to his question.

“No. Not yet. Not quite. I guess I take you to Glad Tidings.”

He looks pleased. “The trip isn’t done. Good. Very good. This road trip has been quite the experience for me. I have enjoyed it immensely. I’ll gladly go a few miles more with you.”

I start down the hill toward the town and the great lake. I can’t say I’m in a good mood. My thoughts are dark, and I’m not feeling too terrific about myself. I had been lured into making this trip by the promise of a quick cash infusion to support my dwindling finances.

I had done this for fast money.

And then things got complicated.

I ended up liking Loyal. I ended up liking him a lot.
I ended up loving him
. And that’s where everything got goofy. If I’d been able to keep this a simple cash transaction, service provided, service paid for, Business 101 class, if I’d been able to keep my emotions out of it, if Uncle Loyal had been a doddering old fool, then all of this would have been different.

But did I want it to be different? Would I have exchanged my experiences driving across the plains with Uncle Loyal, and then driving over the mountains, fishing, getting stuck, pitching my keys into the brush, seeing Yellowstone, and the other thousand small experiences for anything?

No.
Not at all
. So in one sense, maybe it all worked out as it was meant to.

But now we are at the end. He is going to spend the remainder of his days at Glad Tidings; I am going to head back to school, graduate next spring, and then start my career, whatever that meant. The end. The end of our road trip. And while I may not be a hundred-watt bulb, I am bright enough to know how easily we slip from one world to another, and how the bridges between people, while they’re hardly ever burned, do just rust away with time.

I am only half paying attention to Aunt Barbara’s instructions, but I knew we’re getting close. We cross South Davis, then Orchard Boulevard, continuing our downward direction. We’ll be there in five minutes if the instructions are right.

And then something hits me. It hits me with the force of an eight-on-the-Richter-scale earthquake. It seemed like a bright ball of light, pushed by a stiff wind, rolling right toward me from the mountains far to the west, across the lake, blasting up and slapping me across the face. Suddenly, the day is bright again. I feel an incredible surge of joy, a sense of rightness, a solution to the problem. I went from feeling as though I were the gallows master to feeling like an angel of light.

I pull the car off the side of the road, into a big-box store parking lot. My hands are trembling as I put the car in park. Uncle Loyal looks at me with a deep, gentle gaze, his eyebrows raised slightly in an unasked question.

“I’ve got it! I know what we should do! Why didn’t I think of this before?!”

“And what is your idea, if I may ask?”

“This is so cool.”

“Yes, I’m sure it is.”

“This is the best idea ever. I mean
ever.
In twenty-four years of thinking, this is it. My best idea ever. Did I say that? My crowning achievement. It is the
answer
.”

“The answer to what, Levi?”

“The answer to the problem. Your problem. My problem.
This is what we need to do.
”

“I am eager to hear what you have arrived at.”

“This is it. You move into
my
apartment this fall. We have a place with four bedrooms, and the last time I checked, only three were taken. You become,” and I pause for dramatic effect, “
my roommate
!”

He didn’t say anything. It was a funny moment, all right, in the big store’s parking lot, the engine running, traffic passing by, life passing by, and a solution to this ugly problem at hand. I hoped that Uncle Loyal would be as pumped about it as I was.

He isn’t.

“I’m not certain that would work,” he murmurs.

“Work? Of course it would work! This is so elegant. It answers
everything!
You become one of the guys, the buds, a dude. You stay at home and maybe keep the place looking good, and we come back at night and just hang. Like what we’ve been doing this last week. Only in a place with no wheels. It just goes on and on. It doesn’t change. A road trip without the road. You’d have a place to live. We could fish anytime we wanted. We could watch baseball on TV. Cable. We have cable, Uncle Loyal! There’s a nice trout stream ten minutes from town. And the girls—they’d really dig it with you there. You’d be everyone’s grandfather.”

I try to think of the right words to convey to him how perfect this would be.
Loyal as my roommate.
I search for the right phrase, the right words, the right intonation to sway him. “You’d be a chick magnet!”

Well, maybe it wasn’t a case of clear, convincing logic, but it was true. The girls would love Uncle Loyal. And if they loved him, maybe they’d love me if things didn’t work out with Rachel. Share the love, Uncle Loyal.
Feel the love.
We’d be unbeatable.

“I assume that means I would help you and your roommates secure dates with young ladies, eh?” he says.

“Yep. Bottom line. In a nutshell. That about sums it up.”

The words are gushing out of my mouth. The more I talk about it, the more I felt it was the right thing to do. Think of how cool it would be to take Loyal to church with me on Sundays. Of course, he would need to go to a real ward most of the time, and not a student ward, but he could drop in occasionally. He’d be right there for me, my roommates, for all of us. And it would be a lot cheaper for him to live with us than at the Glad Tidings Assisted Living Home. All the angles were covered. It all felt so good, and since I was a three-year-old in Primary, I’d been taught about feeling good and doing the right thing. This nailed them both.

“Do you see it, Uncle Loyal? This
would work
. I think Barbara would even go for it too. You’d still be close to her.”

My words hang still in the air. Only a few seconds go by, but it seems like an hour. I can see Uncle Loyal thinking about what I had said. I could tell he was considering it. I understood that the whole notion is interesting to him.
He was seriously trying to figure out if it would work.

“It feels right,” I say slowly, quietly, trying to close the deal.

Finally he turns toward me. There we are in the dirty red car, hardly recognizable from the flashy, souped-up vehicle I had rolled down his old street in North Dakota. So much had changed. I am a different person than the one who picked him up a week ago.

Uncle Loyal’s eyes are sad, and his chin seems to quiver. “I’m sorry, Levi. I can’t. I just can’t. It would upset so many things. But you’ll never know how much you honor me to even suggest this thing. How I have loved these days on the road with you. How I have learned to respect and love you.”

No, no, no!
This was it. This was our
answer.
I tell Uncle Loyal just that.

Again, silence, as all that wisdom rattles around in his head and he carefully selects his words.

“It just won’t work out, Levi. I am sorry. So terribly sorry. The age difference . . .” and he stops for a few seconds. “Well, it just would not be the way you envision. It is so complicated. Barbara and Warren have selected a place for me. Now, I must go to it.”

“Can you think about it? If you don’t like this Glad Tidings joint, call me, let me know. I can come up in a heartbeat and break you out of there. You know I will. You know it.”

“Yes, I do. I know that. What a measure of a friendship, to unconditionally help another. I know that there are few things you wouldn’t do for me. And I for you.”

The traffic is heavier. I want to stay right there, in the big-box store parking lot, where we are at least out of the flow. I have no desire to get back into the thick rush of things, the race, the competition, the rocky road ahead on my way to become . . . to become something and someone to make my mark in the world, even if it were a tiny smudge. But what did Uncle Loyal teach me, what did he say? You gain more by wanting less. That we all could be photographers. That peace and contentment are gifts. That tiny things really are big things.

If I am a smudge, I’m going to be a happy smudge and do my part well.

It was Loyal who finally said it.

“I think it’s time that we press on. It would be wonderful to get to Glad Tidings before daylight leaves us.”

I can see my choices are limited. We could spend the night stuck in the mountains, we could spend the night off to the side of the road, but we can’t spend the night in a parking lot in Bountiful, minutes from the Glad Tidings terrace.

“If we have to.”

“I think we do. We must. But I want you to remember this. I was tempted. Sorely tempted to take you up on your kind offer,” Uncle Loyal says softly. “I believe I would have relished, as you said it, being a chick magnet, a role that I have never been cast in. And at my age. A delightful thought, Levi. Simply wondrous.”

I put the road-weary red car into gear and, less than three minutes later, spot the long, curving driveway of the Glad Tidings Assisted Living facility. The grounds are filled with blooming rose bushes, grass that is still mostly green, and a few tall trees. It looks well kept and, considering what it is, somewhat inviting.

“We’re home,” I say glumly.

It’s a three-story building, painted white, with long rows of square windows. Some of the rooms at the top have little balconies outside a sliding glass door. The building itself faces to the south—I guess good for sunshine in the winter, but it was clear Uncle Loyal would not have much of a view of the mountains or of the lake.

“Yes, home,” he says softly. “We might as well go in.”

We pull up under the overhang at the front of the building. We climb out of the car and pass through the automatic sliding glass doors. To our right is a desk with a receptionist. She looks up at us and says, “Good evening. May I help you?” Her name tag reads, “Heather.”

Uncle Loyal looks around the lobby, taking it all in. Then he focuses on Heather and says what I knew he would say.

“My name is Loyal. I believe arrangements have been made through my daughter, Barbara Bates, for me to take up residence here.”

“Oh. Okay. Let me see. Your name again?”

“Loyal. I am Loyal.”

“Excuse me. Loyal?”

“Yes, Loyal.”

“Will you be staying with us tonight?”

Uncle Loyal looks around at the lobby again. Lots of plastic ferns and flowers, and big prints of children playing or walking near a pond. A huge aquarium with brightly colored, vacuous fish idly swimming. A natural-gas fireplace, and even on a warm August evening, the small flame flickers yellow and blue. The light is subdued. Elevator music hums aimlessly through speakers in the ceiling. I see a line of wheelchairs near the entrance to a large room, probably where the residents eat their meals. Heather, the woman helping us, is clean, polite, and I think, somewhat mean-hearted, and likely made mostly of synthetic material. Her smile was so big that her toes must have been curling. The aroma in the lobby is an off-the-shelf concoction, smelling only a little like oranges, more of antiseptic.