Day Number Fuck Me

I have a different ending in mind.

In this ending when I came by in August you decided, on the spur of the moment, to tell me. I can see you deciding on the drive over, V. restless and bouncing in her seat, flipping the radio station, rolling the windows in the back up and down. She is curious about me, asks questions. In the back of your mind you mull. At first you think no, no reason to worry me, the treatment is going better, so better not to say. Besides what can I be expected to say?

But then as you pull into the gas station at the intersection of the two lane roads, maybe you remember the last time we ate at the diner, now closed - not just COVID closed but forever closed. Your dad was still alive then. K. and I ate with him there, again, a year before he died. You were overseas. He got tears in his eyes apologizing for something way in the past, a slight he didn’t intend and that I didn’t feel, but he was feeling badly about it, sitting there with the reality of me smiling at him. He seemed a bit confused to me, and K. who was with me agreed. A bit out of breath. I chalked it up to the smoking - his memory was good, he took me to see Grandma, and called B. and J., and we stopped by the John Deere dealership and he introduced me to three old guys in DeKalb hats sitting in chairs out front.

“Me and you always got along,” he asked/said and I said of course and kissed his cheek and we sat there in the dusty mote silence of a one hundred year old Illinois farmhouse and he nodded off a bit, and I checked on him frequently as I took inventory of our stuff from another life. I remembered when he called me a banty rooster, and got his feelings hurt when I got my feelings hurt, feeling I didn’t fully comprehend his great appreciation for this creature - tiny, beautiful - stunning, was the word he used - but taking absolutely no shit from anybody. They protect their own, he said, all serious. I always liked when he shared his deeper level knowledge of animals. His respect for them touched me. I seen one go after a bobcat one time, sniffing around the chickens and he scared it off before I could even get my gun, he told me.

In my new ending you’re sitting in front of this diner now with V. just as you were, scanning all the trucks that drive by and at first you don’t recognize us - just as in real life. Then you do. And everything in this version goes pretty much as actual reality except that when we are out at the farm you say to me, hey can you come here for a minute and instead of stopping in the kitchen you step out back onto the porch, and you awkwardly hold the door for me with the arm that is still completely okay. Then I grab the door and hold it as you go through and you thank me in the way people do who are sincerely grateful for having their weaknesses accomodated in the smallest of ways, even pulling a door closed. Maybe I notice as you go down the steps in front of me the way you use the railing, and the tentativeness of your step - in real life, I had a fleeting thought that your movements had a certain…frailty. But I’d seen that before, when you tore your Achilles. And you had since torn your *other* Achilles.

And in the new version you lead me to under the big oak out back and tell me. We sit in chairs because you are carefully conserving your strength, and we face each other in this oddly formal and wholly midwestern way. I imagine that after about twenty minutes or so V. would come up and call Dad from twenty feet away and you’d tell her we’ll be right there, her disappearing with her long ponytail flying.

Then I say all the things I want to say to you, wish I’d known to say.

Another ten minutes pass and I imagine my husband looking discreetly around the corner and sees us standing and hugging and then he disappears back around the corner, packing the books we are there to collect.

As we take our leave we are back in the grip of false hope, say a few more things that aren’t reflective of the fact we’re never going to see or talk to each other again though the knowledge is there in the clouds, the corn, the trees. You will promise to let me know how it’s going. I will put my sunglasses on to hide my stricken eyes. We would load up and pull away only this time I’d take a longer, more deliberate last look at you than I did. I’d lean out my window and wave to you. Then I’d command my husband to slow down, and I’d pull myself almost completely out of the window and make my arms a half circle over my head, hands touching - the open water diver signal to everyone on the surface that everything’s OK. It would have surprised you into a laugh, a message of acknowledgement and optimism and love. We learned how to dive together, you and I, together in Mexico and Cozumel and Belize. I never had a moment’s worry with you as my partner. I was always confident you’d be there to give me air if I needed it and you never let me down. It’s a pretty profound thing, when you think of it.

I’d be doing that in the middle of a country road with my husband next to me and your daughter next to you but it would be a signal just between us, taking us back to that very first dive together, our first time, the strange greeny wonder of looking at each other in depths that could kill you.

And then in the new version you’d recede to the point I would tuck myself back into the window, knowing you might be watching, still tracking the silver of our camper flashing in the setting sun. In the real life version, we left you and drove straight into the open arms of Kansas, the sky billowing with salmon colored clouds limned in purest gold, the western sky still blue but the rearview mirror reflecting the darkness already falling fast behind us, where you were driving home to R. with V. at your side, your thoughts on the past in a good way they haven’t been for awhile, maybe remembering standing at the bottom of the ocean waving our arms until the plankton lit up around us, like underwater fireflies and us two kids from the flatlands with our scuba tanks and BCDs, the skin around our eyes ghostly in the nighttime water. I like to think of you with the window open, the sunset tinting your windshield red, the air gone bluish with the the corn surrounding you on either side. You are less than ten miles away as the crow flies but hurtling like a meteor fast, so fast away from me.

Maybe R. pictured something like this too. Maybe that’s why she didn’t come. In the end you didn’t say anything about what was happening to you. I can still picture you standing there with V. in the sun dappled shade of the dooryard of the old farmhouse. It’s a fucking ridiculously nostalgic sentence but that is exactly how it went down, you and me saying our goodbyes surrounded by rows and rows of corn, and then we got into our cars and drove away, leaving no other sound but the wind.