The Case of the Flirty Succulent
Sadie
“He had a bad night, but he was still transferred out of ICU.”
That’s the voicemail that I had on my phone from Gio when I got off my work call this morning. I wasn’t sure what Buddy’s “bad night” entailed, just that it hadn’t stopped him from getting to move down to the second floor.
By the time I made it to the hospital, Buddy was sitting up in bed, wires and tubes trailing from under his gown like he was being held together with duct tape and spite.
You’d think a man who had been that close to meeting his maker might come out the other side with a little gratitude.
A little softness. Instead, he’d apparently spent the morning tossing off his blanket and pitching his applesauce at the wall.
“Thought I was done with chrysanthemums and hospital beds after your mama passed,” he rasped as I walked through the door, scowling at the flowers crowding the room as if they’d personally offended him.
Chrysanthemums were my mom’s favorite flower, and because they were and so many people got them for her when she was sick, Buddy didn’t like them because that’s what they represented to him.
“I can clear these out for you if—”
“Looks like a damn funeral in here.” He waved a hand trailing an IV line, dismissing both me and the flowers in one efficient gesture.
I started moving the arrangements behind the curtain without another word—three identical bouquets, one from the VA, one from the ladies of St. Anthony’s, one from the police department. Half the town had shown up in flowers.
Then I got to the final potted gift, which was not a flower. It was a stubby succulent with a Post-it that read: STAY ALIVE, OLD MAN! Signed with a looping cursive T and a cheerful XO.
“Leave that one!” Buddy ordered gruffly.
I looked at him. Then at the plant. Then back at him.
“Who is this from?” The ‘XO’ certainly snagged my attention.
“Just um…a friend.”
The way he said friend—like the word had a locked door inside it—made my jaw drop straight to the linoleum.
Was Buddy seeing someone?
Who was T?
Why was she giving him hugs and kisses?
My mind was flipping through the directory of people I knew in town who had a name starting with T.
Tammy Porter worked at the post office. She was a widow in her late sixties, but I think she would be too young for him.
Tina Jacobson, the middle school librarian.
Never married in her mid-seventies. I suppose the age would be doable, he was only a few years older than her.
She was so quiet though, and how would they have even connected?
Tonya Wallace, the eighty-year-old long haul trucker turned dairy farmer.
I could see the two of them having a lot in common, I just couldn’t imagine them having any chemistry.
From what I remember, Tonya had a four pack a day habit and Buddy couldn’t stand cigarette smoke, now tobacco chew, he was all about, but smoking it, that was a hard no.
But maybe she’s changed. I didn’t know, but what I did know was that this mystery was going to drive me crazy until I discovered who “T” was.
“You see the doc out there?” he asked, shifting in his bed restlessly. “He needs to spring me outta here.”
“I heard you had a rough night,” I prompted, hoping he’d fill me in on what happened.
He shooed away the comment like a fly circling his dinner. “Ahh.”
Okay, maybe not.
I crossed to his bed to try and help him settle in when Ida Blanchart breezed into the room with a wide smile on her face. I remembered her from my mom’s many hospital stays. I had no idea she was still nursing.
Buddy barked, “You here to bust me out or just jab me with something? I swear half you nurses can’t find a vein to save your life, or mine, in this case.”
Ida took his statement in stride, not personal at all, and went about doing what she needed to do, which included taking his vitals and administering his medication.
Once Ida left, there was a steady stream of visitors in and out all afternoon.
Now that Buddy wasn’t in the ICU, visitation had been opened to non-family members.
It turned into an episode of This is Your Life.
It was a parade of characters from my childhood—ladies in pastel windbreakers who used to pinch my cheeks at potluck suppers, men who worked for Buddy back when we still ran cattle, health workers who cared for my mom.
No one showed up empty-handed. They had everything from pies wrapped in picnic towels, casseroles in disposable tins, to cards with a cartoon horse on the front.
All of them had the same sequence of comments when they saw me: first, how long it had been since they’d seen me; next, that I was the spitting image of Rosie and/or Rosebud, my mother and grandmother.
Some even saying it was like seeing a ghost. Last, they would all say that they were glad I’d come to my senses and finally moved home where I belonged, or some version of that statement.
Buddy never missed the opportunity to correct people, letting them know this was only a visit and that if it were up to him, I’d be on the first flight back to the East Coast. My living arrangements weren’t the only thing that got a reaction out of him.
Every time my appearance was mentioned, I felt Buddy stiffen in his bed beside me.
Sometimes he’d give a grunt, sometimes he’d stop talking altogether, and sometimes he’d change the subject so abruptly that the visitor would blink in confusion.
I was proof that it was tough for him to see my grandma and mom in me and validated the reason I’d stayed away so long.
The parade of visitors slowed down around dinner time, and the floor quieted except for the beeping monitors and the shift-change gossip of the nurses in the hallway.
I sat at the foot of Buddy’s bed, picking at the edge of a Jell-O cup, and thought about the phone calls I’d been ignoring all day.
Besides Janine and Peter, I’d also ignored calls from the head of acquisitions, most likely wanting to know what I planned on doing with my clients—all of whom had asked for updates, all wanted to know when I’d be back.
I ignored the calls because I couldn’t answer them.
My entire future was on hold, out of my hands, pinned in limbo by the white-banded wrist of the man in the hospital bed.
Buddy caught me looking at his IV. “Stop staring like I’ve already kicked it,” he gruffly commanded.
“What do you expect,” I shot back, “when you keep trying to pull out your own tubes?”
He’d attempted to check himself out of the hospital three times so far and pulled out his I.V. each time. I wasn’t sure how long they’d be able to keep him in this place.
He made a face at me. “Hospitals are for people who don’t have better things to do. I’ve got three thousand acres of fence to ride and crops to look after.”
The sick pit of worry in my stomach grew as the world outside the hospital room walls began to close in on me. The farm. The land. The legacy. The longer Buddy’s recovery took, the more impossible it seemed that he’d ever go back to running things the way he always had.
“You know you’re not invincible, right?” I stated, flipping through yesterday’s local newspaper someone had left behind, scanning the obits as if they might have featured his name.
Buddy snorted. “Says who?”
I ignored him and kept going. “I mean it. The doctor says you need to be off your feet for weeks, maybe months. You can’t run a farm from a hospital bed.”
“I’ve seen men run empires from worse places than this,” he sneered.
“Empires have staff, Buddy. You don’t even have a foreman anymore. Word is, you fired the last two.”
Apparently, Buddy had become quite curmudgeonly since Randy, his foreman of forty-plus years, retired to Arizona.
Rumor has it he was impossible to please and lost his temper at the drop of a hat.
It reminded me a lot of his demeanor immediately after my mom passed.
He never raised his voice at me, he barely spoke to me, but I heard him with his workers, Randy, Jasper, Kevin, Freddy, and the others.
He’d been short with them. They put up with it because they loved him.
He tried to sit up and failed, settling for a slow-motion glare. “I didn’t fire them. They quit. Millennial work ethic is shit.”
I wasn’t going to bite even though he was clearly baiting me. His hands looked small against the white sheet, which felt like a trick of the light because nothing about Buddy Lockhart was ever small. “You need help.”
He softened just a fraction, or maybe the morphine was starting to win. “Don’t worry your pretty little head,” he said, but it didn’t have the old bite.
“It’s already too late for that,” I muttered.
He pretended not to hear me and closed his eyes, but I could tell by the way his fingers flexed that the conversation wasn’t over. Not for him, and definitely not for me.
I had hoped for a quiet evening, but more visitors arrived after dinner, just as predictable as the sunrise.
First it was Mrs. Lindahl from down the road, who brought a sack of homegrown pears and told me three times in five minutes that I looked just like my mother did at my age.
She lingered in the doorway, eyes darting between Buddy and me like she was watching a television drama, and when she finally left, I caught the faint scent of her rose perfume.
That was followed by two men from the feed store with matching ball caps and matching stories about how Buddy once ran a calf auction while running a hundred-and-two fever.
They shook my hand, patted Buddy’s arm, and marveled at how “the old dog still has all his teeth.”