LITTLE ROCK — Vernise took a leave of absence from her job.
She hated to do it, in part because her attorneys had been so good to her, letting her take off whenever she needed to and a bonus at Christmas besides. But she didn’t see any way around it. He was her husband, and it was her place to take care of him.
They said she could come back anytime she wanted. She thanked them for that and went to the hospital.
The doctor had taken her aside and told her what he thought, and she appreciated that, even if she knew there were things that doctors couldn’t know. The doctor said that if he didn’t get better, if his ammonia levels didn’t come down, they were looking at maybe six months. Give or take.
But he had said the same thing a year before, and somehow Jesse’s ammonia levels had come down, even though everybody agreed his liver was pretty much shot. He’d come home and for a few months he’d been almost his old self. He didn’t always talk sense but she would allow that he never really did talk all that much sense; he always had his own way of putting things which-if you weren’t used to it-you might find hard to follow.
He’d started to slide again around Thanksgiving; Jesse went from not sleeping at all to sleeping all the time, and when he wasn’t sleeping he’d make phone calls to his grown children and people he hadn’t seen in years, promising to send them specific things that meant something to him. He gave away all of his guitars, and shipped back the one her son had left with them for safekeeping almost 30 years before.
In December, she put him on a plane-with his wallet and ID in a pouch around his neck and an envelope with detailed instructions pinned to the inside of his jacket like a little kid-to go see his daughter Marianza in New York. He’d been tickled by the experience, by how the airline had fussed over him, wheeling him onto the plane before anyone else and carting him between gates in the Pittsburgh airport. He said he’s never flown first class before, though it wasn’t really first class, it was just that he needed assistance.
And Marianza had driven down with him into the city and they’d spent the night in a Manhattan hotel, and Jesse had enjoyed that too, being there amid the high buildings and that antic urban hum you feel as much as hear.
He’d come home in high spirits and Christmas was pretty good. Vernice gave her 14-year-old granddaughter the little Chevy she’d been driving back and forth to work. She didn’t need the car, because Jesse couldn’t drive anymore-it was out of the question-and Vernise figured she could just use his truck, for a while at least.
Maybe in a little while she’d get something that suited her better, but for the time being the truck was all right.
When New Year’s came, Vernise was glad to have 2011 behind her. It had been a bad year, no doubt one of the worst of her life, what with the arrest of her eldest daughter and all the confoundment that had caused.
But all that seemed to have settled out now, though there was a court date that kept being put off, and a lawyer who was telling them not to worry about his fee (though Vernise knew there was always a meter running)and some mysteries she preferred not to think too much about (like what happened to the $7,000 she paid to the loss protection officer that she thought would make the charges goaway). She could only worry about what she could handle. Her daughter Jamey was doing better now that she was off the pills.
You could see almost anything as a blessing if you looked at it the right way. It made Vernise sad that morning she drove out to the barn and found their old horse dead in his stall. He’d been fine the night before and there wasn’t a mark on him, but he was an old horse and she was glad that she’d been the one to find him and not Jesse, who could be soft-hearted about animals.
The old horse’s death was sad and sudden, but it left her free to concentrate on Jesse, who needed around the-clock attention. Vernise had help with him, of course; her sisters would stay with him sometimes, and since Jamey wasn’t working she could sometimes help out too, though the truth was she and Jesse didn’t always get along so well.
The doctor had sent some people from hospice to talk to them, but Vernise didn’t think Jesse was ready for that. They wouldn’t do anything to help him, they’d just try to make him more comfortable, and while Vernise appreciated everything everyone was trying to do for them, she didn’t feel right consigning him to hospice. Not yet anyway.
But Jesse was a mess, no doubt about it. He was in and out of the hospital in February, and now he was in, probably at least for a week. And then probably for another 20 days in a nursing home. And after that, who knew? Maybe he could come home again. All Vernise knew was that he was her husband, and she was going to do whatever he needed her to do.
So she sat in Jesse’s room while he slept amid the tubes and the machinery that blinked and beeped. She was getting used to the smell of the place, the antiseptic sting of the air, the hot water taste that clung to the trays in the cafeteria. It occurred to her that she was in her hospital years, that the past decade had been a series of vigils held in white-stained halls, of meetings with doctors who spoke in low rich tones and looked over their glasses at her with eyes professionally trained not to pity or rebuke.
All but one of her brothers had gone this way; so had her mother and soon, most likely, Jesse.
When she was young she never spent much time around doctors or lawyers. It didn’t seem so long ago that she’s been the girl who played basketball and rode her father’s mule through the tobacco fields. The girl who met and married the Air Force ballplayer.
They used to live in a little bungalow not far from the hospital where she stood; she remembered how one summer they spent their last few coins on a pint of ice cream. He cut it in half with his pocket knife and they sat in one of the squares under the stars and scraped it out and ate it with wooden sticks on what could have been the happiest night of her life.
That was longer ago than it felt like; Jack had been dead for almost 30 years. She’d been married to Jesse nearly as long as she had been married to Jack. Vernise was beginning to think she could almost understand what people meant when they said time was a relative and fluid thing, something that had no certain shape and could bend and twist back upon itself.
Here she was, suddenly grown up. Suddenly old. And, for the first time in 60 years, unemployed.
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Perspective, Pages 72 on 03/25/2012