For quite a while now I haven’t been sure I’m going to be able to hold myself together. I keep thinking about what a good little boy I used to be, never getting into any real kind of trouble, doing everything Mom and Gee and Pops asked me to do. Growing up right with Jesus, as Gee used to say. And now the things I’ve done since then. Most days I can’t even look at myself in the mirror.
It’s getting a little better lately, though. For one thing, I keep getting busier and busier, and it’s good to have stuff to focus on. I got that job at Lowe’s after all. The manager called me out of the blue, said he’d run through all the other applicants and not one of them stacked up very well against me. I’d only been there a month and they offered to send me to North Carolina for their management training program.
Cindy’s belly keeps growing, of course, which means I spend more and more time helping out with the chores when I’m at home. And having a girl in first grade—who’d have thought a first grader could be involved in so many activities? I can’t imagine what it will be like when she hits junior high.
Pops and I still talk on the phone a couple times a week, not saying anything we shouldn’t, only asking “How you feeling today?” and stuff like that. I brought up the way he was behaving the night of Shelley and Donnie’s wreck, the way he’d been walking lopsided and mentioned he’d had a little pinch in his chest, but he wouldn’t talk much about it. “Getting old,” was as close as he’d come to admitting something was wrong with him. “Getting older every day.”
Last week I tried to get him to go to a thing Dani was having at school, a little poem recital thing her teacher set up, but he said he was down with a bug and wanted to stay close to the toilet. Dani recited a poem called “The Caterpillar” that she’d been practicing at home all week long. I even know it by heart now too from listening to her practice. She did so good at the recital. Both Cindy and me had tears in our eyes watching her. Isn’t that silly, Spence? To cry over a children’s poem? I still tear up every time I look at the photos I took on my phone.
Plus sometimes I look at Dani or Emma or even Cindy while she’s sleeping, and when I do, those last two lines of the poem are what I hear in my head.
Spin and die,
To live again a butterfly.
I hate the first of those lines, but I love the second one, and for the life of me I can’t figure out why the poet put those two lines together like that. Especially in a children’s poem. I mean Jesus, Spence. I want all my babies to be butterflies. But I can’t bear the thought of any of them having to die first.
But here’s the thing: until I heard that poem, I never thought the caterpillar really dies. I always figured he went into his cocoon and started changing, growing wings and legs and antennae and all, and of course thinning down that fat green body of his, but actually dying? And the more I thought about it, the less sense it made that the caterpillar would die and out would come a full-blown butterfly. Right? So I looked it up. And the truth of the matter is a whole lot weirder. The caterpillar disintegrates. Literally. It turns into a kind of caterpillar soup. Nothing left but a few random cells. And out of those cells comes the butterfly. Is that magical or what? Magical and terrifying all at the same time.
Anyway, overall, back to me and the family. I guess things couldn’t have turned out any better for us. Except that when things get good like they are now, I know it’s time to be ready for something bad to happen. That’s pretty much the way life is set up to work, isn’t it? You gain, you lose. You win, you fail. You spin, you die. Maybe too you liquefy and start yourself all over again as a butterfly, but maybe you’re turned into a moth instead. And maybe something eats you before you ever get a chance to spread your wings.
I need to tell you about what happened one nice afternoon back in the third week of October, one of those Indian summer afternoons when the temperature is back up near eighty and the sky is so clear and blue. After I had come in from mowing the yard for what I guessed would be the last time that year, I found Cindy sitting there at the kitchen table with nothing in front of her and nothing in the stove or even thawing out on the counter. I got a glass of water and sat down across from her. “Everything okay?” I said.
She smiled like she’d been far away somewhere in her mind and wasn’t all that happy about coming back but knew she had to. She said, “I think we could all use a night out, don’t you?”
So everybody got a bath or a shower and then we picked up Pops and drove to this seafood house out by the mall. There was a parking space near the door, right beside one of those handicap spots with a shiny clean van in it, but when I went to pull into the space Dani said, “Not there, Daddy. What if there’s somebody with the van who’s in a wheelchair? There won’t be enough room to get the wheelchair in and out.”
Cindy looked at me and smiled and I sort of knew what she was thinking. That’s some girl we’ve got, isn’t it, Russell? So I found us another spot, and we all went inside, and darned if we didn’t get seated not six feet from a table with a guy in a wheelchair. He looked to be at least ninety years old or more, this wizened little guy who didn’t even have the strength to hold his head up. His wife was all dolled up in a sparkly dress and pearls, and she was enjoying her lobster bowl without hardly even looking at the old guy beside her, who I’m guessing was her husband. Sitting on the other side of the old guy was some young burly dude feeding the old guy his seafood bisque. The young dude would spoon up some bisque, then drain off the liquid and lay any chunks of seafood on his own plate, do this four or five times then go back to the bowl for some broth, which he would feed to the old guy. Half of it would run out of the old guy’s mouth, so the young dude would dab a napkin at it. It was that over and over again—pick out the chunks, spoon up some broth, feed the old guy, dab up the dribble.
Of course Cindy told the girls to quit staring, but none of us could keep our eyes off them, including Pops. I don’t think he’d said a word since we came into the place, and now he was sitting there like he was hypnotized by the old guy’s face. And then I sort of got hypnotized by watching Pops watch the old guy, because I swear I could tell what Pops was thinking. He was thinking, all that money . . . a wife who must’ve been a beauty in her day . . . a fancy van and a fancy wheelchair and a personal attendant . . . and what good is any of it doing the guy?