Do They Wear High Heels in Heaven? (9 page)

Curveball
An excerpt from a novel by Michael Angelo

Sam stirred. He wondered if he was seeing things. A light was on in the locker room and someone was standing over him.

He tried to think back to what had happened, but in actuality, all he could think of was his pain. Breathing hurt, his face hurt, and he felt like he was going to puke from swallowing blood. He rolled onto his side and retched.

His eyes were nearly swollen shut, and he was trying to tell his limbs to move, to tell his arms to cover his face, to defend himself from this figure standing over him. He wondered if it was Charlie, back to finish the job. Back to kill him.

The figure bent down, and he heard the voice of his coach, Carl Ditford. Coach Carl.

“Hey there, Sam.”

Sam couldn’t speak. He tried to open his mouth, but found he couldn’t.

“Son…” Coach Carl said, his voice soft, much quieter than during practice session when his Texas twang barked across the field. “Seems you had a bit of a disagreement with the boys.”

“Mmm.” Sam managed to utter a sound.

Still softly, only now with a threat in the whisper, Coach Carl said, “Well, it’s a shame you didn’t see anything. Didn’t see who hit you. Didn’t see nothin’. Shame. Boys will be boys, Sam. Real boys, that is. And if you want an ambulance, you better swear on your mama’s life that you didn’t see nothin’.”

“Mmm,” was all Sam could say. His heart pounded. He could feel the blood spewing from his nose in time with his pulse.

“You’re gonna have to do better than that. Was that a yes? Blink your eyes once for yes. Slowly. So I can see.”

With every bit of himself, every scrap of fight left in him, Sam wanted to live and so, with difficulty, he opened his eyes as wide as they would go—not much more than slits. And then shut them. He blinked. Once.

Coach Carl slapped him—hard—on the shoulder. “Good little faggot. I’ll call you an ambulance now.” He stood up, then spat on Sam before he turned on his lizard skin cowboy boot heels and walked out of the locker room, and, Sam prayed, called an ambulance.

Lily

W
hile it wasn’t “time yet,” I discussed with Dr. Morris how, if it got really bad, I wanted to die at home. I had become a walking medical dictionary. Ductal, in situ, carcinoma…invasive, stage four, the words could spill out of me at will. I told Dr. Morris that I would let him know when I’d had enough treatment—or he would. When and if fighting became pointless, I would have hospice care at home. I was planning ahead, which was never my strong suit. But spontaneous and cancer didn’t seem to be two words that sat well together. So next I visited two lawyers.

The first lawyer was my family attorney, Harry Conklin, a sweetheart of a guy who’d known me since my father died and we had to settle the estate. Harry always wore bow ties to the office. He possessed quite a collection, including a light-up one for Christmas, one with orange pumpkins for Halloween and a red, white and blue one for the Fourth of July. Good lawyer jokes abound—you know the ones about how they’re all sharks, but Harry reminded me of the kind of lawyer you’d picture in a sleepy, little town. Sort of like Andy Griffith as Matlock, minus the Southern drawl.

As soon as I got sick, I had contacted him. Harry drew up a durable power of attorney, naming Michael, of course. I also told him I wanted to come back to discuss my estate, which amounted to a house with a leaky roof, a dog that snored and two children—one a petulant teen that
I
sometimes wondered if I wanted to take care of.

Without telling anyone, after a month of chemo, I had an appointment with Harry to draw up a will. The children would have to go to David, he had said over the phone, but I wanted to name Michael their legal guardian anyway. There was always a chance Spawn wouldn’t want them. I considered it, actually, more than a chance. Because though David might, in his narcissistic heart, actually love his kids, Child Bride did not.

But in my heart, I knew my wishes aside, I probably didn’t stand much legal chance of naming Michael. Still, I showed up to my appointment with the Bow Tie King, determined to make him see it my way.

“Lily,” Harry hugged me tightly and ushered me into his office, which had that moneyed “clubby” feel of rich burgundy leather, brass and a banker’s lamp on his desk casting a soft green glow.

I settled into a leather chair that seemed to swallow me up amidst its two massive arms, and I smiled at him.

“Harry…the cancer’s kicking my ass. Now I don’t want you getting all blubbery on me. I’m here because I want a living will. I do not want to be hooked up on machines should things go terribly wrong.”

I watched him remove his glasses in a tired gesture and rub his eyes. My father had been the hard-drinking sort who loved his family and hated lawyers, doctors and priests. But he had trusted Harry. Behind the goofy bow ties was a man who cared, and a very smart lawyer to boot. Yale.

“Lily, I’m very, very sorry.” He put his glasses back on. “Is it…bad? Listen to me. When is cancer good? How are you doing, you know, considering.”

Considering. It’s such a cancer word. Considering you’ve got cancer cells running amok. Considering there’s this chance you could die. “All things considered, I’m okay. And yes it is bad, so can you draw up a living will?”

“Of course. Now…” He was all business, pulling out a yellow pad to take notes on. “I hate to be so…morbid, but have you thought about how long…? The timing? You see, we can write up a do not resuscitate order, a DNR. That means that if you, say, had a massive heart attack during surgery or stopped breathing, they wouldn’t do anything to prolong your life, no extraordinary measures. No CPR. No tubes, no life-saving. And considering your age—that you’re young and not some ninety-year-old in a nursing home—you’d have to be pretty sick before they would honor it. Still you’re sure you want that?”

“Absolutely.”

“Okay, then. There’s a second part to this. Let’s suppose you slipped into a coma, but you were still hanging in there. Would you want them to not feed you? Would you want them to wait a period of time, say two weeks, before discontinuing feeding or life support? Because even with a DNR, suppose you collapsed at a store. The ambulance comes and they don’t know you have a DNR, it’s conceivable you could end up on life support even with the DNR, you follow?”

“I follow.”

“So you need to decide what’s a good time to wait?”

“Like two weeks and then pull the plug?”

“Yes.” He took off his glasses again and rubbed his eyes. I saw a tremble in his hand.

“Two weeks sounds good.”

“Don’t be flippant. Think about it.” Glasses back on, a return to business.

“Two weeks. That’s reasonable. Gives people time to gather at my deathbed, say their goodbyes. Maybe my ex-husband will even grovel at my bedside. I like it. Two weeks.”

“All right, then. Two weeks.”

He put down his pen. “I hope you don’t have to use this, Lily, but I guess you’re here because realistically you might. I take it you’re naming your friend Michael again.”

“Yes, Harry. I want him as executor of the will. Now I know I had a sort of basic will once I became a single parent. But, you know, I never really thought I might
need
it. You know? I mean, it was all this theoretical crap. So I want to make a couple of changes to what I originally had. I want to leave Michael my piano. Tara quit taking lessons, and Michael loves it. I catch him sitting down to play once in a while. But now I need to know something…”

“Shoot.”

“I don’t want my children’s father to get them if I die.”

“Why?”

“This isn’t a ‘woman scorned’ kind of thing. He ended up marrying that young student he was seeing, and they have an infant now. She’s just a child, herself, really. Not too much older than Tara. And to be honest the children no longer get phone calls, Christmas cards, nothing. He and his wife have a new life, and my children are not part of it. The kids would never want to leave the U.S., their friends, the life they have, to go to England. And to be honest, when I mentioned, after he left, that I was doing up a will and maybe he should too, he made a fuss about how I couldn’t die because he couldn’t imagine them full-time.”

“Well, we have that in the will, but it’s not iron-clad at all. A judge would want them to go to their father.”

“Here’s the thing, Harry. I want Michael to raise them.”

Harry fiddled with his bow tie—a navy blue one with white polka dots.

“Very tough, Lily.”

“Yeah, well, I’m in a tough spot, so—”

“What you need, Lily, is a bulldog.”

“Hmm?”

“You don’t need a gentleman lawyer, you need a hard-ass. You need Jack Tessa. He’s the toughest, meanest, orneriest lawyer in Westchester. But he has a soft spot for kids. He’ll figure out a way to do what you want and have it airtight. I’ll call him and explain a little. Can you meet him next week?”

I nodded. “Thanks, Harry.” We both stood, and he walked me to the door. I gave him a hug. He held me a minute longer than he would have if I hadn’t just come to tell him I was dying.

So, the next week I found myself in the law offices of Finn, Finn, Smith and Tessa. Jack Tessa was no Matlock. He had on an Italian suit with creases so sharp they seemed to slice the air ahead of him as he walked. His tie was a three-hundred dollar silk Gucci I’d seen in an ad, and he had a Rolex on his wrist that was encrusted with diamonds. He was maybe fifty-five and had the soft tan of a man who gets to the golf courses of Florida a few times a winter. His hair was silver and cut short. His eyes were blue, and they were very, very cold. I decided I would not want to be on the opposite side of the courtroom from Jack W. Tessa, Esquire.

“Harry explained your situation to me a little bit, but I’d really like it if you explained it yourself. This is not going to be easy, especially in light of your friend being a homosexual and the children’s father still living.”

“I have cancer. Stage four. That’s pretty much the toss-in-the-towel stage. I’m receiving chemotherapy and will be in a clinical trial for a new treatment, but for all intents and purposes, Mr. Tessa, you are looking at someone who will likely die of cancer. Everything I am doing is in preparation for that. It’s to prepare my children for life without me.”

I had decided, the minute I looked into his eyes, that I would play this tough. I would be hard, not some sympathy case. That was the way to play Jack Tessa. He was the kind of man who admired a tough broad. I felt it.

“Go on,” he said. Unlike George, he didn’t rub his eyes or look away. He stared me down, and I stared back and kept talking.

“My children’s father is a deadbeat dad. Plain and simple. He hasn’t called them in eight months. He remembers to send his child support sporadically. He has started a new life with a woman who is only ten years older than our fifteen-year-old daughter. He works as a professor in London and makes a decent enough salary with that and royalties from an anthology he edited to support them comfortably, but there is no ‘extra’ money for the two children he abandoned along with me. When he left, he, to speak bluntly, never looked back.”

Jack Tessa nodded almost imperceptibly.

I inhaled and started again. “I have no living relatives except a batty cousin who lives in California. Michael has been the dominant male presence in my children’s lives and a surrogate father.”

“Your parents are both deceased?”

“My mother died of lung cancer when I was twelve years old. My father died of complications from emphysema five years ago. They were both extremely heavy smokers.”

“And so you wish for the children to be raised by your friend, Mr. Michael Angelo.”

“Yes.” I folded my hands in my lap. Jack Tessa, Esquire, had a way about him that made you wonder where you should put your hands. If I still had hair, I might have nervously played with a strand.

“And Mr. Angelo is an admitted homosexual, and he is of no relation to the children.”

I swallowed. When you put it plainly, it didn’t sound so good.

“Look, Mr. Tessa, Michael was in the delivery room when Noah was born. He cut the cord while my ex-husband was stuck in a snowstorm…and, I later found out, holed up in a hotel room with his barely-of-age girlfriend. Michael is a prominent professor, educated at NYU, he played baseball in college and continues to be an avid sports fan. He attends Mass every Sunday and every day of Lent. He has taught my children the Our Father and Hail Mary and has taught them right from wrong. He cooks for them and does their laundry. He irons better than I do. When he packs their lunches no detail is overlooked, down to cutting off the crusts. He knows how much Noah weighs, when he lost his first tooth and how Noah throws up when he eats SpaghettiOs and drinks milk in combination. Some kind of chemical reaction. And he’s brave enough to
clean it up.
He knows my daughter is in the throes of obnoxious adolescence, and he tolerates her excessive moodiness. He can tell you about her first period because she happened to get it during the seventh-inning stretch of a Yankee game, and he had to handle it himself because I was with Noah at a Cub Scout picnic. In short, there is nothing you or anyone could say that would convince me otherwise that he is the person who should raise my children, and the choice of who he screws has nothing to do with it.”

I stopped speaking. During this last burst of speech, I had been talking faster and faster. Now I waited to hear what he would say.

Jack Tessa drummed his long, manicured fingers on the desk.

“They do not belong with their father.”

I looked at him expectantly. He drummed his fingers some more.

“Okay. One, you need to get your ex-husband to give up his parental rights. I can draw up the papers. He has to sign them. You’re safest with that. He would no longer have to pay you child support, but it sounds like that’s not going to impact you much. What about after you’re gone? Will the children need that money?”

“No.”

“You’re certain.”

I nodded. “I have a large life insurance policy that, thank God, some insurance guy talked me into when I became a single parent. I have another policy through the newspaper. Not so big, but enough to set aside for their college. I have a 401K, social security. I almost own my house outright, thanks to my inheritance after my father died. The roof leaks and the bathrooms have 1970s avocado tile, but it’s a solid home. They’ll be okay, and Michael makes an excellent living.”

“It’s a tough one. You came here because I don’t bullshit anyone. Ex-spouses and families have a way of turning strange when death and money come into play. I’ve seen families with estates worth millions fight to the death over a single set of sterling silver tableware. I’ve seen the worst of people—and I rarely see the best. I don’t ever see two sisters fighting over great-grandma’s table linens and one sister just gives in rather than fight. I see people want to draw blood in court, and they come to me because they think I can do it. So you need to think about what your ex is capable of, and what he might really do when the chips are down. Think about it.”

“I have thought about it. Look, Mr. Tessa, ‘when the chips are down’ is an expression. A cliché. But let me tell you, a person in my situation has to lay all her cards on the table. The chips
are
down. And it’s a bad hand and I’m just trying to make the best of it. You’ll draw up all these papers?”

He nodded. “But only you can talk your ex into signing.”

“Leave that to me.”

“Done.”

He stood and shook my hand. It was cool and dry. Mine was sweaty.

He escorted me to the door. “I’ll have my secretary call you when the papers are ready for you to pick up. Think about what I’ve said. You’re very smart, Ms. Waters. You’ll do the right thing.”

I shut the door. Out in my car, my knees started trembling and my teeth chattered. I had told Harry to let them pull the plug after two weeks. Fourteen days. And I needed David to sign papers giving our children to me so I could give them to someone else. Lawyers and death. What a pair.