The Reading Lessons (44 page)

Meg’s cousin Joanie was the first to arrive, then her brother Henry who had come from work. Old Hadley and Grandma each had a tray of Mimosas, and they were cirulating the room. At twenty minutes past twelve, Grandma had everyone sit down to eat. Mom, Dad, and Stephen had yet to arrive, but the stew was starting to congeal. “Leave it to Nina to ruin my oxtails,” Grandma said. 

Meg was angry too. This was no way to make peace. When the doorbell finally rang at 12:35, she and Old Hadley both jumped up expectedly. “You eat your soup,” Meg said. “I’ll let them in.”

Meg opened the door and Stephen and her father and both pushed past into the dining room, the former carrying a plate of brownies covered with clingwrap, the latter bearing a bottle of champagne. Dad went directly to Grandma and gave her his customary kiss on the cheek. “Sorry to be so late, Lucinda. Nina came down with the flu at that last moment, and we got held up.”

“The flu?” Meg said. “But she was fine when I left this morning.”

Dad shrugged. “Came on out of the blue, honey. What can I say?”

Grandma, of course, looked like she could care less. Meg glanced at Old Hadley, but his eyes were on his soup. 

The next day, her mother handed her a stripped box with a big purple bow. 

It was the fringy black dress.

Meg smiled in spite of her hangover and gave her mother a good long hug. “Thanks Mom. It’ll be just the thing for the funeral.”

###

The pnuemocystis was back by the first of April, and Old Hadley was sent to bed with fevers, shakes, and bonebreaking coughs. In point of fact, he broke a rib from all the coughing. 

Like before, he missed the best of the blooming season, but this time Meg was prepared. She’d gone to the Dollar Store for cheap vases so as to save on ketchup and pickles. Everyone thought Grandma was crazy for tearing up her beautiful gardens again when Mr. Brix might easily have delivered all the flowers they needed. 

Grandma scoffed. “As if anyone else’s flowers are half as beautiful as these.”

It was true. There was something about Grandma’s gardens that, try as they might, no other green thumb in town could ever seem to match. Berries were juicier, roses more luminous. The wisteria crept and curled and cascaded as precisely as a symphony. And you’d never tasted pawpaws until you tasted the rich, custardy pawpaws that grew at Wiseria Walk. The air around Old Hadley’s flowers had a distinctive flavor that verged on sweet cream and almonds. And the smell!

People habitually stopped on the sidewalk, placed a hand over their heart, and closed their eyes. The mailman unwrapped his sandwich in front of the house every day and sat down with a smile on the curb to polish off his bologna. Even after Meg and her grandma cut down all the flowers last year, people still stopped on the sidewalk, and the mailman still opened his lunch on the curb. It was like the air around the house was so used to smelling like Lily of the Valley, it forgot to stop even after the tiny white bells were gone.

Unquestionably, Old Hadley must have his own flowers. The difference this time was that Meg couldn’t help but wonder what would happen to the community if Old Hadley never got back on his feet again. For instance, how would people ever know that Spring is Here if the wisteria went to ruin? To those that counted on such things, Old Hadley’s garden was the only clock of it’s kind. What would Beatie’s Bluff do if that tender clock were to break?

It was sad watching Old Hadley wither to bone, but Meg felt a tender feeling for the flower-arranging. So much about this awful disease left her feeling helpless. The flowers were something concrete they could do to make him feel better. And it worked.

“Smells like Lily of the Valley in here,” Old Hadley said when he woke up to his inside garden. There was coughing, sure, but there was Lily of the Valley, too.

It kept them busy, anyway. Meg would clear a space for a vase of tulips and spend several minutes turning it in different directions, adjusting the angle of each flower until it was in the most pleasing of positions when viewed from the bed. Grandma would come in and do the same with her pot or vase, then she would head straight to Meg’s perfectly centered tulips, pick them up, and move them to a stack of books or a dresser top and fiddle with the arrangement. “There now. It won’t do to have the red tulips clashing with the hyacinths.”

If she was honest enough to admit it, there were more than a few peevish moments when Meg felt resentful of how much time Grandma and Old Hadley took from her. Most of her friends were out dancing every night at Wingdings, and Meg made a point of doing this, too, when she wasn’t busy running in the Dollar Store for vases or picking up her grandma’s gardener for a doctor appointment. Even before Old Hadley started to slip again, it sometimes felt like they had become her whole world. On the day they brought the flowers inside, she could easily have made it home in time for a shower and grabbed a bite before meeting her friends at eight. She called to cancel though. Not because she had to, but rather because she wanted to sit with Grandma and Old Hadley and enjoy what they had created. 

“Sure is pretty,” someone would say, and they would all agree and marvel at the flowers in silence for a while.

The illness seemed worse this time around, or maybe it was just that they all knew how deadly it was. Grandma kept saying he’d recover the same as he did before, but Dr. Buckerfield always said goodbye when he left like he was saying goodbye forever and Meg often found herself checking for a heartbeat whenever he slept. Once the first batch of blooms were done, Meg was the one to arrange for deliveries. Grandma started slipping away with Old Hadley and the flowers, and the only way Meg could keep them all going was to pull out the dead roses and tulips and bring in fresh ones. It became necessary to stop in every day after work to make sure nothing was drooping.

“What do you make of all this business, Meg?” Old Hadley asked one day. 

“If you mean your illness, I’d have to say, I think it’s horribly unfair.”

Old Hadley was propped up against a big pile of bedpillows, and he looked horribly small. He had one finger in
The Hotel New Hampshire
to hold his spot. “How do you figure?’

“Most people are getting this from sleeping around. You got it in a hopsital from a medical procedure.”

Old Hadley rubbed his chin. “I see what you’re saying. All the fuss and none of the fun. I never have been good at doing things the right way,” he chuckled. “At least you’re here, I got that much going for me. And soon I’ll be seeing my mama. She’s going to hit me up with a whole lot of
I told you so’s,
and I’m just thankful God gave me a little time to prepare.”

Meg touched his cheek, pretending to check for fever. “I liked what you said in Dr. Simon’s office about making it walk. It was very brave of you to go to Birmingham.”

He shook his head. “I had a handful of reasons for going to Birmingham, and I don’t think being brave was one of them. I’m just doing what anyone would do in my shoes—looking for a way to win.” 

“A lot of people in your shoes would be too busy thinking about what they’re losing to realize there might be anything at all to win.”

“Maybe they need to take up pinocle,” he said.

 After that, Meg didn’t feel so peevish anymore. She told Brenda James to go on and finish off the bowling league. She told her friends to count her out at Wingdings. She raided the old toyroom at home for board games and carted them over to Old Hadley’s house. Grandma was quite taken with Hi Ho Cherry-O.

She also made up a schedule, of sorts, to help pass the evenings. Mondays were
Make Grandma Eat a Big Mac Night.
Tuesdays were
Change the Sheets & Take a Shower
Night.
Wednesday’s were
Stay Up Late and Watch Dynasty Night
. And every night was
Game Night
. When Old Hadley couldn’t manage
Drink Your Water Night
due to the painful sores in his throat, Meg considered taking him to the hospital.

He wanted to stay in his home, he said. The medicine wasn’t working so well this time, and there was nothing much they could do for him. “If I’m going to get better, I stand the best chance of it here in my own house. If I’m not, well, I’ll not get better here best in my own house, too. Either way, I don’t mean to miss out on
Dynasty
or losing to your grandmother at
Clue
.”

Old Hadley didn’t even like
Dynasty
, but he sure did enjoy ribbing Grandma about it. Sometimes the only spark he got all week long was the spark he got when he pretended they were going to watch
The Facts of Life
instead, and Grandma had to beg and plead and fluff his pillows until he’d agree to let them switch the channel.

Some days it seemed like these little tifs were the only thing to keep them going. Grandma was exhausted trying to help him. Patti Carol had left six months ago when she overheard Dr. Buckerfield mention GRID. They hired a nurse named Shaniqua Brown to come for eight hours during the day, and this helped. Shaniqua was a big bossy black gal, though, and Grandma didn’t care for her one little bit. 

“Got no use for bossy people,” Grandma said. 

This set Meg and Old Hadley to laughing until they both could hardly catch their breath. Still, it wasn’t like people were lining up for the job so Grandma was stuck with bossy Shaniqua.

###

Eventually, Old Hadley got too weak to even move Colonal Mustard around or put little plastic cherries on a tree. About the only thing he opened his eyes for was the news story Meg read him about a group in San Fransisco that had banded together to promote awareness of the disease. 

“I hope they kick its ass,” Old Hadley croaked in a voice so raspy, the words sounded more like coughs than speech. 

Buckerfield told Meg that he didn’t have long. Many a night, she’d stood over his bed with her hand pressed to his heart, whispering, “Please oh please oh please.” It was always such a relief to feel his heart still beating in there. Then, a funny thing happened one Saturday morning when she went to check on him. She peeked in the bedroom and discovered Old Hadley out of bed and wearing his old coveralls. 

Grandma was holding a pair of carpenter’s pants pinched between two fingers, sneering at a brown splotch across the seat. “And what about this one? Are you sure it’s paint?”

“What else would it be?” Old Hadley asked.

Grandma snorted. “You’re an old man. Lord knows.”

“Hello, Meg,” Old Hadley said when he saw her standing in the doorway. “Your grandma and I are going to paint my bedroom.”

Meg almost fell over. “You’ve been laying in bed for weeks.” 

Drop cloths had been spread over the furniture and floor. The containers of flowers formed an explosive garden off in one corner. “What’s your hurry all of a sudden?”

He shrugged his bony shoulders. “I’m tired of the color.”

Meg glanced at the bedroom walls. “They don’t have a color.”

“Precisely,” he said.

She didn’t know how he managed to stand when he couldn’t even managed to sit the day before. Still, his face looked more brown than gray at the moment, and he was stirring a can of paint with some of his former vigor. 

“Well, this is quite a change,” Meg said.

Grandma leaned on Meg and stepped into the carpenter’s pants with the brown stain. “He could have painted this room a thousand times over yet he waits until today.”

“Couldn’t do it until today,” he said. 

“Why the hell not, you doddering old fool?” Grandma said.

“Didn’t know what color to make it.”

Grandma gave Meg a pointed look and made the cuckoo sign. 

“What color did you pick, Old Hadley?” Meg asked, twisting to look over Grandma’s shoulder as the woman fought to work her highheel through the pants. 

“Magenta,” he said.

“That seems an odd color for a man,” Meg said.

“It is an odd color for a man,” he agreed. “Did you know that Newton didn’t even put magenta on his color wheel? He believed that only the spectral colors counted.” Old Hadley smiled and stirred his magenta paint. “Now Goethe, on the other hand, he argued that magenta was the natural result of mixing violet with red in the dark spectrum, just the same as mixing blue and yellow in the light spectrum will give you green. You see, I was reading
Theory of Colors
last night. Goethe thought magenta was an essential color.”

“Blah blah blah. What does that have to do with the price of tea in China?” Grandma asked.

Old Hadley quoted a poem for her: 

Should your glance on mornings lovely,

Lift to drink the heaven's blue

Or when sun, veiled by sirocco,

Royal red sinks out of view -

Give to Nature praise and honor.

Blithe of heart and sound of eye,

Knowing for the world of colour

Where its broad foundations lie.

 He stood up with a wince and a creak. “Goethe said that.” He picked out a paintbrush from a pile on the floor. “Would you like to help, Meg?”

The three of them stood before the first dingy wall, contemplating where to begin. “I knew a woman once who painted her walls the most God-awful shade of red,” Old Hadley said.

“And how is this different?” Grandma asked. 

“It isn’t. What you got to understand is that it’s about how the color makes you feel. That woman, she needed to make her walls red at the time.”

Meg couldn’t stop looking at them both. How could he be well enough to paint a wall? And Grandma! It would have been funny enough to see her in pants, but carpenter’s pants? 

“I always start with a message when I paint,” Old Hadley said. “Some little thing that will secretly live on underneath the color.”

“You do?” Grandma asked. “Do all my walls have secret messages hidden under their colors?”

“Every single one of them. Now what sort of message shall we put on this wall?”

“If no one knows it’s there, what good is it?” Grandma wondered.