Calendar
Holidays filled him with dreadful excitement. St Patrick’s Day (Amateur Night, his father had called it). Thanksgiving. The first day of deer season, turkey season, even spring bear season when there was one, though a fatal head shot in Alaska was unlikely to help him.
His calendar was filled with handwritten notations, three-day weekends highlighted, red ink for major events, blue for those he deemed of medium importance, black for the most unlikely-who was going to get sloshed and wrap their Miata around a tree on Secretaries’ Day or Martin Luther King’s birthday?-and he put stars by the ones with gunfire. Fourth of July, Cinco de Mayo, Confederate Heroes Day.
Most of his hope rested on New Year’s Eve. It would be fitting as well as likely, that someone would have one too many or cross an intersection where someone else with one too many laughed or cursed and looked for a dropped phone while accelerating, and then his life would begin again, his resolutions the new leaves of a man given another chance.
He spent long afternoons at the Kawasaki dealership, figuring the Harley riders too slow, too careful with their loud mufflers and group rides, and most of all, too old and full of their own carcinogens. The salesclerks thought him a ‘looky-loo’, but at least one who never asked for a test ride. He noted the patchy-bearded riders still fighting acne, strutting in bandannas and sunglasses and pseudo-Asian tattoos, wondering each time, Will it be you?
He told his wife they’d moved to Kentucky for the weather, better for his lungs, the soft humidity easier on his bronchi than the splinters of January in Buffalo. Laura worked remotely, filing appellate cases, and his disability check came from Frankfort instead of Albany, and the neighbors drawled y’alls thick as the air instead of the nasal resonance of you guys, but the apartment was the same, ground floor, beige rental carpet and exactly one U-Haul’s worth of furniture. The only difference that mattered was in the helmet laws.
They never went out on a holiday, not even to dinner. Around 4PM, he’d lay the table with his cell and the pager from the hospital, pick up the landline and call the phone company and the power company to check for scheduled outages. They’d watch TV or read and pretend that things were all right, that his heart was round and fat and pulsing with bright red fluids, his lungs pink and plush, the alveoli yielding to the touch like apricots in their brief season.
When the phone finally rang, in June, it was World Environment Day, not even a real holiday, not one on any calendar or that he’d bothered to ink in. When he turned from the phone, Laura knew, she had known from when it rang, he saw, and at the same time he realized he couldn’t go.
“Someone’s-”
“That’s how it works,” she said, calmly. “Don’t waste it.”
“I wished it.”
“Intent isn’t action.”
“I wished it.”
He stood still with the phone in his hand, while she got his coat and packed him into the car as gently as a child, reaching across her lap to shift while he clutched her right hand all the way to the municipal airport where the LifeFlite could land and take him to the transplant center quickly, as quickly as catastrophe, as quickly as thought.
whipchick was inspired by basric's mention of holiday weekends, and dedicates this piece to Charlotte.