The Law of Second Chances

37

Pat lived for another three months. Most days, after she took her pain medication, she was alert and pain free. She took short walks with Jack in the morning after breakfast and spent her afternoons on the front porch watching the traffic on the Okalatchee.

Jack’s Uncle Bill started showing up every morning around breakfast time. Pat got a kick out of him. Even though he was eighty-seven, Uncle Bill had a strong, thick, rich voice and perfect diction.

“Good morning, young man,” he’d say to Henry, as though he had stepped to center stage. “And how is the young lady of the house?” he’d ask Pat. The way he said it forced her to smile whether she felt like it or not. It was like having Shakespeare come to the house for coffee.

Jack was always the afterthought. He would simply get a “Hello, nephew.” Jack didn’t mind one bit. He enjoyed Bill’s presence as much as everybody else. It made them feel like a family.

Pat and Jack didn’t say much on their morning walks. They just held hands. Pat brought peanuts for the squirrels. They’d stop on the way and sit and drink some water and smile at each other and enjoy each moment, squeezing it for everything it was worth.

In the afternoon, Henry would join Pat on the porch for a while. Her eyes were going bad, and Henry had taken to reading books to her. They were halfway through Cross Creek, by Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings, but it was going slowly. Pat kept having him go back and read her the final paragraph at the end of the first chapter before he could pick up where they had left off the day before.

“Read it to me, Henry,” she’d say. “Just one more time.” And Henry would open the book to page fourteen and read:

Folk call the road lonely, because there is not human traffic and human stirring. Because I have walked it so many times and seen such a tumult of life there, it seems to me one of the most populous highways of my acquaintance. I have walked it in ecstasy, and in joy it is beloved. Every pine tree, every gallberry bush, every passion vine, every joree rustling in the underbrush, is vibrant. I have walked it in trouble, and the wind in the trees beside me is easing. I have walked it in despair, and the red of the sunset is my own blood dissolving into the night’s darkness. For all such things were on the earth before us, and will survive after us, and it is given to us to join ourselves with them and be comforted.

“That is so beautiful,” she would say when he was done, and then he would find their place from the previous time and continue reading.

One day she stopped him before he finished the chapter he was reading. “That’s enough for today, Henry. I’m tired.” Henry closed the book and started to get up to help her into her bedroom. “Sit down here next to me, Henry,” she said.

“Yes ma’am.” He had cared about her before he met her, so it was no surprise to him that his feelings for her had only grown deeper.

“You don’t have to feel guilty, Henry.”

“Ma’am?”

“About living.”

“I’m not sure I understand.”

“C’mon, Henry, we haven’t known each other long, but we know each other well. You feel guilty because you were spared, and I’m not going to be.”

Henry didn’t answer. He rubbed those huge hands of his, and his broad, muscular shoulders tightened as he tried to fight back the tears.

“That’s just the way it is, Henry. God has plans for me elsewhere and for you here. So promise me you won’t feel guilty anymore.”

Henry hesitated, collected himself. “I promise,” he finally said.

“Even when I’m gone.”

“I promise,” he said again, his entire body shaking.

Charlie came down from New York every other week like clockwork. She and Pat would sit on the porch and drink tea and chat. Every once in a while the conversation turned serious.

“Would you do something for me, Charlie?”

“Sure, Pat. Anything.”

“Sometime down the road when you think it’s appropriate, I want you to tell Jack you and I had this conversation. Tell him I want him to go on with his life and live it to the fullest. And tell him. .” Pat hesitated for a minute. This was not something she had planned to say, but she knew, sitting here with her old friend, that Charlie would deliver the message. “Tell him that if somebody had told me that I could live to a ripe old age if I gave up the last few years I’ve had here in Bass Creek with him, I would choose to die tomorrow rather than do that.”

Pat almost couldn’t get the last words out. Both she and Charlie started crying. They held each other for several minutes.

“That is so beautiful, Pat. Why don’t you tell Jack yourself?”

“I can’t, Charlie. There are certain things we can’t talk about even at this point. It’s too hard.”

Pat had a different conversation with Jack. It was toward the end, when she was bedridden. He was sitting beside her, trying to put on a game face.

“It’s going to be fine, Jack,” she told him. “I know it now. I can feel it. My people are going to come to get me. When that happens, when they finally come, I’ll let you know. I’ll give you a signal.” Jack didn’t know what she was talking about. He just held her hand and kept his eyes from her view.

“You’re the one who first told me it was going to be all right,” she said with a weak smile.

He gave her a surprised look, forgetting for the moment to hide his tears.

“That’s right. It was you. That day out on the river when I was worried about the cormorant. You said, ‘Things that happen in nature are meant to be.’ You remember that?”

He nodded.

“That’s when I knew. Coming here to Bass Creek-finding our special place. It was all about learning that I was a part of it-nature. And this is simply meant to be. I’m going somewhere, Jack, but I won’t be gone.”

She took his head to her breast and held him.

They were all there the day Pat slipped quietly away. Uncle Bill usually went home after breakfast. Henry always left Pat’s bedroom when Jack entered, not wanting to interfere with their time together. This day, however, Uncle Bill stayed all day, and he and Henry and Jack and Charlie never left the room. They said the rosary-something Bill hadn’t done in forty years-several times. And they sang Pat’s favorite songs and hymns. They were standing around the bed singing the Beatles’ tune “All You Need Is Love” when Pat opened her eyes and caught Jack’s-and winked. Then she closed them for the last time.

It took Jack several minutes to realize that was the signal.