Barbara Jean thought for the first time in her life that she had truly been cheated by not having had a father.
More than three decades later, after she saw Chick standing on the porch at Big Earl’s funeral dinner and after Lester was dead and gone, Barbara Jean had every evening to sit alone and think. She used many of those hours to return to the night she first saw Chick at the All-You-Can-Eat. She played it over countless times in her head in a way she hadn’t done in ages. Every time she thought about it, she asked herself whether things might have turned out differently if she hadn’t gone to the jukebox that night, or if she had just walked away when those plates hit the floor instead of standing there and learning just enough of Ray Carlson’s story to set in motion the schoolgirl process that transformed pity into love. She asked herself if maybe there was some way she could have seen what was coming and avoided it. After each round of those thoughts, she would end up in her chair in the library curled up with her vodka bottle, wondering if she would ever be able to stop rolling that same old stone up the hill and just accept that what had happened was her fate. She had inherited her mother’s luck.
Chapter 14
I got a second opinion about my condition on the Friday after Halloween. Again, Mama, Mrs. Roosevelt, and I had to sit through a speech about non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma. This time nobody cried, though.
Mama said I should talk to James as soon as I got back home, but I ignored her advice. I still wanted to hold on to the fantasy that maybe I could get through my treatment and never have to tell him. Hadn’t Alex Soo said that some rare patients got through chemo like they were taking an aspirin? Well, maybe he hadn’t said exactly that, but I decided to believe he had. I made up my mind to put my trust in the part of James’s nature that never noticed when I got new clothes or when I gained pounds or lost them. Okay, so far only gained pounds, but the opposite was likely to be true, too. I decided to count on the same cluelessness that used to make me want to shake James by the throat to be my friend now.
I slept late that next morning. Life being funny the way it is, the hot flashes that had been keeping me awake at night for months stopped the day after Alex Soo told me I might be dying. When I walked into the kitchen, the first surprise was the smell of coffee. I had learned decades ago that James didn’t understand the science of coffee making. Whenever he brewed up a batch, he ended up with sludge or piss water, nothing in between. So he was forbidden to touch the coffee machine.
But that morning a glass carafe full of coffee rested on a cork trivet in the center of the kitchen table. My mug, a brown and white mess of clay coils fashioned by the tiny fingers of the grandkids and presented to me the previous Christmas, was there on the table, too. And at his usual spot at the table, behind a coffee mug that matched mine, sat James, who was supposed to be working that day.
He sat at attention with his back completely straight and his hands clasped together in front of him atop a wicker placemat. He stared at me for a moment and then said, “What’s wrong?”
I started to say, “Nothing,” but he held up a hand to stop me. He asked again, slower this time, “Odette, what’s wrong?”
I never lie to James—well, not often, at least. I poured a cup of pale brown coffee for myself and I sat down next to him. I exhaled and began, “You know those hot spells I was having? Turns out it was more than the change.”
Then I told him everything that both of the doctors had told me. James listened to me without saying a word. The only time he interrupted me was when he scooted his chair back from the table and patted his thighs with his palms, a gesture that had been a signal for me to climb into his lap in the early days of our marriage.
I laughed. “It’s been a long time since I sat in your lap, honey.” Running my hand