CHRIST IN WINTER:
Reflections on Faith & Life for the Years of Winter--THE MAC HOUSE HIT MAN [F, 3-15-24]
[I’m proud of this story.
I think it’s one of my best. But I’ve never gotten anyone to publish it,
perhaps because it has only a niche audience—people who have spent time in a
Ronald McDonald House. It’s fiction, but many of the people and scenes are ones
I experienced myself as a Mac House grandpa. I really was a cancer hitman,
taking contracts on other patients, usually given by nurses or social workers, to
get them to “straighten up and fly right,” but that was in a cancer center, not
in a Mac House. Be warned: My usual CIW columns would print out at 2 pages.
This one is closer to 6.]
I
am up at five, but I know Parker will beat me to the Ronald McDonald House. He
is probably already there, baking. Parker is the handsomest man I know, but he
did not have a date last night. Never on Friday. He has to get up too early on
Saturday to make it to the Mac House, as the volunteers and the families all
call it. No, I said that wrong. It is not that he has to get up too early. It is just that he does get up that early.
I asked him once why he does it. “Kids like cookies,” he
said. His face got red as he said it. He does not want anyone to notice that he
is doing good things for sick kids and their families. He is as shy about
getting praise as he is good looking.
Don’t get me wrong. I do not normally notice whether a
guy looks good or not. Raymond, in my support group, is gay. We talked in Group
one night about how cancer is equal-opportunity. It doesn’t care if you’re
black or white, straight or gay, male or female.
“You’re
so straight you squeak,” he said to me that night while we munched oatmeal
cookies. “I don’t blame you,” he went on. “Your wife is… well, let’s just say
she makes me want to be straight.”
I didn’t know what to say, so I just slugged him on the
shoulder. Gay guys like to get whacked on the shoulder as much as straight guys
do. It means that, gay or straight, we all belong to the same fraternity, Iota Beta Delta [I Bea Dumbass.]
But Parker is so good-looking even squeaking straight
guys notice. He’s sort of the good-looking version of George Clooney. He is a
hell of a baker, too. In the time is takes me to clean the toilets at the Mac
House, he can turn out six dozen cookies, two dozen muffins, a couple of loaves
of bread, some of those twisted stohlen things, and three birthday cakes, just
in case anybody has one that week.
He says he gets there so early every Saturday so he can
use all the ovens at once without getting in the way of the families when they
get up and need to use the kitchen to fix breakfast, but it’s really so when
the moms and dads and sisters and brothers and grandmas and grandpas of kids in
the hospital come down to the dining room area, they will sniff all those
baking smells and know that there is something
in their lives that is going to be good that day. I tell them the smell of a
clean toilet is just as good, but nobody pays attention to me. The mothers and
sisters and, yes, even the grandmas are too busy staring at the fast-reddening
Parker, and the dads and grandpas and brothers are too busy gobbling up cookies
for breakfast while the women are not noticing what they are doing.
All but Crystal, and the mother from Israel.
That is the other reason I am there this morning, in
addition to cleaning the toilets. There is a contract out on Crystal.
I am the cancer center’s hitman. When there is a deal
with a patient beyond medicine, I get the contract. Sometimes a fellow patient
can get stuff done that nobody else can.
Crystal’s
mother is fixing a bowl of cold cereal. I offer to fry her some eggs. Parker
uses only the ovens, not the burners, of the six stoves in the big kitchen.
“I’ve
got to lose some weight,” she says, as she stares at Parker.
If
I could just troll Parker around town, I could call it the Mac House Diet and
make a ton of money. He reminds every woman that she wants to look good, which
women always interpret as losing weight.
“Cereal
is not good for you,” I say. “You ever heard of cereal killers?”
“I’ll
take eggs, provided you washed your hands,” says a gruff voice from behind me.
I
know it is Keeley, the day manager. She does not get up until seven on
Saturday. Here she is, in her flannel moose pajamas and bunny house slippers
and all-night hair.
“Don’t
you need to lose weight, too?” I ask her.
Every
head in the whole dining room turns. Every voice goes quiet. Keeley is bigger
than I am.
“I’m
used to him,” she says, tilting her head toward Parker.
Parker
gets redder, which goes very nicely with his black tee-shirt and tight jeans.
“Bacon,
too,” Keeley adds, tilting her head back toward me.
I
put on my Kiss the Cook apron and
start scrambling. A grandpa rises and makes a little bow in my direction. He is
impressed. He knows that I have said the one thing a man must never say to a
woman, and yet I have survived. Unfortunately, Keeley sees him.
“Don’t
encourage him,” Keeley says. “He gets to live only until I get those eggs.”
She
flops down into a chair and puts her bunny slippers up on the table and wiggles
her toes so that the bunny noses do the bunny nose thing at a little brother.
The kid giggles.
Keeley
and I do an improv routine every Saturday morning. It goes along with Parker’s
baking. We try to loosen up the families before they trudge back over to the
hospital.
Also,
Keeley is the one who put out the contract on Crystal.
I
start some whole-wheat toast so it will be ready when the bacon and eggs are. I
am impressed when my timing works. Nobody else notices. I take a cholesterol
special plate to Keeley and some toast to Crystal’s mom. She needs something
warm to go with the cereal.
“I
don’t see Crystal this morning,” I say.
She
looks at the toast and her face begins to dissolve, like those old-fashioned
computer screen-savers. My toast isn’t that
bad.
I
sit down and butter her toast for her.
“TV
room?” I ask.
She
nods.
Crystal
is in eighth grade. Her little brother is over on Floor Seven at the hospital.
He is not doing well. She is acting out her anxiety about her brother and her
anger at God by taking it out on her mother, by refusing to relate to the poor
woman at all. She slept in the TV room last night rather than stay in a room
with her mother. Now she is skipping breakfast rather than be civil to the poor
woman. She is even skipping the chance to stare at Parker. I know this because
it is not the first time.
The
way we work out love-worry never makes much sense.
I
get a plastic bag and put some of Parker’s new muffins into it. I stick a jar
of apple butter and a knife into my apron pocket and wander upstairs to the TV
room. Crystal is watching Hanna Montana reruns with the sound off. She is
wearing jeans and a ratty tee-shirt and dirty socks, the clothes she slept in.
I sit down on the floor,
take a muffin, spread some apple butter on it, eat it in two bites. I take
another muffin out of the bag, spread apple butter on it, hold it out to
Crystal. She looks the other way. I eat that one, too. I get out a third
muffin, spread apple butter on it, start it toward my mouth. Crystal reaches
out her hand, palm up, without looking at me. I put the muffin into her hand.
It disappears in one bite.
“Parker
makes good muffins,” I say.
She
does not reply, just holds out her hand again. I take another muffin, do the
apple butter thing, put it into her hand. It takes two bites this time.
“He
has good buns, too,” I say.
Crystal
begins to giggle. The giggle does not last long. Now tears are spreading down
her cheeks. She looks an awful lot like a little girl instead of an all
grown-up eighth grader.
I
let her cry, every once in a while handing her a new muffin, until they are all
gone.
“I
need you to do something for me,” I say.
“I’m
not talking to her,” she says.
“Somebody
else,” I say.
“Who?”
“Go
get showered and put on some makeup and clean clothes and meet me in the little
lounge,” I say.
“Only
the Jew goes in there at this time of day,” she says.
“You
owe me for the muffins,” I say.
She
gives me the finger, then sticks it down her throat like she is going to give
me the muffins back.
“Okay,
okay,” I say. “We’ll go to the mall with you dirty and stinky.”
Her
eyes take on a radioactive glow. The word mall
has that effect on teen-age girls.
“Tell
her not to come in the room while I’m there,” she says.
“Okay.”
“219”
she adds, as though her mother would not know their room number. I am glad she
said it, though, because that was my dorm room number in college. It brings
back good memories, back when I did not know that children got cancer.
I
go back to the dining room. Crystal’s mom is talking with Keeley and another
mom. I go up to Keeley, whisper into her ear, telling her to keep Crystal’s mom
busy for half an hour. She slaps me.
“You
make a proposition like that to me again, mister, and I’ll take you up on it
and you’ll die,” she says.
Parker
turns red. The other women snort.
“I
do all the scut work around here, and you still won’t put out,” I say.
“What
does put out mean, Mama?” one of the
little brothers says.
“It
means I won’t put the garbage out in those big cans in back because that’s his job, but he’s too much of a moron
even to find the cans. Can you help him?”
Keeley
really thinks fast.
“Sure,”
the boy says. He is proud to help a moron. Great. Now I have to put the garbage
out, too.
I
take the kid by the hand and we go to the kitchen to get the garbage. Parker
snickers. At least it will keep me out of trouble until Crystal is ready to
help me get the Israeli mother out to the mall.
Yeah,
right. She is going to cooperate with me like Jerry cooperates with Tom.
Crystal
does not know, of course, that “the Jew” is going with us to the mall.
The Israeli woman has
brought her little girl all the way from there to here because we have a doctor
who can operate on little bodies in a way that very few can. Right now the girl
is undergoing chemo to shrink the tumor, getting ready for surgery.
Unfortunately,
the mom, Tama, speaks just a few words of English, and her daughter, Adira, not
even that much.
One
of our nurses, Rabab, is a Palestinian refugee who speaks Hebrew. She and the
little girl get along famously, but something happened the first day between
the nurse and the mom that neither one will talk about.
The
bottom line, though, is that they refuse to speak to each other, and Rabab
won’t go in Adira’s room if the mom is there. If communication gets done
between Tama and the medical staff, they have to call in Rabbi Friedman, and
that takes a while to set up. Also, the rabbi seems to like the nurse more than
the mom, which doesn’t help the tension.
I
have to admit that Tama is hard to like. She acts as if she is a celebrity and
everybody else should know it and be glad to be her servants. She gets mad if
you don’t understand what she is saying, like everybody should know Hebrew,
too. Well, actually, she doesn’t get mad anymore, because no one will have
anything to do with her. At the hospital and the Mac House both, she is
increasingly isolated.
If she does not fit the
medical definition of depression, she will soon. She spends all her time in the
little lounge at the Mac House. Does not even go to the hospital much to see
her daughter.
Crystal
shows up in the little lounge as I am practicing my Hebrew on Tama, who is
slumped in the corner of a couch like an old-time movie actress.
I
know about ten words in Hebrew, including shalom
and hava nagila and aloha and terre haute.
“I
told you she’d be here,” Crystal says.
She
knows Tama does not understand what she is saying, but she probably would say
it anyway. She is, after all, an eighth grade girl.
I
ignore Crystal and say to Tama: susi
zaqen gadol, which means My horse is old and large. At least, that is what
I think it means. I do not have an old and large horse, but I know how to say
that I do. Tama looks at me like horse
is slang for something else. At least, that is what I think that look means.
Crystal
looks at me like she’s impressed. Or disgusted.
“Are
we going to the mall or not?” she asks.
“Mall,”
I say, sort of like I am thinking about it. “Mall…”
Tama
perks up. Mall is a universal word to
women. I continue to mutter: labas yape
beged, which I think means to put on a beautiful garment. I add issa, which means woman, because I know it, and jerk my head at Crystal and say ebed, which means servant, I hope.
Tama
stands up. She brushes her hair back from her face. One thing about
celebrities: You don’t really have to invite them, because they assume it’s all
about them.
“Oh,
no,” Crystal says. “I’m not going anyplace with her.”
I
take out my credit card and wave it in front of her face. I take her hand and
press the card into it. She puts it back in front of her face.
“Wow,
platinum,” she says.
Damn.
I meant to give her the one with the $100 limit.
Tama
grabs her purse. It looks like the feedbag for a sus. She hands it to Crystal, the ebed.
Tama
pulls up short when she sees my truck, but Crystal has that credit card and she
is not about to be deterred. She pushes Tama up onto the running board and then
into the center of the bench seat and climbs in behind her.
I
always park as far from the mall doors as possible. It means I get more
exercise, and I figure people who can’t walk as well as I do need the places
closer to the door. Crystal and Tama don’t even notice that it’s a mile from
the doors. They are off before the motor has shaken to a stop.
“Make
sure Tama uses her own credit card,” I yell at Crystal’s retreating back. She
gives me the Hawaiian good luck sign, which I think is not a good sign.
I can’t possibly keep up with them, but I don’t want to
follow them around anyway. I figure they’ll know to look for me in Starbucks. I
go to Books on First first. It used to be on First Street before it moved to
the mall. I buy the new edition of Now
That I Have Cancer I Am Whole. Hardback. I have finished it, plus three
coffees and four scones, by the time Tama and Crystal arrive.
They
are carrying a whole lot of fancy looking sacks, none of which says Target. I
think that is a bad sign, too. Crystal blows on my credit card and shakes it,
trying to get it to stop smoking. Tama giggles. She is carrying her own purse.
On
the way back to the Mac House, they “talk” to each other by pulling various
garments out of the fancy sacks and showing them to each other, even though I
am sure they have seen them before. They make sounds men can only shudder at,
and Tama says, “Just gorgeous” with great frequency, and totally without
accent. I assume that Crystal has been drilling her.
I
let them out in front of the Mac House. I don’t want to go in, in case Keeley
has thought up something else for me to do. Crystal hands me a little sack.
“We
got you something, too,” she says.
I
open it. There’s a cloth bookmark that says, “No day is wasted if it makes a
memory.” There is also a big wad of credit card receipts.
