Myra lifted her hands and watched herself flex them, as if they were kitchen gadgets she had not yet figured out how to work. He tried to imagine how it must feel to her, the disease filling her bones, emptying her muscles.
“I won't ask, Nelson. Thank Goddess that Roxie will be there. You'll hate yourself someday.”
“Do you have to say that?”
“It's true, you will. I know a few things after sixty-eight years.”
“I mean the âGoddess' part. I hate that.”
She fingered the fringes of her choppy hair. “Like that's the worst of my problems, what you hate.” He couldn't face another gathering, what she insisted this time on calling her “bon voyage party.” The plan was to say good-bye to everyone, give away her things to friends, celebrate her life with alcohol and snack mix, and then within a week or two dig out of that book some quick and easy way to kill herself, as in earlier years she might have found a recipe for pound cake. At the first party she announced her decision to “embrace her death” rather than fight it, and all her friends applauded and kissed her. She introduced one of them as a “midwife,” whose job it was to assist Myra as she delivered herself from this world and into the next. He'd just stood there, hearing them speak this way.
She sighed. “If you won't come to the party, at least promise to get the mistletoe for me. Be some use to me. And it's not like I'm asking you to be there when the time comes.” Myra reached in her smock and automatically brought out a handful of quarters for the little boy who approached them with a dollar wadded in his fingertips. He was a skinny, pinkish boy who looked to be about seven years old, wire-rimmed glasses low on his nose. His other hand held a baby doll with a missing arm and matted blond hair. His grandmother helped out at the Laundromat three afternoons a week.
“Get
the mistletoe? Why don't I just
get
my shotgun?” Nelson's face heated up.
“Lower your voice, please,” Myra said, nodding at the boy, who stood with his pale mouth slightly open, eyes wide behind the quarter-size lenses.
Nelson looked at him. “No, it's okay, I'm not going to be shooting anybody.” He felt his pockets for something to give the boy. “Tell me your name again, son.”
“Earl.” He chewed his lower lip. “My daddy's name, too.”
“Earl is our little helper-outer,” Myra said.
Nelson found a key-chain bottle opener with RUSTY'S LIQUORS printed on the side. He gave it to Earl, who looped the chain over the head of his doll for a necklace. He shook the doll to make the necklace swing back and forth, then ran off toward his grandmother behind the front counter. Nelson looked at Myra. Her blouse, her pants, shoes, all her clothes had been altered to fasten with Velcro.
“The party is Saturday night, in case you change your mind. I'd like you to change your mind.”
He shook his head, drew a deep breath, the air around them heavy with the smell of scorched sheets. “I'll see you later,” he said.
Nelson had deliveries to make by Friday: three tanks of helium for Pizza Palace, liquid hydrogen for the hospital, water bottles to the office park, concrete mix to some guy building a garage. Roxie was at home, fixing lunch. He sat in the truck, chewing one of the ginseng toothpicks Myra had given him to help him quit smoking. For all of his adult life he'd been delivering something to somebody. When Roxie was studying for her degree, she told him that a writer named Ralph Waldo Emerson once said, “Make yourself necessary to somebody.” She told Nelson that's what he did, with the delivery business he'd had since he was eighteen and bought his first pickup. Nelson liked the way Roxie could make what he did sound important and indispensable. He'd written the quote on a notecard and taped it to the visor next to his roadmap holder and looked at it now as he cranked the engine, pulling out down Taylor Avenue toward Mary Alice's place.
The house stood in the middle of fast-food restaurants, gas stations, convenience stores. A small wire fence guarded the weedy yard, the broken walkway lined with cement blocks and headless, unpainted lawn ornaments of squirrels and deer. The brown asbestos shingles that covered the house were wrapped in a layer of kudzu, the tendrils of the vines stretching up the chimney and along the far wall. The house looked sunken, as if it had drawn back from all the commerce that surrounded it. Two Chihuahuas sat panting in a ring of dirt where the grass had worn away, the ring marking the length of the chains that tethered them to the dog house. Above them, dense as a thundercloud, was an oak tree, and in the middle and top branches were the darker green patches of mistletoe spotted with white berries. He tried to imagine what it would feel like, swallowing the berries, the slow wait as their poison wound through the bloodstream, snapping out nerves like light switches, shutting down the lungs, the heart. She'd found out about it from the suicide book she'd gotten from the Hemlock Society. The book had some lavish title meant to make killing yourself sound reasoned and noble. At her first party Myra told a variation of the old funeral parlor joke, saying that the Hemlock Society must not be a very good club, seeing how everyone was dying to get out. Her friends laughed like she'd said something cute.
Why was it nothing mattered to anyone anymore?
Without much thought, Nelson stepped up to Mary Alice's rotted porch and knocked. Tacked to the doorframe was a recent notice to condemn. They were booting her out, finally, squeezing in another car wash or Taco Bell. Nelson knocked again. From inside came the faint sounds of shuffling and things knocked over. She was a mean old woman, he knew from the years delivering heating oil to her house. He'd ask about the mistletoe, she'd chase him from the yard, and that would end it; he would have his excuse for Myra. The latch on the door sounded. Through the window Mary Alice looked like a shrunken version of his memory of her, her hair fully white now and thinning, her apple-doll mouth puckered brown, her eyes a whitish blue.
She swung the door open, looked at him through the dirty screen. “You here to see to those moles?”
“Ma'am? No, I just wanted to ask you something.”
“My daughter-in-law hates me,” Mary Alice said, her voice trailing to a mumble. As he leaned to hear her, Nelson noticed her smell, like creosote and attic trunks, and her feet, covered in men's wingtip shoes bound with twine.
“I bet she doesn't hate you,” Nelson said. He didn't know what else to say. “Do you know your oak tree is full of mistletoe?” Beneath thinning hair, her scalp was bright pink and spotted.
“Just another parasite. That's all there is anymore. Them moles, my daughter-in-law. The whole list.” A can of tuna fish sat open on the hall table behind her.
“Looks like the county is on that list, too,” Nelson said. She squinted at him. “They mean to condemn your place and take it, ma'am.”
She made a grunting noise. “Like to see that happen. See them try that again.”
Nelson shrugged. “It's not really a matter of trying. They just go on ahead.” He thumped the notice stapled to her doorframe. “What I wondered was if I could take some of that mistletoe out of your tree before they take it down with a bulldozer.”
She frowned at him. “You get rid of those moles, you can take anything you want, except my dogs. They caught my asthma from me, you know.”
“Ma'am, I'm not really here about your moles ⦔ He stopped, not wanting to get into the whole thing again. She looked at him, blinking. He told her he would do what he could. As he climbed into his truck, he took another look at the clumps of mistletoe high in the tree. She pushed open the screen door to shout after him.
“Don't you put down any poison,” she said, her thin voice a wire stretched across the yard. “You'll kill my dogs if you do.”
“I've said it before, I think you should go,” Roxie said. She sat at her small desk, hands busy with changing the ribbon in her typewriter. Since her degree in English from the state college, she'd had a job writing captions for the Walter Drake household gift catalogue. So far this afternoon she had finished up descriptions of an electric callus remover and a bathtub safety seat. She was working on a sheepskin recliner cover when the ribbon went out.
Nelson nodded, rubbed his face, finished his fried chicken. “She wants me to bring poison to the party.”
“Poison?” Roxie looked at him.
“Yeah, you know, the way other people bring beer.”
“What poison?”
Her told her about Myra's request, about Mary Alice and the moles. She leaned her head on her typewriter, looking at him. “What are you going to do?”
Nelson sighed. “I'm not going to kill my mother, Rox. Let her call what's-his-name, that Dr. Death guy. Did he retire or something?”
“In a way, though, it's her last wish. It's the last thing you could do for her. Giving her an easy death isn't such a bad thing, Nelson.”
“Don't even start that.”
She pulled her long braid across her shoulder, fingering it. “You talked to her doctors. You know what's in store. It takes a long time, Nelson, and someday she won't be able to chew. Won't be able to talk or move or swallow.”
Nelson held a bite of fried chicken in his mouth until the saliva pooling around it threatened to choke him.
“At least go to her party,” Roxie said.
“Her party.” Nelson shook his head. “You weren't there for the first one. She went around telling everybody she'd rather have Babe Ruth's disease, so she'd only have to deal with getting fat and drinking a lot.”
Roxie smiled.
“That's not funny,” Nelson said.
“Well, it isn't and it is,” she said. “You can't stop her from dying, honey.”
That was the part he knew, that she would die, and that all she wanted with the mistletoe berries or the Hemlock Society or the books she read was a way to speed things up and make it happen sooner. But it was just wrong, somehow. He saw this early on in his business, when he first had the truck, how he tried to impress everybody by making deliveries early, but only messed everybody up. They couldn't put the carpet down until the floors were finished, or had no place to stack bottles until the steel shelving was up. He learned to wait until it was time. Maybe tragedy had its own time, its own schedule, and to hurry it up would do nothing but compound it. Maybe something wasn't ready, maybe Myra herself, or some eleventh-hour cure some doctor might happen upon, or maybeâ¦something. As for God, heaven, soulsâ¦it was hard for him to think of it, and Myra had given all that up when Nelson's father died, as though she had worn out her faith or just let it go. He looked at Roxie, her hands striped with ink from the new ribbon.
“I don't know about any of this,” he said.
“You don't have to decide right away,” she said. She wiped her hands on crumbled-up paper and turned back to her work. She typed, then stopped. “How does this sound? âRelax in durable comfort.'”
Nelson shook his head. “Can't imagine that there is such a thing.”
That night, his hand resting on the curve of Roxie's hip as she slept beside him, Nelson slipped into half dreams of walking, he and his father, in the bone cold of winter that came to the Ozarks after an eye blink of autumn. Early December, his father crunching through drifts in stiff rubber boots to a field behind Singleton's Tire Shop, where a forty-foot oak threw gnarled shadows across Davidson Street. His father smoked a cheap, sweet-smelling cigar and carried a shotgun crooked under his arm. Other men gathered there, smoking, drinking from Thermoses or Dixie cups. One at a time they loaded paper shells into their guns, took sloppy aim, and fired into the upper branches of the oak. Early morning or early evening, he couldn't remember, the sky marbled, sparse cars slipping on the road behind them. With no word the next took aim at the tree and fired, then came the nudge of his daddy's thumb against his shoulder and Nelson ran to gather the clumps of mistletoe that had fallen, separating them from the broken branches cut through white and brittle, flecked with shotgun pellets. He stuffed the green leaves and white berries into grocery sacks, and at home his mother and the other men's wives would wire together small bundles tied off with red ribbon and slipped into plastic sandwich bags. A dollar each, sold in the grocery store and the card store, or by Nelson door to door. They did this every Christmas.
Once, while he was gathering bundles, one of the men raised his gun and fired without waiting for Nelson to retreat back to their group. All the other men shouted, some of them laughing, the pellets falling like finger thumps along the top of Nelson's skull. He pressed back against the tree trunk and watched his father grab the gun barrel and twist it upward. Above him a few stray pellets tapped like rain through the tree branches, and as Nelson listened he felt only a kind of assurance. He was nine years old. He would grow up. He would be an adult with a life as full and troubled and real as his father's or his father's friends. He would have a wife someday, kids (he'd been wrong on that part), his life would continue on and was not about to be ended by some shotgun accident notable mainly for its stupidity. It wouldn't happen that way. Now, at forty-nine, lying in the dark beside Roxie, what did his life have left in the way of assurances? A job that never changed, a woman who needed him only in ways. None like he had at nine, knowing that no threat could touch him, and none like those he carried into adulthood, the belief that someone, somewhere, would find you and love you completely, that your life would turn out to be something rather than just things. He lifted his fingers from under the sheet and toward the darkened ceiling. What thing might be left to hold in your hands? What might be left to know?
The next morning, while he picked up a load of peat moss at Scott Seed, he asked the man working there about the best way to get rid of moles.