Chapter 5 Hendrix
CHAPTER 5
HENDRIX
T he way I’m feeling, the last thing I need is to stand around fake oohing and ahhing over Zere’s fireworks. I’m leaving this party. Chapel can stay if she wants.
My mind keeps playing out scenarios of what could be happening with Mama now, what could happen next. Things Aunt Geneva wouldn’t want to “bother me” about.
What if she gets out again? Wanders, this time into the street at night? We have keyless, coded locks on the doors now, but you never know.
I turn, determined to march back up that hill to catch an Uber and the next flight to Charlotte. I run into a wall of muscled chest before I can take even one full step.
“Sorry.” I glance up a few inches. “Oh, Maverick! Hey.”
“Hey.” He proffers a glass, another Golden Cadillac. “Thought maybe you could use this after that call.”
I study the strong lines of his face, softened a little with sympathy.
“Thanks.” I take the drink and lift the glass for a cooling sip. “I needed this.”
“Yeah, I know the feeling. It’s not an easy diagnosis.”
“Easy?” I lick the traces of liquor from my lips, laughing mirthlessly and turning my attention back to the bay, its tranquility so at odds with the emotion churning in my chest. “No, it’s definitely not that.”
“I’m sorry I mentioned it,” he says, standing beside me and facing the water. “About my grandfather passing. It’s not what you want to think about at this stage.”
“It’s all I can think about. The end and everything that leads up to it.” I slide him a glance. “Was it your paternal or maternal grandfather?”
“Maternal. My mom was determined to look after him herself as much as she could.”
“How is she now that he’s gone?”
He hesitates an almost imperceptible moment, and then turns his head to meet my eyes. “She died not too long after he did.”
“Oh, my God.” I touch his forearm, compassion closing my fingers around the warm skin. “I’m so sorry. Your poor family. Losing so much.”
“Aneurysm.” He lifts his eyes and studies the darkening sky. “I sometimes wonder if taking care of him so well took too much out of her. If maybe she… I don’t know. It doesn’t do any good to wonder, but I do know she took better care of Pop Pop than she took of herself.”
A small smile steals across my face for the first time since the call. “Pop Pop?”
“What do you call your grandfather?” he asks with a smile of his own.
I swallow more of the cool liquid before going on. “They’re all dead, so nothing now.”
“Man, sorry to hear that.”
“They lived full lives. My mom and dad just got a little bit of a late start on the family front, so my grandparents were older.”
“You the only?”
“Yeah.” I chuckle. “My mom always said I was spoiled rotten.”
The tinkle of glass, shouts of laugher, and the faint strains of Jodeci drift from the party down to us by the water.
“I couldn’t help but overhear you singing to your mother earlier,” Maverick says, his voice carrying a mix of compassion and curiosity.
“Yeah, that hymn seems to calm her down.”
“I read that the part of the brain that stores music, prayer, poetry, and art is the last and least affected by Alzheimer’s.”
“The temporal lobe?” I ask, trying to recall the things I’ve been learning about the brain as I’ve studied the disease.
“Specifically, the temporal lobe around your right ear.” He reaches to touch behind my ear. “It holds all that stuff and can sometimes remain virtually untouched throughout the disease.”
His finger still rests behind my ear, and all my body’s sensations convene in that one spot where he’s touching me. Our eyes meet in a gaze soldered with heat and tension.
“Oh.” He drops his hand. “Sorry. I didn’t mean to—”
“It’s fine.” I force a smile. “You were… ahem… saying about the brain?”
“Yeah.” He nods slowly, eyes not leaving mine. “Language is housed in the left temporal lobe behind your left ear. There are Alzheimer’s patients who can no longer talk because the left temporal lobe, which stores language, has been desecrated, but they can still sing entire songs with perfect pitch and perfect recall. It affects different parts of the brain at different rates.”
“That’s really fascinating.”
“There are documented cases of Parkinson’s patients whose hands stopped shaking when certain music was played,” Maverick goes on. “So the music thing makes sense with your mom. It may continue to be an effective way to soothe her when she’s agitated.”
“I love that.” The smile feels almost foreign it’s so unexpected on my face. In a moment that felt hopeless, Maverick injected hope. “I’m so glad when I find strategies or things that will help because sometimes it feels like nothing really can.”
“I think we’ve had similar experiences,” Maverick says, his voice quiet and careful as if one wrongly placed word could set off an explosion, “in that I had to watch my grandfather slip away. Like it was years, stretched out agonizingly slowly, but then my mother was ripped from us when we least expected it. I’m not sure one is better than the other. Both hurt so bad.”
“I think if I got a choice,” I say, huffing out a short breath, “I’d choose quick. Here today. Gone tomorrow, instead of this endless half-here that my mother’s existence is becoming.”
I turn to him abruptly, shame constricting my chest.
“I don’t mean I want her gone,” I rush to say. “The exact opposite. I want all the time I can have with her. I’ll make it last as long as possible, but I don’t know that she would want that.”
“You don’t have to feel weird. I knew what you meant, but what makes you think she might prefer it the other way?”
“She always seems to be going back to a time when her mama was here, or my father, or just when things were happy and simple and she had a grasp on it all.”
“That’s pretty common. For them to kind of return to a time that was happy or that provided some routine, predictability.”
“She always wants to go to her shop.” I offer a sad smile. “Her old bakery. She’d go there every day if we’d let her. She wants to make the cupcakes and the free cookies she’d always have for kids who came in after school.”
He looks at me, but there’s a faraway quality to his eyes, darkened with memory and maybe a touch of sadness.
“It was the bus for Pop Pop,” he offers after a few seconds, grinning into his drink before taking a swig. “He used to drive a school bus. Every day at seven in the morning and three o’clock in the afternoon, he’d put on his coat and hat and head for the door.”
“Seriously?” Even though I know firsthand how difficult patterns like that can be, the fact that Maverick is smiling gives me permission to. “What’d you guys do?”
“At first we kept trying to tell him you don’t drive the bus anymore. No one is waiting for you , but that just seemed to devastate him. A man who had always had people depending on him, needing him, to hear that no one did anymore.”
“You’re a real downer, you know that?” I ask, bumping his shoulder with mine.
“I guess that did sound pretty sad, huh?” He glances over at me, a hint of a curve to his lips. “We stopped trying to reason with him and eventually just took all the clocks out of the house so he wouldn’t know when it was seven or three. Worked most days.”
I can’t help but think of the hymns I sing and all the small things Aunt Geneva and I do to help Mama navigate the present when the past calls to her so strongly. Maverick and I are like soldiers trading war stories, only his battles are behind him. I’m still in the trenches. In many ways, just getting started.
“She has really good days where it’s like she’s herself,” I tell him, “but then in a matter of hours, she’s paranoid or agitated or terrified. It’s not a line her brain is drawing from here to the end. It zigzags. More like a maze, and half the time I feel like I’m lost in there with her.”
“Hey.” He touches my shoulder, prompting me to tear my gaze away from the gorgeous bay and look at him. “I know we just met, but I don’t believe in chance.”
“Aren’t you the betting app guy?” I teasingly scoff. “How can you not believe in chance?”
“I don’t believe in wasted meetings. Maybe that’s a better way to say it. Basically, this, with your mom, it’s not something people understand unless they’ve lived it. I’ve lived it. This may sound weird since we just met, but if you ever need someone to talk to…”
I don’t answer, but simply search his face. There’s no sign of subterfuge, ulterior motive, or creepy cheater boyfriend vibes, so after a beat, I nod. “Thanks. I might.”
The wall of politeness typically standing between you and a stranger isn’t there with Maverick. Our shared experience, the loss he understands when so few do, barreled through that barrier. And I don’t know him or even know him enough to trust him, but I do see him. And I feel like he sees me. That’s more than you can ask from most people you’ve known for years. We so rarely truly see people in their hurt. It’s even rarer not to flinch—not to look away from another’s pain.
“Mav!”
We both turn toward his name being called. Zere and Chapel are picking their way down the grassy hill wearing spindly summer sandals.
“Babe,” Zere huffs, and I’m not sure if she’s out of breath or patience. “I’ve been looking for you. It’s time for the fireworks. We need to go do the toast.”
“Sure.” He knocks back the last of his drink, dangling the empty glass from one hand and slipping the other hand into the pocket of his well-cut slacks. “Can’t say I’m sorry this is almost over.”
Something that looks like hurt pinches Zere’s pretty face.
“Shit.” He takes her hand and holds her eyes with his. “I meant the party, Zee. The party.”
“Right.” She paints on a bright smile that she spreads between Chapel and me. “Well, ladies, come on. We’re watching the fireworks from the other pier. You don’t want to miss it.”
They walk slightly ahead of us, hand in hand. Chapel and I seem to by tacit agreement fall far enough behind that we can’t hear their conversation. Something is off between them and has been all night, but who am I to question their relationship? Every couple has an off night or a rough patch.
“You sure you’re okay?” Chapel asks, linking her elbow through mine. “I could tell the call really upset you.”
“I’ll be fine.” I sigh, continuing down the pier and giving her arm a squeeze. “It just catches me off guard sometimes, this new reality.”
“I get it. I mean, I’m not sure I can totally understand what you’re going through, but I can imagine.”
My gaze drifts to Maverick standing beside Zere at the edge of the pier, a relaxed smile on his face as he lets her do the talking and the toasting. He gets it. If no one else at this party gets what I’m going through, he does.
The fireworks explode and whistle across the horizon. We raise our glasses to toast the sky, a vibrant star-filled dome of color and spark. It’s a chaos of sound and sight that sets the world above us on rainbow fire.
And I was wrong. This isn’t useless. It somehow lifts my spirits, the fireworks streaking through the moon-split clouds and soaring as if striving for outer space. Neon confetti flares in the night sky, brilliant colors mirrored on the glassy water. Beauty like this is enough just for its own sake.
When I drop my eyes from the spectacle overhead I meet Maverick’s considering stare. He almost seems to silently ask if I’m okay, if I’m better now. I smile and raise my glass to him, allowing the warmth of his answering grin to thaw out those last few corners that froze inside when I talked to my mother. The petrified places that always leave me shivering and uncertain.
As I look from him back to the electric night, I can’t help but think that maybe beauty’s never wasted and maybe Maverick’s right.
Nothing ever happens by chance.