Same Kind of Different As Me (18 page)

I dropped everything and took off. The Harris Hospital is a good two miles southwest of the mission. I sped there, making a quick stop at What-aburger to pick up Denver’s favorite milk shake, vanilla. Inside Harris, I remembered the floor but forgot the room number, so I walked down the long hall, peeking into each room as I went. Finally, I saw his name, hand-printed on a card, slipped into a slot on a closed door.

A pretty blonde nurse stood nearby, jotting notes on a chart. “Can I help you?”

“Well, I just spent the last ten minutes looking for my friend’s room, but I guess I just found it,” I said, nodding toward Denver’s name card.

“He won’t be in
there
,” she said, lowering her voice confidentially: “The man in there is black and homeless.”

I grinned. “Then I’m obviously in the right place.”

Embarrassed, she skirted off, probably hoping I wouldn’t tell her boss. I pushed my way through the door. “Hey there, Denver! All those white ladies put you in the hospital?”

Denver, by now able to laugh, told me about his long walk to the hospital through the hood. “Don’t tell Miss Debbie, but out there at the religious resort, I just kept eatin all that free food, but I just didn’t feel right ’bout usin the Man’s bathroom, so I didn’t go the whole time I was up there. So here I am, tryin to get unplugged!”

We both howled. When we finally settled down, he got serious. “Miss Debbie knowed what she was doin takin me up to that retreat.” He didn’t confide any details and I didn’t press.

A couple of weeks later, when his innards were ready, I took Denver to the Mexican restaurant where he had first learned to identify the parts of a combination plate. He ordered his usual—taco, enchilada, rice, and beans—but he pushed it all around on his plate, more interested in talking than eating.

“Miss Debbie knowed what she was doin—takin me outta the street environment I was in so I would have time to think about my life,” he said. “You know, you got to get the devil out the house ’fore you can clean it up! And that’s what happened to me up in them woods. I had time to clear my head and shake loose of some old demons and think about what God might have in mind for the last part of my life.”

Then Denver got quiet again. Finally, he parked his fork tines in his refrieds, wiped his hands on his napkin, and put it back in his lap. “Mr. Ron, I got somethin important to tell you. The work Miss Debbie is doin at the mission is very important. She is becomin precious to God.”

Denver’s brow wrinkled and his head dropped. Then with that dark glower that always preceded his most serious pronouncements, he said something that still rings in my ears today: “When you is precious to God, you become important to Satan. Watch your back, Mr. Ron. Somethin bad gettin ready to happen to Miss Debbie. The thief comes in the night.”

29

Certain
days in life, you remember the headlines.

November 22, 1963: JFK assassinated. Easy to remember since I had a front-row seat.

July 20, 1969: Neil Armstrong took one small step for man and one giant leap for mankind as Deborah and I, newly engaged, made out on the couch in my apartment at TCU.

April 1, 1999: I remember the headlines from that day less for the events themselves than for the fact that April Fools’ Day was the fulcrum that flung our lives down a path we could not have foreseen.

Per our usual coffee-in-the-kitchen routine, it was the Bible for Deborah that morning, the
Star-Telegram
for me. Albanian refugees were pouring out of Kosovo, the paper said . . . former Catwoman Eartha Kitt was still lounge-singing at age seventy-two . . . Texas Governor George W. Bush had pulled in $6 million in less than a month for his likely presidential campaign.

After coffee, Deborah took off for her exercise class, then to her annual physical. She was military about that yearly visit—she checked in, got the “you are in fantastic health for a woman half your age” report from the doctor, then made her appointment for the following year on her way out the door. Weddings, parties, and travel plans all were scheduled
around
that physical.

I headed out for my office in Dallas, looking forward to a lunch date with our daughter, Regan. She had been working for me in the gallery. With an art history degree from the University of Texas and a certificate of completion from Christie’s Fine Arts course in New York City, it seemed like a natural fit. But she hated it.

Even in high school, Regan had felt more comfortable around the dis-advantaged than the privileged. She often would whip up a batch of sandwiches and, we were mortified to find out later, take them
alone
to the bums living under the bridges in downtown Dallas.

During the Christie’s course, she discovered she did not enjoy the art business—the pampered clients, the self-involved dealers, the pretentious power lunches. But maybe it was just that way in New York City, she thought. So she kept mum, came home, and stuck it out at our Dallas gallery for a while. Carson, meanwhile, was a senior at TCU, and Deborah was enjoying having all her chicks back in the nest.

But Regan’s discontent grew daily. So we met for lunch that day at Yamaguchi Sushi and, in a corner booth over raw tuna topped with jalapeño slices, got down to the serious business of charting another course for her life. As we discussed options, grad school and ministry among them, my cell phone rang. It was Deborah.

“Craig felt something in my abdomen,” she said, her voice thin and strained. The doctor, a personal friend named Craig Dearden, wanted to do a sonogram in his office then send her to the hospital for X-rays. “Would you come back to Fort Worth and meet me at All Saints?”

“Absolutely,” I said. “I’ll be there in half an hour. And don’t worry, okay? You’re the healthiest person I know.”

I hated to cut short lunch with Regan, but we agreed to reschedule the next day, and I told her I’d call as soon as I talked with Craig. When I arrived at All Saints, I found Deborah in the radiology waiting room. Mary Ellen was already there. So was Alan, an All Saints physician and former chief of staff.

I scooped Deborah into a long hug. Her shoulders felt tense, but she gradually relaxed. I pulled back and looked into her eyes. “You okay?”

She nodded, trying on a weak smile.

Deborah got X-rays, but also a CAT scan. When the films were ready, we sat in an examining room, lights dimmed, X-ray illuminator glowing. Another doctor, John Burk, clipped the first film to the illuminator. At first, the amorphous image, milky white on gray, meant nothing to me.

“This is Deborah’s liver,” Dr. Burk explained, drawing an invisible circle around a shape on the screen.

Then I saw them: shadows. Her liver was completely covered with them.

As we stared at the film, several more doctors filtered into the room, their white coats and serious faces vaguely blue in the dim light. A couple of them experimented with sounding upbeat.

“These spots are a little troubling, but it’s nothing to worry about yet,” said one.

“It’s possible they’re birthmarks,” said another. “I’ve seen that before.”

But none of them looked us in the eye. The word
cancer
floated through my mind like a poisonous gas, but I didn’t dare utter it.

“We’ve scheduled a colonoscopy for tomorrow morning,” Craig said. They would withhold judgment until then.

At home that night, we settled into bed, and Deborah shared with me the story of Joshua and Caleb, two of twelve men Moses sent to spy out the Promised Land and bring back a report for the children of Israel.

We lay facing each other, heads on white-cased pillows. “When the spies came back, they brought good news and bad news,” Deborah said, her voice lilting softly like a storyteller. “The good news was that the land
did
flow with milk and honey, just as God had promised. The bad news was that the land was inhabited by giants.” The Israelites wept with fear, she went on, all except for Joshua and Caleb, who said, “If the Lord is pleased with us, He will give us the land. Do not be afraid.”

Deborah fell silent for a few minutes, then raised her eyes to mine. “Ron, I’m afraid.”

I pulled her to me and held her. We prayed about the colonoscopy. That the Lord would be pleased with us, that the doctors would bring back a good report.

Stars hung like ice in a black sky when we pulled into the All Saints parking lot the next morning. Word of Deborah’s pending diagnosis had spread among our friends, and we were surprised and touched to find about twenty of them clustered in the day surgery waiting room, praying.

As the doctors wheeled Deborah away and she made her pale face brave, we prayed for a good report. I posted myself outside the door of the endoscopy room—as close to Deborah as they’d let me get—and paced the cold tile floors. I alternated between prayer and mild panic, between “the peace of God that surpasses all understanding” and bubbling nausea. An eon ticked by, then an epoch. Sand through an hourglass a grain at a time.

Finally, through the square of wired safety glass, I saw nurses wheeling Deborah into recovery and rushed to join her. Through heavily lidded eyes, she looked up at me, her bottom lip protruding slightly in a way it did only when she was truly sad. She mouthed the word
cancer
, her lips attempting a half-smile to cushion the blow.

Then tiny tears appeared in the corners of her eyes and spilled down her pale cheeks and I remembered her words from the night before:
giants in the
Promised Land
.

30

It was
Miss Mary Ellen that told me about Miss Debbie. She come down to the mission alone to lead that Bible study Sister Bettie let em have, and when I seen Miss Debbie wadn’t with her, I asked her where was she at.

Miss Mary Ellen put her hand on my shoulder. “I have some bad news, Denver. Miss Debbie went to the doctor and . . . it’s serious. She has cancer.”

When Miss Mary Ellen said “cancer,” I couldn’t hardly believe it. Didn’t look like a thing in the world was wrong with Miss Debbie. Here she was, comin down to the mission two or three times ever week, feedin down at the Lot, leadin a Bible study. Seemed so perfect in her health.

The first thing I knowed was that God was gon’ heal Miss Debbie. The second thing I knowed was that I was afraid. What if He didn’t heal her? In my life, I had already lost most a’ the people that was important to me—Big Mama and Uncle James and Aunt Etha. Miss Debbie was the first person that had loved me unconditionally in over thirty years. Here I’d let her get close and, sure ’nough, looked like maybe God was gettin ready to take her, too.

I got scared my life was gon’ be changed forever. Then I started worryin how was everbody else at the mission gon’ take it when they heard?

I ain’t gon’ sugarcoat it: They took it purty hard. There’s a lot of folks come down to the mission and volunteer, but most of em was not faithful like Miss Debbie. But that wadn’t all. It was the way she treated the homeless that made them accept her as their friend. She never asked em no questions, like how come you is in here? Where you been? How many times you been in jail? How come you done all them bad things in your life? She just loved em, no strings attached.

That’s the way she loved me, too. The Word says God don’t give us credit for lovin the folks we want to love anyway. No, He gives us credit for loving the unlovable. The perfect love of God don’t come with no conditions, and that’s the kind of love Miss Debbie showed the folks at the mission.

After we heard about Miss Debbie, me and Chef Jim got to be purty tight. We never had no special prayer group before, but ever mornin me and Chef Jim would meet up in the kitchen and pray for Miss Debbie and her family. And there was other folks prayin, too.

You know, if you ain’t poor, you might think it’s the folks in them big ole fine brick churches that’s doin all the givin and the carin and the prayin. I wish you coulda seen all them little circles a’ homeless folks with their heads bowed and their eyes closed, whisperin what was on their hearts. Seemed like they didn’t have nothin to give, but they was givin what they had, takin the time to knock on God’s front door and ask Him to heal this woman that had loved them.

31

Deborah
’
s
doctors scheduled another surgery for three days later. Deborah, Carson, Regan, and I retreated to Rocky Top to pray and think things through as a family. Maybe “retreated” isn’t the right word, at least not in my case, for the ranch became my war room.

We would probably spend a year in this battle, I told Deborah, then celebrate our victory, maybe even with a parade like soldiers returning from war, or the Apollo 13 astronauts rumbling safely back to earth after a space flight that seemed doomed. On the road from here to there, we knew that pain, tears, and fear waited like assassins. But pain makes life fuller, richer. And I remembered what Denver’s aunt Etha told him: “Good medicine always tastes bad.”

I was confident that the right medicine was out there, and it became my mission to find it. As of that day, supported by my partners, I basically hung an out-of-business sign on my Dallas gallery. It was only days before hired crews were to sweep into Fort Worth to remove the Calder sculpture in the most lucrative coup of my career. But my partners agreed to handle the final operation, and I asked them not to fill me in on the details. It meant nothing now. I was in the army again, this time a field general in the war on cancer.