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MANAGE YOUR SUBSCRIPTIONTen Things
LESLIE PIETRZYK lives in Virginia and is the author of two novels: A Year and a Day (William Morrow/HarperCollins) and Pears on a Willow Tree (HarperPerennial).
These are ten things that only you know now:
One
He joked that he would die young. You imagined ninety-nine to your hundred. But by “young” he meant sixty-five, fifty-five. What “young” ended up meaning was thirty-five.
In the memory book the funeral home gave you (actually, that you paid for; nothing there was free, not even delivering the flowers to a nursing home the next day, which cost sixty-five dollars, but you were too used up to care), there was a page to record his exact age in years, months, and days. You added hours; you even added minutes, because you had that information. You were there when he had the heart attack.
Now, when thinking about his life, it seemed to you that minutes were so very important. There was that moment in the emergency room when you begged for ten more minutes. You would’ve traded anything, everything, just for one more second, for the speck of time it would take to say his name, to hear him say your name.
Later, when you thought about it (because suddenly there was so much time to think; too little time, too much time — time was just one more thing you couldn’t make sense of anymore), you wondered why he’d told you he was going to die young. The first time he said it, you punched his arm. “Don’t say that,” you said. “Don’t ever say that again, ever.” But he said it another day and another and lots of days after that. And you punched his shoulder every time, because it was bad luck, bad mental energy, but you knew he’d say it again. You knew then that there would always be one more time for everything.
Two
He once compared you to an avocado. He was never good at saying what he meant in fancy ways. (You had a boyfriend in college who dedicated poems to you, one of which won a contest in the student literary magazine, but that boyfriend never compared you to anything as simple and real as an avocado.)
You were sitting on the patio in the backyard. It was the day the dog got loose and ran out onto Route 50, and you found him by the side of the road — two legs mangled and blood everywhere — and you pulled off your windbreaker and wrapped the dog in it while your husband stood next to you whispering, “Oh God, oh God,” because there was so much blood. He drove to the vet, catching every red light, while you held the dog close and murmured dog secrets in his ear and felt his warm blood soak your clothes. And when the vet said she was sorry, that it was too late, you were the one who cupped the dog’s head in both hands while she slipped in the needle, and you were the one who remembered to take off the dog’s collar, unbuckling it slowly and looping it twice around your wrist, and you were the one whose face the dog tried to lick but couldn’t quite reach.
So, that night, out on the patio, the two of you were sitting close, thinking about the dog. It was really too cold to be on the patio, but the dog had loved the backyard; every tree was a personal friend, each squirrel or bird an encroaching enemy. It was just cold enough that you felt him shiver, and he felt you shiver, but neither of you suggested going inside just yet. That’s when he said, “I’ve decided you’re like an avocado.”
You almost didn’t ask why, you were so busy thinking about the dog’s tongue trying to reach your face and failing, even when you leaned right down next to his mouth. But then you asked anyway.
He looked up at the dark sky. “You’re sort of tough on the outside,” he said. “A little intimidating.”
“Maybe,” you said, but you knew he was right. In photos, you always looked as if you didn’t want to be there. Lost tourists never asked you for directions; they asked your husband. It was something you’d become used to and no longer thought about or wondered why anymore.
He continued: “But inside, you’re soft and creamy. Luscious, just like a perfectly ripe avocado. That’s the part of you I get. And underneath that is the hardest, strongest core of anyone I know. Like how you were today at the vet. Like how you are with everything. An avocado.”
At the time, you smiled and mumbled, but could only think about the dog, the poor dog. That was five years ago. What you remember now is not so much the dog’s tongue, but being compared to an avocado.
Three
He predicted a grand slam at a baseball game. It was the Orioles versus the Red Sox, a sellout game up in Baltimore, on a bright, sunny June day, the kind of day when you look out the window and think, Baseball. But in Baltimore it wasn’t possible to go to a game just because it was a sunny day; they were sold out months and months in advance — especially against teams like Boston, which had fans whose fathers had been Boston fans, whose kids were Boston fans, and whose grandkids would be Boston fans. He’d actually bought the tickets way back in December, not knowing what kind of day it would be, and it just happened to be that perfect kind of baseball day.
He’d grown up listening to games on the radio, sprawled sideways across his bed in the dark listening to am stations from faraway Chicago, New York, St. Louis. He still remembered the call letters and could reel them off like a secret code. Now he brought his radio to the game in Baltimore and balanced it on the armrest between your seats, and the announcers’ voices drifted up in bits and snatches, and part of him was sitting next to you eating a hot dog and cheering, and part of him was that child sprawled in the dark listening to distant voices.
The bases were loaded, and Cal Ripken came up to bat. Cal was your favorite player. You’d once seen him pick up a piece of litter that was blowing around the field and tuck it into his back pocket. Something about that impressed you as much as all those consecutive games he’d played.
“What’s Cal going to do?” he asked.
You looked at your score card. (He’d taught you how to keep score; you liked the organization and had developed a special system, with filled-in diamonds for home runs, a k for a strikeout, and squiggly lines to indicate a pitching change.) Cal wasn’t batting especially well lately — the beginnings of a slump, you thought. “Hit into a double play,” you said. Cal had hit into a lot of double plays that season, ended a lot of innings.
He shook his head. “He’s knocking the grand salami” — meaning a home run bringing in all four runners. You’d never seen one in person before.
“Cal doesn’t have many grand slams,” you said — not to be mean (after all, Cal was your favorite player), but because it was true. You knew Cal’s stats, and his grand-slam total was four at the time, after all those years in the majors.
“Well, he’s getting one now,” he said.
After Cal fouled twice for two strikes, you glanced over at him. “It’ll come,” he said.
On the next pitch, Cal whacked the ball all the way across that blue sky.
Everyone stood and cheered and screamed and stomped their feet, and he held the radio in his hand and flung his arm around your shoulders and squeezed tight. From the radio by your ear, you heard the echo of everyone cheering, and you thought about a boy alone in the dark listening to that sound.
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