She said: “Nathan, you better not do that.”
Then she was quiet and grinned: “You’re rotten to your core.”
Nathan touched and then touched some more. They weren’t giggling anymore.
I went into the other room to leave them alone, but when I sat down on the couch, I could still see them saying goodnight.
Nathan sat up in his bed and Rhonda started doing the hand signals she used to help communicate with him. But now they were whispering to each other and I heard Rhonda say: “Okay now. I gotta go.”
And then she pointed to her eye.
Then she pointed to her heart.
Then she pointed to Nathan.
Then Nathan was quiet and he did the same thing.
He pointed to his eye.
I.
Then he pointed to his heart.
Love.
Then he pointed to Rhonda.
You.
Rhonda kissed him goodbye and said: “Well you just look at my picture, and I’ll be back in the morning.”
And so she left and Nathan just sat there and looked at Rhonda’s picture in the moonlight.
I tried talking to Nathan, but he was too busy looking at it.
And so he stared at the picture beside his bed.
It was a picture of Rhonda.
It was a picture of the woman he loved.
This went on until Ruby started getting jealous.
“He don’t need no woman. All he needs is me,” I heard Ruby say one day.
And then one evening Ruby told Rhonda right to her face: “Well you’re just a fat old thing. Big around as can be.”
Rhonda told Ruby she didn’t have any room to talk. But then Rhonda started crying. She left. This went on for months.
After that Ruby started complaining about how Rhonda kept coming in late and how one night Rhonda didn’t show up at all. Then one night Ruby told her not to come. Rhonda left crying again, and Nathan lay in the bed and didn’t say anything. PISSED OFF.
The next day I went into Nathan’s bedroom and he was still in bed.
I said: “How are you doing, Nathan?”
He didn’t say anything.
I asked him how he was doing again.
He still didn’t say anything.
I twisted his ear.
He didn’t even act like I was there.
He turned over in his bed, staring at Rhonda’s picture.
He started watching soap operas again, but then it happened. One day on the soap opera, the actress he loved was walking across the street, and her husband’s crazy ex-wife hit the gas and ran her over. Her husband was there and held her in his arms as she died.
And so I imagine that Nathan just sat there unable to do anything, listening to her whisper, “I love you. I’m so sorry I didn’t do more to love you. I’m so sorry. I’m so sorry.”
And then… “I’ll love you forever.”
So Nathan watched her die and whispered it inside his head, I love you too.
And now it wasn’t an actress anymore he watched on TV, but a beautiful woman he had loved for a long time.
WHAT HAPPENED?
So nobody really knows what happened. I was outside when I heard Ruby scream.
I came running inside. There was a drawer on the floor and newspapers. Ruby said, “I was in the back room and when I came back the poor thing was like this.”
There was a set of knives on the counter beside the sink. He was in front of his chair. The chair was turned over. His legs were beneath the table. He was on his back. There was a steak knife sticking straight out of his chest.
There was an ambulance. Lights were flashing around and around.
There was a stretcher… ambulance guys… bringing Nathan out on a stretcher.
And then the back of the ambulance.
He tried to take his own life, but he survived. He didn’t die.
So after Nathan’s knife wound, he didn’t do much of anything but sit around at the kitchen table and watch it all go by.
One day I was sitting at the table with him, and he leaned over on his elbow and started rolling his 7UP bottle back and forth like he was bored.
Back and forth.
Back and forth.
He breathed a soft sigh and batted his eyelids.
He had movie star blue eyes.
So he sat and I wondered if he was thinking about the fact that he was the one who stayed. He was the one who sat watching his younger brothers when they were little boys, and then watching them leave the house when they were grown men.
He was the one who stayed because he had to stay. He was the one who was sitting at the table now, where he was always sitting, remembering how his brothers returned with their young wives, all pink and pretty, and pretty and pink, and pink and pretty, and pretty and pink and pink and pink and with accents from faraway places.
And then a few years later, returning once more with pink children of their own.
So I felt his muscle and laughed, trying to make the quiet go away.
But he was quiet now because he knew he would never have any of this. I saw what he saw sitting there — that there would be no brides or babies. There would be none of this. He blinked and breathed another soft sigh with a look on his face like…
Oh shit I’m trapped in my body…
Oh shit I’m trapped in my body.
And so there was no more Rhonda.
There was no more Rhonda until after Nathan died.
After the wake was over, and the funeral was over too, and everybody was walking away, I went back to pick up something, or help my aunt walk back through the mud.
I looked up, and when I did, all the way in the back of the crowd of people was a woman.
It was a woman all by herself.
It was Rhonda.
She was crying so hard that I thought she was going to fall down.
She was crying and her chest was going up and down, up and down, and she was trying to walk back to her car.
A couple of months later, on a bright evening, just before the sunset, I went by the grave. It was fall and there was this glow over everything, and it was so bright. And it was all still there — the gravestone and the old tree, and the old flowers were there too. But now there was something new in front of Nathan’s gravestone. It was a little teddy bear covered in fur and there was a little note beside it. So I opened it up and saw a picture of a heart, and beneath the heart was a note that said, “I love you, and I’ll always love you Nathan.” It was just like in the soap opera. And then beside the heart was a single name. It said…
…Rhonda.
But wait.
I have decided to stop for a moment.
I want to stop for a moment before they die. I am not ready yet.
I want to stop and remember them for a moment as they were, when we were all together, when they were still alive. I want to remember Ruby’s food and Ruby’s table and Nathan’s laugh.
On Sunday I sat and smelled the chicken and gravy, bubbling up all brown and beautiful. I stood and dusted all the JFK commemorative pop bottles — and spoons from the 50 states — and a bird clock chirp-chirping the time. It was a bird clock that chirped a cardinal at two o’clock and then an Eastern Woodlands Oriole at four o’clock. So if you were outside and heard a robin chirp you were fucked up the whole day thinking it was three o’clock.