Ten
Even in his lingering sodden state—he’d consumed more than one person’s share of bourbon—he was euphoric because he’d made it.
His father had died of a massive coronary three weeks before his fifty-second birthday.
Fifty-two loomed over Finn like a dare, the reason he’d eschewed a celebration at fifty.
He felt—irrationally but obstinately—that if he could live longer than his father, usher in his fifty-second birthday, he would have won, and the prize was more time.
No surprise, his father was on his mind this morning.
Finn supposed he’d loved his parents the way most boys of his generation loved their parents—dutifully, respectfully.
He wasn’t happy when his father died, he missed his father, but at the funeral as he shouldered the front right corner of the weighted casket and processed out of the church to a lugubrious version of “Danny Boy” on the organ, Finn felt a physical sensation of relief, a disconcerting combination of joy at his pending ascendency and grief at his encroaching mortality.
Well, sure. Produce went into the garbage because they needed to update the refrigeration systems and try to automate inventory.
They needed to build and develop relationships with local fruit and vegetable suppliers and audit their use of wholesalers trucking products from down south and out west, crunch some numbers to see if it all made sense.
A regional distribution center was inevitable and necessary and smart.
His list went on and on. Finn could see how money was flooding out of the stores.
If his father had his way, they’d still have everything behind a counter manned by female clerks wearing white aprons and ruffled caps, politely putting three pears into a brown paper bag, weighing them, and penciling the price by hand.
The week after his father’s funeral, when he was officially president of the company, Finn fired his uncle Dennis, handing him a seat on the board with an accompanying annual salary that was more than he deserved.
He immediately announced that all Finnegan’s locations would open on Sundays from eight a.m. to five p.m. When Monsignor Thomas at Saint Benedict’s pulled him aside after Mass the following Sunday to register his displeasure, suggesting next week’s homily might discourage parishioners from shopping on the Sabbath, Finn understood.
He offered to donate coffee and donuts for the reception in the parish hall held the third Sunday of every month and for any other sanctioned church functions, and that was that.
Finn’s second and smartest move was to recruit a young woman named Helen Harper from the MBA program out of Stanford.
It wasn’t easy. She’d grown up in California and was reluctant to relocate to a place that regularly appeared on the list of the gloomiest cities in the United States.
He brought her out in June, when Rochester was at its greenest and sunniest and loveliest. He asked his neighbor Nancy Tannenbaum, who was a realtor, to show Helen some houses on the market and a charming English Tudor right around the corner from the George Eastman house did the trick.
“I would pay twice this for a tiny bungalow in San Diego, not even near the beach.”
Bringing Helen into the fold meant breaking his father’s golden rule: to keep Finnegan’s Grocer firmly within the grasp of the family.
No outsiders. If he’d heard the admonition once, he’d heard it a thousand times.
But he knew his limitations, and he knew he needed help to execute his vision, and Helen Harper was a godsend.
If Finn’s preoccupation was roaming the stores and interacting with customers and envisioning how to improve the shopping experience, Helen’s obsession was numbers.
She would say every spreadsheet told a story about what was being done well, how they could improve, and where they were failing completely.
Within a decade of her arrival, they’d opened four new locations and had plans for an additional three, including a renovation and expansion of the flagship store, smack in the middle of town.
Expansion was thrilling, and Finn was just getting started.
He’d had about one-third of the driveway done when a pressure in his left arm distracted him from his musings.
He stood up straight and was hit by a wave of nausea.
Before he could stop himself, he vomited onto the snowbank he’d just created.
His arm was throbbing. He tried to steady himself against the snowbank but it gave way and Finn slipped and fell.
The next thing he remembered was waking up on a stretcher in the driveway and feeling worse than he’d ever felt in his entire life.
The paramedics were talking to each other in urgent voices and injecting something into an IV line. They’d removed his jacket.
“I’m cold,” he managed to croak out. “I’m sick.”
“That’s why we’re here, friend,” one of them said to him. A big guy with red hair and a full beard and surprisingly agile fingers given their size and heft. “But we’ve got things under control, and we’ll head to the hospital soon.”
He wanted to ask a million questions, but he was so tired.
He felt like a prize idiot for not knowing the heart could fell him whenever it wanted.
So he prayed. He prayed to live to see Dune and Fern graduate from high school.
Marry. Have kids. In a disappointingly banal and predictable Ebenezer-like flash, he saw how single-minded and work-focused he’d been.
He quietly bargained and promised: more time at home, better father, more understanding boss, better human.
He felt a quiet elation he assumed was the saline flooding his dehydrated body.
Then he was floating above his street and could see the paramedics pummeling some poor guy on his driveway.
He wanted to tell them to take it easy, but he was distracted by the view.
Up here, everything felt lighter and clearer, even the blue of the sky.
He could see the cars slowly making their way down Park Avenue and the steeple of the Episcopal church a few blocks away.
And then he felt his mother beside him. She didn’t say anything, but he knew she’d come to help.
He looked down to see how the guy on the driveway was doing and saw Fern collapsed on top of that poor man.
Fern. Sobbing and calling for him and he felt an unaccountable sadness not only because she was upset but because he knew he had to choose.
He could go with his mother, or he could go to his daughter, but he couldn’t do both. “Fern,” he said. “Fern.”
Hallucination, the doctors insisted. “These things—these premonitions or visions—can feel real,” his cardiologist assured him.
“You fainted and your brain was not getting enough blood, so strange things can happen during what we call syncope, things we don’t even fully understand.
But it’s no surprise you would think of your children.
Your wife. You’ll have a greater appreciation for all of it. ”
But he hadn’t thought about Fern, he’d seen Fern.
From high above his body where she lay sprawled and sobbing.
And he hadn’t thought about Dune because Dune had slept through the entire incident.
And he hadn’t thought about Honey because—why hadn’t he thought about Honey?
Why, when he woke up in the emergency room, did he wish Honey weren’t holding his hand?
It turned out that feeling as if he were going to die didn’t make him appreciate all he had—it made him wonder why, in this one critical way, he had settled.
He read a book called Life After Life full of case histories detailing experiences like his.
So many people in the book who had near-death experiences said they now felt a peace about dying, an uptick in faith, but the opposite happened to Finn.
He wasn’t afraid of dying, he wasn’t afraid of heaven or hell or whatever the church used as a brandishing tool to keep their followers in line, he was deathly afraid of wasting the rest of his life.
He tried to broach his unhappiness with the doctor, who told him depression was normal after a cardiac event and would correct itself.
Finn knew better. The correction was up to him.