Over the years the winter months were especially lonely for Joe. Having a new friend with so much youth and vigor proved to sustain him even in his most distressing moments of physical pain.
However, the friendship was only so extra-worldly, and as the pain set in like a persistent winter gloom, it became even more earthbound and visceral. The conversations turned to convalescent care and Jennifer found herself caring for Joe in ways she didn’t imaging just a few weeks prior.
The two had spent the last two months getting to know and serve each other. For Joe, Jennifer was the daughter he never had. He would often tell her that. At first, he would approach the subject sheepishly, and toss around the subject like a hot potato. But eventually, he felt comfortable enough to just come right out and say it: “If ever I had a daughter, I would have wanted her to be you.”
Jennifer would grin and move toward a distracting task, like drying dishes or preparing the evening’s meal.
Joe often fought back tears when saying these things. He wished so badly he and Carla could have conceived a child, and now that Jennifer was in his life, conception wasn’t enough. He knew exactly the daughter he would have wanted and she was it. He felt broken-hearted when he thought of his life without her, all the prior years leading up to their meeting, and how he didn’t know her until now. It was grief in reverse, like a missing organ or portion of the brain that failed to mature because of some unknown absence that wasn’t discovered until life’s final years.
He thought of early imaginary years. He didn’t have her to help him with spaghetti meals in the kitchen, where she would stand on a step stool and ask too many questions. He didn’t have her to pick up when she fell off her bicycle and cried over a skinned knee. He never gently approached the sensitive subjects, the boys that would have broken her heart, and the bashful concealment that followed, the truth he would fish for until he lured it in. She would eventually break and he would have his chance to swoop in as her father and hold her and tell her he loved her and thought she was the most special and most beautiful girl in the world.
Though Joe was dying and his death would come soon, his anger over the matter had long subsided. He now dealt with this most irrational phase of grief, the grief of what never was and never would be. Despite his years studying molecular biology and quantum physics, this pondering was the most existential question of grief he had ever faced. “Lord, help me,” he would say weakly. “It’s not fair. I didn’t ask for her to come into my life, but now that she’s here, I love her more than anything. But I’m afraid I also love the lost potential of what might have been but would never be.”
Joe wasn’t wrong. He loved Jennifer, but he likely loved a parallel universe Jennifer where he was in the operating room, participating in her birth, watching her cry and take her first breaths. He watched as she timidly boarded a school bus for the first time. She looked back and with the saddest eyes in the world, said nothing except that she loved him and so badly did not want this new stage of life to begin.
Joe imagined the heartbreaks over boys, the late night chats, the hand-in-hand walks together in the old neighborhood. He imagined walking her down the aisle and giving her away to someone unworthy of her affections. He imagined killing that same man, too. Then, for a moment, he snapped out of his imaginings and laughed a little until a rattling cough erupted and, like an elevator plummeting down a shaft, he buckled over. The coughing sent a plug of mucus in a southerly direction only for Joe to heave and ho until the green and clotted bloody mass emerged and found itself plastered to the gravel just off the porch. As sad as the other world was, reality really was a bitch.
Joe had been dying for quite some time, but the clock’s second hand seemed to tick faster these days. Many days, he found himself unable to get out of bed. Jennifer, more often than not, made him breakfast and brought it to him; and more often than not he only ate scraps if anything at all. Jennifer was motherly over Joe. She urged him to eat, almost scolding him when he refused to touch his food. She loved him, too, and this was one tough but cerebral way of showing it.
She found herself more frequently sitting by his bedside reading to his sleeping, snoring body, the gurgling sometimes taking her off guard and startling her. “Is this the end,” she thought She would stop reading and hold her own breath as a way to make the room as quiet as a tomb. She leaned in and his breathing began anew and almost sound perfectly normal. The restart was both a relief and a horror. His chest would rise, like a baptized proselyte, up from the water and into consciousness. He was alive and free for a moment before plunging buried again, approaching the death throes of the first phase of baptism.
Jennifer also found herself alone in the enduring hardships of the homestead. In the early days of living under Joe’s roof, she took for granted his ability to still chop firewood, his ability to forage for wild edibles and shoot the occasional game. She wasn’t very versed on how the larder worked and how he managed to preserve wild pork below ground in a box filled with salt. Where would she even get the salt to undergo such a task? Once she pulled the meat out of the salt what would she do with it? And when would she pull it out? How did his little smokehouse work, the one made from an old refrigerator? How did he manage to preserve so many seeds from such a small garden plot? How would she continue to do so in his absence? Was she being presumptuous to even assume she would stay at Joe’s place after he was gone? It was a conversation she avoided. Joe taught her a lot of his knowledge on these subjects, which came from many years of hands-on experience. His vast library included a trove of homesteading and survival books that ranged in every topic imaginable. They were a great resource, but time and dirt under the nails was the truest way to hone those skills.
Joe had a dairy goat, Lulu. How long would the girl produce milk? When she dried up, what would Jennifer do? Was there someone nearby who had goats and could help her re-establish the breeding and milking cycle? If none of the hens were broody, how could she guarantee additional chicks to keep the egg-laying prospects alive? What if a dog or some wild animal, or worse yet, poachers, stole the chickens and left her empty handed? Jennifer wrote all of these questions down and more on a legal pad, and after looking over them, she began to cry.
She cried for Joe, for his dying self. She cried for the sweet man who took her in and gave her a home and an education in life she would have never had elsewhere. She cried because he would soon be gone and she would be all alone. She cried because in her loneliness, how would she survive this wilderness life? In the short time she had lived with Joe, he had only mentioned one nearby neighbor, Leland, and didn’t say much about him. In Jennifer’s dreamlike state, the denial of the future days ahead, she lacked the courage or foresight to ask questions about anyone nearby.
It was late late February, and Joe, in good spirits, arose early and slowly ambled around the kitchen, his slippers making a sandpaper sound on the floor with each movement.
Jennifer came down the stairs, and let out a yawn and hugged and rubbed her shoulders with some friction to create some warmth.
“Morning,” she said. “It’s cold. I’ll get the stove going.”
The comment flew past Joe like a bat under a streetlamp.
“I heard through a little birdie that today is a special day,” he said, wearing a cooking apron with lacy false filigree, one that hopefully had belonged to his deceased wife.
“What are you talking about? And what are you wearing?” Jennifer asked.
“Well, it’s February the 27th, right? Isn’t today your birthday?”
Joe pulled a cake out of the oven and turned toward Jennifer when she shared the bad news.
“It’s not your birthday today, is it,” Joe said, looking forlorn with his mouth slightly open, the cake in hand, the apron even looking sad.
“Oh Joe, no, I’m sorry. My birthday isn’t for another month, March 27th.”
She felt broken hearted for him but also wondered why he believed it was today and how he came upon that conclusion.
“Well, no worries. We’re celebrating today. Who knows, a month from now I might be packing shoe boxes in the North Pole.”
“OK, well I’m good with it,” she said, with a laugh. “Thank you so much!”
She hugged her frail old friend. The two embraced quietly for a brief moment and then they heard Silver barking wildly. The bark was constant but lacked malice. There was a tap at the door.
“Are we expecting company?” Jennifer asked, immediately skeptical and moving toward a defensive position behind a couch where a handgun was stashed and loaded.
“I don’t know. Let me check. Just have my back, but I’m sure we’ll be OK. Silver didn’t sound too upset.”
Joe approached the door and did his best to sound more villainous than he was.”
“Who’s there?”
“Hey, buddy, it’s Leland. Just dropping by to check on you.”
Joe opened the door and sized up his friend who had grown an impressive scraggly beard but had lost several pounds and looked a little gangly since he last saw him.
“Leland! It’s been awhile.”
Leland took the last statement as more of a question mingled with the sour vinegar of rebuke. Leland, after all, had only landed at his river cottage some months earlier and was still fairly new to the area. He bartered with Joe early on and the two struck up a friendship that included fishing, singing old country songs on Joe’s front porch and the not-so-occasional pint. Leland, however, had been busy running up and down the river in search of any signs of life where items might be traded or worked for; unfortunately, he only found himself defending his life against river rats who were too far gone in their drunkenness for greed, survival, and misgivings about the state of the world to notice the need to help a fellow man.
About this time, Jennifer rose suddenly from behind the couch. Leland, startled, pulled away at his shirt and grabbed the grip of his pistol. The action didn’t deter Jennifer. With gun in hand, she drew it immediately upon Leland. Her hand unfazed by her action, she was too far lost in the previous month’s abuses to allow some tentative fear stop her from defending Joe and herself.
“Jennifer, sweetie, he’s my friend,” Joe said, pleading, using his hands to try to break her stolid gaze locked on Leland.
“Please, darlin’ just let the gun down. He’s helped me in more ways than I can count.”
“I’ve been here nearly three months. If you’re such a good friend where the hell have you been?”
It was a fair question. Leland answered by describing his journeys up and down the rivers and sloughs, looking for any signs of life, any sign someone might have created a small community along the river bank and began trade and commerce.
“I’m sorry, I would have been by sooner but I got into a gunfight with some savages. I took a bullet in the leg; dug the thing out myself before passing out. It took a few weeks for me to heal up enough to leave the house. I would have called, but no phone and all.”
Leland was mesmerized by the beauty of Jennifer. Though he still gripped his pistol, he was completely under her spell. She could have shot him until her revolver was empty, reloaded, shot again, and Leland wouldn’t have noticed. His dying visions would have been Jennifer’s beautiful blue eyes, her blonde hair and her lips, slightly agape, looking at him with suspicion and displeasure.
The tension was slowly melting. Jennifer had already laid the gun on the nightstand. Leland dropped his shirt to conceal his weapon. The two just stared at each other, like two aliens from different planets trying to figure out the other.
Joe had different thoughts. Hot damn, he said to himself secretly, though openly a coy smile began to break open one side of his mouth.
“That jar of honey we have says Leland’s honey. That came from you, I presume?”
“Yes, ma’am, it’s an older batch I harvested back where I used to live in Jacksonville, but I hope to catch a swarm by spring.”
Leland was amused that she referred to the honey as something “we” have. He noticed the nestled, comfortable connection Joe and Jennifer enjoyed and was pleased by it.
“It’s good. Thank you.”
“You’re welcome.”
There was a long, silent stare again.
“Alright, well, come on in Leland and let’s catch up. I’ll put on a pot of tea. Jennifer, what would you like besides a slice of birthday cake?”
“Oh, wow, happy birthday!” Leland said.
“Thanks. Joe’s actually a month early, but I think we’ll celebrate anyway. Please stay and enjoy a piece of cake. I guess he knows what he’s doing. He sure does look bona fide in that apron.”
“Hey, my wife taught me a lot in the kitchen and I taught her a thing or two as well.”
”Keep that to yourself, old man,” Leland told Joe. The three laughed and the plates were dispersed with Jennifer’s birthday cake.
After that day for the rest of her life Jennifer would celebrate her birthday a month early, and in doing so, also celebrate Joe.
This is my favorite one so far! I like the fact that you put some hope in this story. Great read