Keyboards
I play two services every Sunday, the Lutheran and the Methodist. Though I’m the only one, most likely, who knows for sure, I can vouch that the organs at those churches are identical. I’ve filled in for vacationers at the Presbyterian and the Missouri Lutheran, but I can tell you that neither organ at those places measures up, both of them fifty-year-old Hammonds, models that tempt me to play “Whiter Shade of Pale” or some other bluesy song from the late 60s.
It takes some explaining as to why the members of the Missouri congregation are the “other” Lutherans in a town of less than 10,000, but to hear them talk, it seems like they take more pride in being conservative. Tougher on themselves. More guilt for not living up to the demands of the Bible.
The point is I don’t much care for one over the other, no matter where I’m sitting on Sunday. I play what’s asked, no embellishments, and what those ministers and congregations agree among themselves to believe in is their business, not mine.
Aside from funerals and weddings, I haven’t sat in a pew since I graduated from high school and my father, standing beside me for picture taking, said, “You’re on your own now.” Giving up church was high up on my list of things I’d set my mind on doing as soon as he gave me the word.
But I’d kept up with the piano and the organ my mother had settled me into at eight, and when Norma and I were married, my father gave us the piano as a wedding present because my mother had been dead a year by then, and he said having it in my living room might make good use of it because, as far as he could tell, “the thing still worked.”
You have a skill, you put it to use is all, and as it turned out, I could play in both churches because the Lutherans moved their starting time up by half an hour, and I didn’t have to be a choir director to get either job. Sure, there were choirs in both places, but there weren’t any rehearsals for weekly anthems. Each church had a dozen or so people who dressed up in robes and paraded into choir lofts, but they were there to carry the hymns, that and the organ accounting for enough to keep every song from lapsing into a few minutes of embarrassment.
I’d say playing on Sundays was a “God-send” if I even half believed in God’s hand in anything. It’s not the money, the $75 times two, but the pleasure of those organs being as well-made as they are, especially with my work five days a week being what it is.
I’ve been a carpet salesman for all thirty-three years since marrying Norma. I’d wager there’s not many that’s done that with carpet selling. It’s been a job where I spend most of my time alone. There was even a time when I imagined how easily the store could be robbed, though it wouldn’t be for money, surely, nothing there except the few dollars in my wallet. But how awkward would it be to steal carpets, lugging them onto a truck? So just the once, twenty years ago, I grew uneasy when two men walked in together, something so unusual I kept my eye on their hands. And when they finally decided on four throw rugs for their hardwood floors, they told me how happy they were to have just moved into their own house together, and I stood there like a fool with taking so long to understand how it was with them.
Here I am in two churches every Sunday, but Norma’s always been the more spiritual one, though she never frequented any of the regular churches. “I was raised Catholic,” she said. “I know how silly the established church can be.”
I didn’t argue that, not even when she opted, for almost half a year, for the Church of the Affirmations, a congregation that met at our Ruby Tuesday, coming and going long before the cooks and the wait staff showed up to get ready for the after-church lunch crowd. It was even in the Saturday paper, listed among all of the ordinary sects, holding services at 7:30 a.m.
I went the one time with Norma after she’d pulled through her cancer scare. She’d had an operation. The stomach. There was the chemo still to finish. She told me the service would be over by 8:30, and I could get myself to the Lutheran church in plenty of time, and what I remember most is it felt like we were sitting in a nightclub lounge from the 1950s because everybody sat in pairs at tables to listen to a minister who wore a sport coat but no tie.
At 7:30 there were seventeen other people in the room, including the minister, a woman black-haired and Olive Oyl thin sitting at a Wurlitzer spinet piano. “The pastor’s wife,” Norma whispered. The skinny woman, when she stood in her long dark dress, looked as if she had nearly starved herself to death, but she slipped from table to table, giving each of us a stapled booklet titled Christian Camp Songs.
I recognized nearly every one of the forty-eight, from the familiar “Battle Hymn of the Republic” to the one that strings out verses that begin with “You can’t get to heaven on roller skates” or “in a big fine car.” I’d sung those myself at church camp where the song leader would mix in something that was supposed to be funny like “I wear my pink pajamas in the summer when it’s hot” that ended up with all of us supposed to be laughing when we slipped between the sheets with “nothing on at all.”
But that morning, at 7:35, what we were encouraged to sing to get everyone feeling affirmative was “I Believe,” starting in on “for every drop of rain that falls a flower grows,” followed by what the minister obviously hoped was a perky rendition of “You are my Sunshine.” Concentrating on the simple arrangements, his wife leaned into the piano, wringing as much volume from it as she could muster. Watching her made me want to whisper in Norma’s ear that the organ plays at the same volume no matter how hard the keys are struck. The stops and shoes make the sound change. And if she didn’t tell me to “shush,” I’d have liked to know right then and there where the minister’s wife stored that spinet piano in the Ruby Tuesday because it was no easy thing to move despite its size.
What I did do was spend most of the service hoping that what I was witnessing had nothing to do with the cancer Norma had found herself with, what ended her eating not only the things she loved like fried chicken and mashed potatoes with gravy, but most everything else except what came smooth and bland.
Since there were no Bibles or hymnals, the congregation got to shut up when the singing ended. Now there was nothing but the man with the open collar calling each of us by name, including me, so I knew Norma had told him. He even announced, as if there were doubts, there would be another service at the same time next week, delivering every word like a shy boy who’d been called to the front of a high school classroom for an impromptu speech.
Ten minutes into his sermon, he shut up. So short, I thought, marveling and happy to be finished at 8:06, but the piano player popped up with a plate and started in collecting money. I watched as bills dropped like people were grateful for being asked. Our turn came, and I saw there were two tens on the plate. Norma dropped in six one dollar bills, and I added a five to nearly match her before the woman stuttered past. The man in the sport coat said, “Thank you” and asked us to share the sacrament of The Church of the Affirmations before we departed.
“We’re gathered here to express our confidences in the here and now,” he said, “and to share them.” I waited to hear what came next.
The minister called his wife up from where she’d been sitting, expressionless, with the plate on her lap. She set the money on her bench, walked forward like a moving silhouette, and said, “I am blessed by my work for this church.”
Immediately, a woman rose from her chair at a nearby table to declare, “I am blessed by the lives of my children.”
The affirmations seemed so easy. They sounded like a responsorial. An old couple offered an “Amen” to punctuate each one, but Norma shook her head and stayed seated beside me, and the minister looked away from both of us to where a pair of old women rose to say, “I am blessed by the company of others” in unison.
I was embarrassed for Norma, who rested her hand on my arm and let three of her fingers tap steadily until the minister nodded before saying “Farewell.”
“It was like AA,” I said when we were inside the car.
“I didn’t want you to be the only one not to speak,” she said.
“I had something ready if it came to that.”
Norma looked back at the Ruby Tuesday as if she was considering asking the minister to accept our affirmations. “What would you have said?”
“I am blessed that my wife is healthy again.”
“I’m glad I kept you quiet then,” Norma said. “You’d have jinxed me.”
How that turned out was Norma stopped going on her own accord, and when the Ruby Tuesday closed its doors altogether two months ago, the listing for the Church of the Affirmations vanished from the Saturday newspaper. By then she’d completed her chemo, and I let her pick where we would go to celebrate as long as it was in the United States and everybody spoke English. I told her we had six and a half days, beginning on a Sunday afternoon and ending on a Saturday night—my five vacation days from carpets but no Sunday missing the organ.
“They can’t do without you?” Norma said.
“There’s nobody else,” I said.
“That’s enough then,” she said, the words coming so quickly I didn’t have to make an argument. “I go back to work the first of August. I can’t wait to be useful again.”
I knew it was more than her position as administrative assistant to the Dean at the local college where she kept everything organized for a man who relied on her to make sure he didn’t screw up his well-paid job. Her health plan, not my commissions and organ playing, had kept us afloat through the cancer treatments. Carpet Palace just wished you luck and hired new.
And let me admit to one more thing–at first, when Norma said she wanted to see the rain forest, I thought she was going to beg for the Amazon or Africa, but then she said, “And Mt. St. Helens, too, the volcano that blew itself up,” and I knew that somehow there was a rain forest out west somewhere, that it didn’t have to be a jungle, just the woods with a lot of rain.
“And the sequoias,” she went on. “The redwoods, too. I want to see everything that’s special.”
“Is that all?”
“There’s only the six days,” she said.
“Ok,” I said. And I looked up all those things and studied them like homework so I’d know what Norma was so excited about, the difference between a sequoia and a redwood, how much rain it took to call a place a rain forest, how quickly a mountain can lose more than a thousand feet of its height. We waited a month for her to get her strength back and then another three weeks for summer to settle in so the weather wouldn’t be a problem.
The Sunday we were leaving Norma came to the late service at the Lutheran. “Packed and ready to go,” she said, and I have to admit I used the crescendo shoe more than usual, even pushing it down all the way for a few bars, driving the volume of “Oh God, Our Help in Ages Past“ up all the way as if there were a full house and a choir of 100.
I wanted her to know what a real church pipe organ can do to make the music sound important. I wished it were Reformation Sunday and “A Mighty Fortress” was on the bill, but I did my best with “My Faith Looks up to Thee,” and on the recessional, the last verse, when the choir was gone and the singing had dropped to a scattering of mumblers and reedy-voiced old women, I used the tremulants, wavering the pitch to get Norma’s attention
“You can see all the pipes,” Norma said in the car. “I sat there the whole time trying to imagine which ones were full of sound.”
“There’s more pipes where you can’t see them,” I said. “They live behind the ones you see in the façade.”
“How do you remember them all?”
“You get used to it.”
“I know that for a fact, Charles,” she said. “’Getting used to’ is as regular as the sun coming up. Everybody can count on having to do it.”
Natural Wonders
We flew to San Francisco and rented a car. Monday morning, we drove along the coast, following the redwoods up into Oregon. Norma didn’t want to spend so much time in the car, so we skipped the sequoias in Yosemite and places where we could have seen them with more time. The redwoods were over 300 feet tall; but only fifteen feet in diameter. The biggest sequoias, the ones we weren’t going to see, were thirty feet in diameter. “Everything has to be just right for both kinds of trees,” Norma said more than once. “A few miles one way or the other and there aren’t any at all.”
“The redwoods seem more likely to fall down,” I said. “The biggest are taller than any of the sequoias but they’re only half as thick.”
“We could have seen them both,” Norma said. “The tallest and the biggest around. That’s a thing to remember.”
“But there’s the organ to play,” I said.
“I’m not angry,” she said, “but you’d want to be a sequoia if you were a tree. You wouldn’t spend any time worrying about falling over.” The ocean, which came with the trip as we drove up the coast, was the ocean, too big to get hold of.
Norma had reserved a Bed and Breakfast a few miles from the Washington coast. The first thing I noticed was it was soggy underfoot even with the sun shining when we arrived.
Aside from the red cedars and Douglas firs, everything small seemed to be nothing but ferns and moss, none of the annoying underbrush from back home. The earth was so soft and so cushioned by needles, I felt like I could sneak up on somebody without being heard, not even only a step or two away. I wished I could test my belief by letting Norma walk ahead of me and come at her from another direction, but in that forest I was afraid to let her out of my sight, certain that if we were separated, both of us would get lost searching for the other.
At eight a.m., our second day at the B&B, the owner, like a servant, carried our breakfast out on a tray and laid the plates on the table. Omelets with tomatoes and mushrooms, bacon, English muffins, orange juice, coffee in a large pot. “Like a Sunday breakfast,” Norma said after I polished off six bites of her eggs and the two strips of bacon she was wasting.
The clock on the bedside radio read 8:52. “If this were a Sunday, I’d be late getting off to church,” I said.
“You’d have missed church altogether,” Norma said. “Back home it’s coming up on noon.”
“Maybe that’s why I have such an appetite,” I said. “Here it is lunch time already.”
“And more rain, it looks like. Let’s hope it clears up enough to let us stretch our legs.”
The rain locked in and didn’t let go. We spent the day in our B&B listening to it continue. There was a deck of cards in a drawer near the phone, and we played gin until Norma reached 1000 points, ahead of me by 37. During that afternoon, we sat on the sheltered porch and watched the downpour until it ended just after three. “This must be what it’s like to be eighty,” Norma said.
“We sat inside and played cards all the time when you were sick.”
“Charles,” she said, and I recognized the tone she would have used on our children if we’d ever had any. The sky cleared just then, and the late afternoon sun brought up the brilliant color of the trees that practically surrounded us. “These red cedars aren’t redwoods or sequoias, but they’re at least like distant cousins. All of them are bigger than the trees where we live.”
“That can’t be true,” I said, but it felt like I was defending an idea I’d accepted in first grade.
“Just look.”
“Think about the oaks—how big they are.”
“They’re big, not tall. Fat and boring.”
Norma made me wonder about how I could prove anything to her by talking. She’d never taken to facts. From where we were sitting there didn’t seem to be anything but mature red cedars, as if they’d all grown up in one generation and now they needed to be permanent or else risk disappearing as a group. So many and so big caused me to think of time passing in a way that made me want to go inside and try a few hands of solitaire with the cards we’d been using.
“Doesn’t this make you feel there’s something you know but don’t have a name for?”
“You want me to get religion here?”
“Reassurance is enough,” she said. “Things can work out without us fussing over them.”
Things end, I thought, but couldn’t let myself say. What I did instead was nod because without words it wasn’t a lie.
The last day dawned sunny. By ten-thirty we were on a trail where a series of fallen trees crossed the path. Norma put both hands on the first and nearly straddled it as she pushed herself over one leg at a time. She didn’t ask for help, and after managing the first, she didn’t look back.
I stepped up on that first moss-covered downed tree, half expecting it to collapse, rotted underneath by years of moisture. I watched Norma struggle over two more in the same awkward way before I jumped down and stepped off the path to circle the next one. So quiet it was, that Norma could have been flickering on a drive-in movie screen, all of the speakers turned to “off.”
“Three days was more than we needed for the rain forest,” Norma said as we drove away from the trail two hours later. “All that hiking has worn me down to a frazzle, and I think I picked up something in those woods that’s making me itch all over even though I don’t see a rash anywhere.”
“We’re done with the hiking,” I said. “It’s just the volcano now.”
“And the plane ride home,” Norma said. “I almost wish we were up in the sky already.”
“Without the volcano?” Suddenly, the upcoming flight made me feel as if we were traveling too fast toward home. I’d been bored half the time, but I wished I could have more of it.
“I’m tired of eating all these big breakfasts and fish dinners anyway,” Norma said. “After a while I don’t even feel like eating. I wish I hadn’t said I was going to eat what’s special here, and there was good old fashioned fried chicken on my plate.”
“It’s good to try new,” I said. “There’s time for your favorites when we’re home and the doctor gives you the green light.”
“KFC. Extra crispy,” she said, and I squeezed her hand.
We stayed overnight more than thirty miles from Mt. St. Helens because Norma didn’t want to get too close and spoil the effect of coming up on it in the morning. She got her wish. The road was tricky with hills and valleys and curves, so it was Norma who said she could make out the mountain while I was concentrating on the road, missing the mountain both times she said, “There it is.” The third time I stopped the car and got out to take it all in. Norma stood beside me as we looked at what was left of Mt. St. Helens. “Just think about this big terrible thing happening right about the time we were getting settled in after the honeymoon. And we didn’t pay any attention to something so spectacular because we were busy with the new apartment.”
I liked seeing her excited again. I told her people as far away as we were, nearly twenty miles away, had died from mud slides that day. “You can be nowhere near something and still it kills you,” Norma murmured.
“It doesn’t seem possible standing here, does it?” I said. Though when Norma didn’t answer, I knew that was the wrong way to get things started.
Up by the volcano, the wind lifted grit into our eyes. A man with a telescope showed us where to look to see elk resting at the base. He told us it was fireweed we were seeing growing in patches on the mostly barren ground. “It’s one of the first things to come back after disaster,” he said. “It’s a miracle that tells you there’s more to come.”
Inside, there was a photograph of a scientist taken the night before the eruption. The man had studied the volcano closely, even taken samples from the crater. The photo showed him lounging outdoors looking like a camper comfortable with nature. He was sitting six miles from the mountain, and the following morning, the caption said, he was killed by the enormous explosion right after he radioed “Vancouver. Vancouver. This is it.”
There was a photo of Harry Truman, the old guy I remembered had been in the news a week before our wedding, two weeks before the mountain blew up, because he refused to evacuate, claiming he knew what was up after fifty years beside a volcano. And then he was absolutely gone in a flash of ash and mud and smoke.
Norma read every word on every picture, taking a few hours with a volcano we needed binoculars to see up close. There was only the drive to Portland and a night in a motel between us and the airport. “This is so interesting I don’t feel as tired as I did traipsing through the woods all day.”
“It always seemed like the same woods,” I said, true enough. We went back outside where shadows were rushing across the wide runway of obliteration. We stood for photographs with the ruined mountain behind us, Norma bare-headed, me in a Mt. St. Helen’s hat bought minutes before, just after we’d listened to survivor’s voices describe mud floods and clouds of ash to corroborate the testimony of the landscape.
Finally, before we left, we went back inside so I could stand on what looked like scale connected to a seismograph. I made a mark on the unspooling paper, registering a modest tremor with a small, self-conscious leap, then standing still while the graph registered a steady line of calm. “It’s like big lie detector,” Norma said, and I jumped like a child, the graph spiking before it settled, and I didn’t say a word about my small pleasure in the misery of others who had the terrible luck of standing where hell-to-pay had visited.
Treatments
“Don’t forget to tell the doctor about your itch,” I said before Norma went to her appointment a week after we returned home, but by then she had so much worry on her face I knew she had more news for him to analyze.
It took a few more days for the doctor to be sure, but by then Norma and I both knew she’d come home with more than an allergy. “He says it looks like it’s just the one new place, so they can try again,” she said, “but I’ve been reading about this for a while, and when the one place is the liver, it takes some imagination to believe things will work out for the best.”
I was sitting on the couch, but Norma stayed standing. Instead of speaking, I began to imagine the house without her, how it would turn disheveled, beginning in the kitchen and bathroom, the filth spreading into every room until it would be impossible to allow anyone to visit. Norma looked out the window as she went on, “He told me about another operation, how the liver is a difficult site.”
“Difficult how?” I said, able to answer because her face was turned away.
“You know.”
“More chemo?”
“That’s the least of it,” she said, looking down at me now in a way that pressed against my chest and made it difficult to breathe. “I’m researching. There’s supplements they advertise on the Internet. All these people saying they’re alive because of taking them.”
“Your doctor would tell you to take them if they worked.”
“It says doctors don’t know about them.”
“Of course, it does.”
She stiffened then, and I thought she would rush out of the room, but she sat beside me and draped her arm across my shoulders. “There’s no sense pretending what I already know will help me,” she said.
Her words sounded so sensible I swallowed hard and looked down at where her right shoe touched my left. “You won’t know what to do when it’s your turn,” Norma said at last.
“I’m hoping for a quiet and sudden lights out.”
“You and your dreams. What you’ll get is a doctor and directions to follow.”
“The directions are better than they used to be.”
Norma smiled and pecked my cheek as if I were her father. “Save that for the Church of the Affirmations.”
A week later, when Norma asked me to drive her to and from the doctor’s, I felt sick myself. “You can’t drive?” I said.
“It’s not that,” Norma said. “He’s a new one, and there’s an outpatient procedure. Something different.”
“He sounds like a hope specialist.”
“Hope can be a specialty,” she said. “You don’t have to believe any more than I have to think you’re right.”
Doctor V. Kumar, it said on the office door. Psychic Surgery. On the wall beside the door was what looked like a magazine ad inside a black frame: Specializing in the Removal of Tumors and Negative Stress Clots it began. “Don’t you start in now,” Norma said when she saw me reading. I felt like I was in an old familiar story that I’d somehow never heard.
A young woman who looked to be still in her teens greeted us. Kumar’s daughter, I thought, but she didn’t identify herself. While Norma signed in, I took a close look at the diploma on the wall behind her. Granted to Doctor V. Kumar, the diploma said, by The Institute for Psychic Healing, this 5th day of June, 1991. I wondered if it had been backdated, that when you bought something like that you chose a date to suggest experience and long-term success. Or maybe the date was simply adjusted to fit the purchaser’s stated age.
Norma didn’t even sit down in the empty waiting room, a first for these nearly two years of such visits. She kissed me goodbye on my forehead. A dry peck. I sat down, but the magazines on the table between the two pair of chairs were all more than a year old. National Geographic. Readers’ Digest. Six different names were scattered across the eleven address labels. None of them were V. Kumar. “You can observe from here,” the young woman said, guiding me through another door five minutes later. “I’ll be with you in a moment.”
Another five minutes and the young woman reappeared to turn on a switch, and through what looked to be two-way glass, I saw Norma draped in light blue except for a bare patch between her breasts and waist. The scene reminded me of executions in movies, families of the victim and the killer staring at a hooded body being strapped to a table
I wanted to lay my hands on the glass, but a railing blocked any access unless I crawled over it. “We don’t want someone to knock on the window,” the young woman said. “Concentration is absolute.”
V. Kumar, when he walked in, looked to be about the same age as Norma and me. I wasn’t certain about how much he resembled the young woman who said, just before she left, “The operation will commence very shortly.”
A moment later, a brilliant light came on, and Dr. V. Kumar placed it above Norma’s left side where she must have indicated her pain was most intense. For a few seconds, her stomach was brightly exposed, but Kumar shifted his position and obstructed a clear view just before he seemed to mimic incision by tracing a fingernail across her skin right where the light was shining. Just that one supposed cut Kumar made before he bowed his head and held both hands under the light.
This is how it goes then, I thought, but Kumar stayed meditative for a few minutes, and Norma, when I glanced at her, looked rapturous, caught up in the possibility of a miracle. She stared at the ceiling. She seemed to be holding her breath. Kumar stayed prayerful while I gripped the brass railing and leaned forward.
Suddenly, blood spurted through his hands, and Norma’s mouth shaped into an O. Kumar did nothing to stop it from bubbling up between his fingers, but the fountain of it ended in less than a minute as if Kumar could sew up incisions with the same mind control that opened them. Kumar kept his hands still for three more minutes before he lifted them away as if they held something small and slippery.
The bright light clicked off. Kumar seemed to be showing Norma something in his bloody hands. He left, but Norma didn’t move, lying there stained with blood as if she were shackled to the table. Another minute and Kumar reappeared. I watched as he washed her body and applied something dark blue over where the wound would be if his fingernail had been a scalpel.
The young woman returned. “The entry way is so thin that it very quickly closes,” she said. “Your wife has been asked by Dr. Kumar to rest for an hour and allow the healing gel to do its work.”
As if Kumar expected everyone to go back to the waiting room or to stare at the patient, there were no magazines near the two chairs in the observation room. After a minute, I didn’t look at Norma. I sat and felt like I’d just watched my house burn, with everything in it, including my wife.
In less than half an hour, the young woman called from the doorway. “Your wife will be ready shortly.”
“I thought you said . . .” I began.
“She’s recovered rapidly. Dr. Kumar says she concentrated so well he is very optimistic. She’s doing great.”
When I stood, I saw that Kumar was wiping away the blue gel. In the waiting room two women sat side by side, both of them engaged in National Geographic. I couldn’t tell from their bodies or posture which one was sick.
Norma reappeared fully dressed. “What do you think?” she said at once.
“It was hard to tell whether his fingernail even touched you.”
“It felt hot,” Norma said. “Then it felt very, very cold.” One of the two women folded her National Geographic shut and held it against her chest. She fixed her eyes on Norma, evaluating.
The young woman smiled. “Dr. Kumar says you were a wonderful patient. You were able to lie so still the whole time.”
When the woman with the closed magazine cleared her throat, Norma tugged my sleeve. “We’re finished here,” she said, so I knew that whatever arrangements she’d made for paying had been handled ahead of time, that in all likelihood, she’d prepaid. In full. Maybe even in cash.
For the first time, I glanced through the window that looked out over a culvert, a trickle of water running toward a bowl-shaped holding area that must have been dug to keep the road from flooding from run-off from the parking lot during heavy rain. I wanted to stay where I stood and wait for a thunderstorm, watch until I could see how furiously the water ran in the culvert, how rapidly the holding area filled.
When we were back on the landing outside the door, I noticed the office next door. Dr. R. Daniels. Psychic Dentistry. There was a framed ad beside that door, too. Perfectly painless root canals it began. Cavities filled by touch and thought, teeth made whole.
The next door advertised an organic weight-loss center. The one next to it was the entrance to a tanning salon.
“Did you see the blood?” Norma said in the car.
“Yes,” I said.
“And the tumor?”
I held the key turned to the right so long that the ignition ground. “I was too far away to see anything like that,” I said.
“It was small and yellowish. It looked like something you cough up when you have bronchitis.”
I didn’t sense a contradiction for me to be proud that Norma was shamelessly being a fool for survival. The truth was I felt apprehension that there would be many more impossible things to try. “I should step on it,” I said, turning into traffic. “Let’s get you home and make sure you’re all in one piece.”
“This isn’t religion, Charles,” she said. “This isn’t about prayer. God’s not the only one who can clean you out.”
“Money is what it takes.”
“What else would I spend it on, Charles? Dr. Kumar let you see everything, didn’t he?”
For a mile, I acted as if I had to concentrate hard on the crowded highway, and then Norma asked to stop at the KFC. “I feel wonderful,” she said, and I couldn’t deny she was glowing.
“I’m not hungry,” I said, “but I could use a Coke right about now.”
Extra crispy, she ordered, a two-piece dinner with mashed potatoes and gravy. “All that grease,” I said, sipping from my soda, but she waved me off.
“It’s been nearly two years since I last had this,” she said.
She tore the skin off the thigh piece and stuffed it in her mouth. “The secret recipe,” she said. “It’s never been beaten.” She peeled the skin off the drumstick and swallowed it quickly, smiling, before she scooped potatoes and gravy into her mouth.
She got two bites of meat and another spoonful of potatoes down before she said, “That was so good” and wiped her mouth with a napkin. Crumbs of breading were scattered on the table. She caught her breath and touched the chicken once more, but didn’t pick it up. I might as well admit that right about then I wished for psychic resurrection.
“You get me straight home now,” she said. “Before it’s too late. You drive as fast as you can.”
Gary Fincke is the author of multiple books of fiction, poetry, and nonfiction. His latest collection of stories is After the Locks are Changed (Stephen F. Austin, 2024). Earlier collections won the Flannery O’Connor Prize and the Elixir Press Fiction Prize. The Comfort of Taboos: More Selected Stories will be published by Braddock Avenue Books in 2025. He is the Charles Degenstein Professor of Creative Writing at Susquehanna University.