Watermelon Days and Firefly Nights: Heartwarming Scenes from Small Town Life (22 page)

What good soup that was.

A
LFRED AND
T
INY WANTED TO WAIT
until he got out of school before they started having kids. To do so only made sense.

But Millard and Sugar weren’t in agreement on that issue. Sugar said that now that she was married, she aimed to start having kids. So what if she and Millard didn’t have much money? She wanted a baby!

It was “Visit the Shut-Ins” day with the ladies of the church when Tiny and Sugar dropped Sugar’s specimen off at the doctor’s office. “You can call in two hours, honey,” Sugar was told by the nurse. “We should have the results for you then.”

Who would have guessed that when the two hours were up, they would be in the middle of visiting old Mrs.
Crutchfield? Tiny kept looking at her watch. She
motioned to Sugar when it was time.

“Mrs. Crutchfield, may I please use your phone?” asked Sugar.

“Is it long distance?”

“No, ma’am.”

“All right. It’s in the kitchen.”

As they sipped their tea in the living room, Tiny and Mrs. Crutchfield heard Sugar scream. Then Sugar dropped the phone and rushed in to them. “Can you believe it? I’m going to have a baby!”

But soon after she received the joyful news, Sugar began fretting over where her baby would sleep when it was born. She didn’t have a crib or cradle, and she and Millard had no money to buy one. It was December, and Christmas carols were playing on all the radio stations. “Poor baby. Just like the little Lord Jesus. No crib for a bed. Not even a manger.”

Then Tiny had an idea. She took one of the drawers from her and Alfred’s dresser and fixed it up into a pretty place for Sugar’s baby to sleep. She cut up one of her ruffled dresses to make a sweet little pillow, used stuffing from one of the throw pillows off of her couch to make a mattress, and pieced together a coverlet. By the time she got through fixing up that dresser drawer, she and Sugar agreed that except for the hardware (which they both thought best not to remove since the drawer would go back in the dresser once the baby got too big) it was almost as pretty as a store-bought bassinet.

Tiny was always doing something sweet.

She was also always eating too many sweets. Which, combined with her family’s medical history, was not a good thing. In her early forties, Tiny’s diabetes, which she’d had since her late twenties, got worse. In her late forties, her kidneys began to show wear. By her fiftieth birthday, she was told she’d likely be on dialysis within the year.

“How many hours a day?” asked Sugar.

“Four.”

“Once a week?”

“Three,” said Tiny.

“That’s awful. There’s no other option?” said Sugar.

“Nope. Down the line, a kidney transplant, maybe—but the docs won’t even talk about that until both these kidneys of mine completely tucker out.”

Which they did by the end of that year. So Tiny was put on dialysis. Her skin took on a grayish hue, she lost her energy, and though she tried to fake it, anyone who knew her was aware that she felt awful almost all of the time. The dialysis
would keep her alive, but it was a poor, poor substitute for a functioning kidney.

Talk of a transplant commenced. There were two kinds of kidneys one could get—one from a cadaver and one from a living donor. A kidney from a living donor would be best.

Alfred hated seeing his wife so sick. At an early visit with Tiny’s doctor, he told the man that he was ready to give Tiny a kidney. They could take it from him tomorrow. What exactly did they need him to do? Sign some papers, get some tests done? Alfred rolled up his sleeve. They could start right now.

But there was more to it than that. After the results of some tests came back, Alfred was told that his kidney would not work. Incompatible? He and Tiny? He was devastated. What now?

Since Tiny had no living relative healthy enough to qualify for even preliminary donor testing, she was put on a list to receive a cadaver kidney—one from a healthy person who had died.

How long would she have to wait?

No way to know.

Months? Years?

Could be.

Six months into the dialysis, Sugar was bent over Tiny’s feet, painting her toenails a pretty pink. She did it every week. Out of the blue, she asked, “What about me? You think mine would work?”

“Your what?” Tiny had been daydreaming about Chinese food, which, because of its high salt content, she could not have.

“My kidney. You think my kidney would work for you?”

Tiny didn’t speak for a long time. The polish on her toes was dry before she finally said, “You want to see?”

“Yes, I do. Millard and I’ve been talking about it for the past three months. Me? I’ve been thinking about it since the day you found out that you and Alfred weren’t a match.”

“It’s a big, big deal to give a kidney,” said Tiny.

“I know. I’ve been reading up on it.”

“So you really want to see.”

“I do.”

“It’s going to hurt.”

“So? My mama always told me you can’t make an omelet without breaking eggs.”

“You’re a big baby when it comes to pain.”

“I hear they give you drugs.”

“They’re going to be taking a part of your own body away.”

“Not a very big part.”

Tiny gave her a look.

“Compared to the size of the rest of me, no more than a pinch is the way I’m looking at it. A pinch of Sugar. That, my friend, is what I think you need. It’s what I want to give you. Okay? Now, give me your hand. You want the same color as what I’ve put on your toes?”

P
RELIMINARY TESTS SHOWED
that Sugar looked like a good match. A really good match. Before they would know for sure, doctors did more extensive testing, blood work, X-rays, even a long psychological exam.

“Took me an hour and a half to do the written part, and then I had to talk to the head shrinker for another hour,” Sugar reported to Tiny after she’d taken the test. “Took ’em that long to figure out that I’m sane—at least sane as anyone can be who is planning on giving away a vital organ! Wonder which one they’ll take, my right or my left?”

Three months later, their husbands drove them to the hospital. Despite Tiny and Sugar’s protests, they were assigned separate rooms on different floors. “Yes,” they were both informed after they’d sipped clear liquid dinners, “you may walk up and down the halls, but not on any of the other hospital floors.”

Which is why they, sitting in wheelchairs, dressed in their hospital nightgowns and matching old-lady house slippers that Millard had bought for them, ended up riding up and down in one of the elevators for an hour and a half that night. “You ready for tomorrow?” asked Sugar between floors.

“I’m a little scared. How about you?” said Tiny.

“The same.”

“In case something happens . . . you know . . . tomorrow,” said Tiny, “I want you to understand that I don’t know what I would have done without you all of these years. Even before any of this kidney stuff came up, well, you were the best kind of friend that a person could ever hope to have.”

“What?” Sugar pretended shock. “You mean I didn’t have to give you my kidney for you to consider me a good friend? Shoot! I suppose that now it’s too late to back out.”

Just then, the elevator stopped and the doors opened up to the hospital lobby. A toothless old man in a blue bathrobe got on. He was eating Twinkies from the vending machine. “Excuse me,” the man said to Sugar, holding his wrist near to her face, “but can you read what this bracelet says that they put on my arm? I left my glasses at home, and for the life of me I can’t tell what it says.”

“Sure,” Sugar said. “Turn your wrist over so I can see. Hmm. N–P–O.”

“What’s that mean?” He brushed a crumb from his mouth.

Sugar looked at Tiny. She was trying not to bust with laughter. “Sir,” said Sugar, “I think it means that you best not let the nurses see you eating those Twinkies.”

“Oh! I remember now. When that little nurse put this thing on me, she told me I couldn’t have anything else to eat or drink!”

“Don’t worry,” said Tiny, “we won’t tell.”

“Your secret is safe with us,” agreed Sugar.

When, back in their rooms, they were chastised by harried nurses who had been searching for them, Tiny and Sugar both feigned ignorance. “You mean I wasn’t supposed to leave this floor? I’m sorry, I misunderstood. I thought you only said that I wasn’t to go to any other floor. I didn’t. Promise. I never left the elevator. Not even once.”

Right. Like nurses were born yesterday or something. Not to worry, the score came out even. A little while later, Sugar and Tiny’s compassionate caregivers smilingly administered just revenge in the form of physician-prescribed laxatives designed to preoperatively clean out the most clogged of digestive tracts.

Just before drifting off into drug-induced dreamlands, Sugar and Tiny spoke via their hospital phones.

“See you tomorrow,” whispered Tiny.

“I doubt it,” said Sugar.

“I know. But maybe the day after.”

“Yeah. Probably so.”

Neither one wanted to hang up, but neither one could think of anything to say.

“Sweet dreams,” said Tiny.

“You too. Good night,” Sugar yawned.

“Good night.”

I
T’S BEEN A YEAR NOW SINCE
Tiny’s successful transplant. For her, the operation wasn’t so bad. She’d been so sick on dialysis that with a functioning kidney, she felt better than she had in a very long time.

Sugar’s recovery was slower. Tiny was awake from surgery before her, out of bed before her, and traipsing up and down the halls before her. An unexpected infection forced Sugar, after she’d been home a week, to go back to the hospital and spend a couple of days hooked up to IVs. Even though the infection cleared up and she was back on her feet within a few weeks, she didn’t get her energy back until a good six months after the surgery. During those months, Millard worried over her and daughter Shonda cooked and cleaned for her.

Tiny called her every day.

Eight months after the surgery, on the night of her birthday, Millard and Sugar lay in the dark, holding hands. “It scared me when I saw you right after the operation—all those tubes and things and them trying to get you to wake up. I was worried that you might die. Then when you got that infection . . . Sugar, I’m not ashamed to say that at the time, I was wishing with all my heart that you hadn’t done this thing.”