43
A week later, I meet Nancy.
In her eighties and remembering me from my days in Cambridge way back when, she is thrilled to offer me a job fixing up her old place.
“Oh, believe me, you chatted all ways this and that, you were the nicest little boy.”
Imagine that. She has wonderful memories of me from a time I can hardly remember. A time where I was bounding around, pure and happy, and a chatterbox. I only wish I could recall her as she did me.
“Oh, you were too young, must have been five, six years old! Sure do miss Ruby and Bill, sure do. They were sweet. Good folks. Sure is something . To see you all grown!”
She lets out so many ohhhs of excitement and has that indelible kind nature, like she knew some heavenly secret.
A few mornings ago, I was chatting up this mustached fellow named Jeff at the local Casey’s gas station.
The place was deserted, and Jeff seemed a rugged enough, hardworking man, so we hit up a conversation.
Turned out Jeff had moved to the area some years back to help out his parents with the station and just hadn’t left.
I laughed about that.
I’d heard that story before, a thousand times.
For many, once they got down and attached to a responsibility, they didn’t look up till they were nearly sixty and done.
It’s only then that they reflected back on their lives, bewildered.
Well, Jeff was doing well enough regardless.
We were splitting a pair of cigarettes and trading stories. Jeff hadn’t had the opportunity to meet Bill or Ruby when they were still around, but he said.
“they sound like one hell of a pair. I only hear good things about ’em.” It warmed my heart to know it.
“How long you stickin around?” he asked.
“Your guess is good as mine. Just lookin for a bit of work.”
“No shit? What can you do?”
“Anything man. Anything with my hands anyway.”
“Good with a hammer?”
“The best.”
“Can ya paint?”
“I can.”
“Well damn, ya know, there’s the nicest old lady, just in town. She’s got this spot off Acres, big place, real nice, just off the corner there. Sweetest thing she is. But she needs help on her place. She’s loaded too.”
“No kidding?”
“Let me get you her number.”
A few puffs later I was off to my ways, thinking how nice a guy Jeff was and if I ever needed a solid, no strings attached chat, I’d be back his way. I wished him the best and that was that.
Jeff wasn’t lying.
Nancy’s place was the nicest, most epic home in the neighborhood.
It didn’t even seem to need that much work.
Nancy was married to an insurance guy who ran a pretty successful joint in town for like forty years.
Forty! They weren’t exactly hurting for cash and turns out the old guy, rest his soul, had taken great care of lovely Nancy here before he went off adventuring to the other side.
Nancy is a retired schoolteacher.
She has short clipped white hair and is frail, but still all there.
She uses these endearing terms when talking to me, making me feel as if she had helped raise me through the years.
She emanates a specific warmth that I’ve found only in elderly women, the warmth of a hundred generations.
It seems to me that once you made it all the way to your eighties, women like Nancy somehow meshed their soul with the all-knowing and carried extraordinary, yet simple, wisdom and love.
Nobody under thirty could ever dream to be so patient and calm and kind.
Well, Nancy adopts me on sight.
I show up in my grandfather’s leather jacket, smiling, offering my help for dirt cheap.
She makes lunches, lemonade, sandwiches, cookies, and such, daily.
She interrupts my work so frequently to talk that it’s immediately obvious to me why she really needed me around in the first place.
I decide to work much slower and talk as often as I can.
Standing from the top of my ladder, removing gunk from her gutters, she walks slowly below, throwing questions my way, always checking if I’m hungry or tired or anything at all.
“Nah, Nancy I’m fine, I’m fine. Thank you.”
And she’ll begrudgingly shuffle away for a half hour at most. One day while painting her ceiling, she stands beneath me for fifteen minutes just looking up.
“Who taught you how to do this anyway?”
Brush in hand, smoothly gliding it along, I smile.
“My mother.”
And so I help her paint everything anew. I replace some boards in her deck and clean the floors and cupboards. Overall, it’s nothing too serious. It’s the company she needs, and that’s fine with me. I need it too.
Over midday sandwiches and chips, Nancy tells me stories about her late husband and her incredible life stretching as far back as her high school days. She had this crazy romantic story about prom.
“John took another girl, Susie was her name. John took Susie to the dance. Silly. I never knew why he did that. Said he was too nervous to ask me. Bless him. He was making eyes at me all night! And you’ll never guess, but he drove me home that night. He drove me home. Suppose I got him in the end.”
She chuckles, and my God, is it beautiful. Is there anything more wonderful than a woman, eighty-eight, still living all strong and alone and ignited, retelling the stories of her life and being happy about them? She is the highest sort of genuine light I’ve seen in ages.
“Nancy,” I tell her.
“all the novels, they’re written about you.”
And she blushes!
“Oh shush, stop that, stop that. That’s sweet.”
Well, it’s true and I believe it.
I am positively convinced that women like Nancy are the undeniable lifeblood of the world.
In the back roads of the smallest towns in all of America they were everywhere, having done more than their fair share of good work and living out their days in holy spirit and angel-like energy which seeped straight to the soil of the Earth and spread itself to everyone, everywhere.
It’s healing being with her, though I become sad whenever the days come to an end and I have to depart, reminded that she lived in that big house all alone.
“Nancy, if I could, I would stay with you forever,” and she blushes some more.
“That’d be nice,” she whispers, and she’s right. She takes a sip of her coffee, sitting across from me at her dining table covered with elaborately embroidered silk placemats.
“Cash, you’ve never really told me why you’re here.”
“Jeff gave me your number, remember?”
“No, no, Cambridge.”
“Ah right, well you know, my grandparents.”
“Yes, of course.”
“Yeah.”
“But why?” She asks softly, gentle. And she sees right through me. It’s that wisdom in action. The coffee warms my hands through the white ceramic, and I stare down into it. I nearly confess everything to her.
“I don’t know.”
“Young man like you. Must have a home.”
“I do, I do.”
“Friends, family.”
“I do.”
“Where’s your father these days?”
“Couldn’t tell ya.”
“Is that right?”
“That’s right. He left after Ma’s accident.”
“God help him.”
“Think it broke him. Yeah. I don’t know. I don’t know where he is.”
“Are you okay?” And her deep blue, divinity eyes nearly shatter me. They stare at me with such compassion. I swear that simple question posed in such a genuine, empathetic way could make the hardest of men weep.
I nod and say quietly.
“Yeah. yeah I’m okay. Anyway, I think I came back here for her. My Ma. And to get away for a second. Needed a change. Find what I’m looking for.”
“Have you?”
“I think I’m starting to.”
“You will. Keep your heart open and listen. Give God a little space to work.”
“Yeah.”
“You’re welcome here any time.”
“Thank you, Nancy.”
“They never really leave us, you know.”
“No?”
“Can’t you feel them?”
“Sometimes.”
“You just have to listen.”
And so we do. We sip our coffee in the cold afternoon, and we listen. I’ve spent about a week with Nancy doing anything imaginable to help her, but we’ve finally gotten to the point where there’s nothing more to be done.
“I’ll stick around for a while yet. You’re not rid of me,” I say.
“Okay good, good.”
“I don’t know when I’ll head out, but I’ll tell ya. Don’t worry.”
“Good. That’s kind of you.”
She nods, and a little sorrow colors her voice. She’s downright depressed to see me go, and it breaks my own heart in two.
“If what you say is true, John, Ruby, and Bill are here looking over you in the meantime.”
“They are. They definitely are. Your mom too.”
“My mom too.”
“It’s true, Cash, it’s true.”
“I believe you Nancy, I do.”