Animal Dreams - Barbara Kingsolver [27]
Carlo and I in fact weren’t living in Paris (we never had), but in Minnesota; we’d already come back from Crete. Hallie had kept decently in touch with Doc Homer but I hadn’t, and felt guilty, so I engineered a visit in Las Cruces. God knows how long he would have waited to tell me, otherwise. This meeting was not a plan he’d cooked up to give me the news, but my idea, sprung at the last minute. An accident of science, actually. Someone had recently spliced the glow gene from a glowworm into a tobacco plant, and the scientific world was buzzing over this useless but remarkable fact. All the top geneticists were meeting in New Mexico and my boss wanted me down there to take notes. I was working at a high-powered research lab; this was prior to my moving back to Tucson and falling into convenience-mart clerking. If I ever wrote down on paper my full employment history, I assure you it would look like the résumé of a schizophrenic.
And in my professional upswings I had more of what passes for confidence; it dawned on me that it’s an easy bus ride over the state line from Grace to Las Cruces. I’d phone Doc Homer.
I was astonished when he agreed to come. “Barring unforeseen difficulties at the hospital,” he’d said over the phone. I didn’t know yet that the hospital had closed; that he sometimes forgot.
“You always say that.” It was true, that was his standard disclaimer on every promise to Hallie or me, but it was uncharacteristic for me to tease him. Truthfully, after such an ice age, there was no such thing as characteristic. I tried out joking, more or less to see if it would work. “You’ll say that at your own funeral, Pop,” I’d said boldly into the receiver. Later, after he told me, I could have bitten my tongue off for that.
We met in the lobby of the Holiday Inn, just for a couple of drinks since he said he had to get back to Grace that night. The bar was done up in this madly cheerful south-of-the-border décor, with a blue tile fountain and silk bougainvillaeas climbing out of clay pots shaped like pigs. It was somebody’s idea of what Old Mexico would look like if you didn’t have to take poverty into account. The waitresses wore swishy miniskirts with ruffles in contrasting primary colors. In this setting my father told me he had a terminal disorder of the brain.
All I kept thinking was that he must be wrong. I doubted he’d had a CAT scan. The thing to do would be to check into the University Hospital in Tucson and get a neurological workup, to rule out other things, but I didn’t try to talk him into it. The nature of my relationship with Doc Homer, which had eluded me over the phone, came back instantly when I saw him. There are all the small things you love and despise about a parent: the disappointed eyes, the mannerisms, the sound of the voice as much as the meaning of the words, that add up to that singular thing—the way you are both going to respond, whether you like it or not. It had settled heavily over our table and I could hardly breathe. I knew this man. He wouldn’t seek out a second opinion to stack up against his own. He’d suffer his own doubts but never anyone else’s. The waitress swished over and brought us fresh margaritas. The trickle of the fountain put me on edge, the way a running toilet will, or any sound of water going to waste. “What are you going to do?” I asked Doc Homer.
“I don’t see a need to do anything special, for the time being. I’ll make arrangements when the time comes.”
My stomach was tight. I felt perversely annoyed with the smiling clay pigs. I touched my lips to the coarse salt on the rim of the margarita glass, and the crystals felt like sand in my mouth, or broken glass. I thought of walls I’d seen in Mexico—high brick hacienda walls topped with a crest of broken bottles imbedded in cement, to keep people on their correct sides of the fence.