That devastated me. First, I’m not a fucking idiot. I have a developmental disorder, but I’m not stupid. Second, it upset my mother terribly. It’s the first and only time I ever saw her really stand up to my father. She told him that he was a cruel and awful man and that he should apologize to me. He never did, at least not while he was alive. Four days later he bought the house where I now live, and I was made to leave my parents’ home and begin seeing Dr. Buckley. I was thirty-one years old, so maybe it was time. I think my parents wanted to keep me close to protect me; that’s what Dr. Buckley said when she diagnosed me. But as my condition worsened, my father came to resent me (and I came to dislike him). I was certainly happier on Clark Avenue than I was in my parents’ house, but it was hard to forget what my father said to me in those last days at his house. The truth is, I’ve never forgotten it. From time to time, my mother tried to explain my father’s behavior when he was mean to me, telling me that he was struggling at his job on the county commission and that he was under a lot of stress. I think she gave him too much credit, and to be fair, my mother would agree with that. After my father died, and after she saw the way he controlled me through Jay L. Lamb, she made a break with him. She scarcely talks about him anymore.
I don’t like remembering that story about my father, and I don’t like telling it. I’ve never told anyone except Dr. Buckley, not even Donna Middleton (now Hays). I think I would like to tell Sheila Renfro, however, and this surprises me.
I will have to think about it a while before committing to telling her. Instead, I say something else, because it occurs to me that as Sheila Renfro describes her parents to me, she’s telling me about people I never got a chance to know even though I met both of them in the summer of 1978. That’s odd. It’s like they’re more than an anecdote and less than a robust memory.
“I wish I’d gotten to know your parents,” I say. “I’m sorry they’re in the ground.”
“You’d have liked them,” Sheila Renfro says. “And I think they’d have liked you.”
I’m trying to formulate my next question when I actually hear the words coming out of my mouth.
“How did you find out when your parents died?” I can’t believe I just asked it like that. I was too abrupt, but Sheila Renfro doesn’t seem to mind.
“It happened in the middle of a hot summer day, seven miles from home,” she says. “The sheriff and a deputy got there fast, and one of them came to the motel to get me. I was making dinner for us. Grilled chicken. It was too hot to cook inside, so I was on the patio. He said, ‘Sheila, you’ve got to put that chicken away and come.’ By the time we got there, it was over with. Daddy and Mom were in bags on the side of the road. The guy who hit them was, too. I guess he had a heart attack and lost control of his pickup. He hit their pickup on my daddy’s side at seventy miles per hour. Sheriff said there were no skid marks.”
Sheila tells me all of this matter-of-factly. I am mesmerized.
“How did you find out about your daddy?” she asks me.
“My mother called and woke me up and told me to come to St. Vincent Healthcare right away. He died after I got there.”
“What happened?”
“He had a heart attack in the parking lot of his favorite golf course.”
“I’m sorry.”
I haven’t thought about the actual day that my father died in a long time. It’s been three years, one month, and eighteen days, and most of my effort where my father is concerned has been focused on making peace with every day other than the one on which he died.
“After the doctor told us he’d died, we got to go into the hospital room and see him. It was weird. It was clearly his face, but his hair was mussed, and the qualities that made him who he was—things like his loud voice and his mannerisms—were gone. The only thing that I really thought was odd was how peaceful he looked. He looked much more peaceful than he did the last time I saw him alive.”
“They wouldn’t let me see my daddy,” Sheila Renfro says. “They said it was really bad and that it wouldn’t be something I’d want to see. My mom didn’t have a scratch on her, though—she died because of how shook up her insides were in the wreck. They let me see her. It looked like she was sleeping.”
“What was your mother like?”
“She was a good person. My daddy was my best friend; he had the mind of a child, and so I related to him. My mom didn’t make a lot of time for fun. She was too busy trying to keep things going. I think I’m more like she was.”
It’s interesting to me that Sheila Renfro has thought all of this out. I’ve never considered whether I’m more like my father or my mother. I don’t think I’m like either one of them. That’s been the problem.
When we leave the interstate at Limon, I ask Sheila Renfro if we can turn around and go find the place where I ran into the snowplow. I would like to see it, now that the sun is out and it’s not snowing. Also, it will give me a chance to correct this mileage discrepancy.
“The gauge says 268,443.4,” she says as we merge onto Interstate 70 westbound.
I try to reconcile what I’m seeing now with what it looked like two days ago, when Kyle and I were driving through a blinding snowstorm in the middle of the night. It’s impossible to do.
“Here it is,” Sheila Renfro says, and she slows down so she can pull over on the shoulder of the interstate.
Broken pieces of my turn signal are on the side of the asphalt. I see them now, and I guess that’s how Sheila Renfro knew to stop here. You’re not supposed to stop here, but she doesn’t seem concerned. It’s her business if she wants to risk a traffic ticket.
“What does the mileage say?” I ask.
“Let’s see… it’s 268,449.2.”
“So that’s 5.8 miles from Limon.”
“Looks like it.”
I do the calculations in my head. “So that means I’ve driven 1,844.9 miles on this trip, not 1,846.1.”
“If you say so.”
“That’s clearly what the math indicates.”
“What difference does it make?”
This flummoxes me. “I don’t know. I like to track things.”
“Are you going to include the miles we’ve gone today in your total?”
“That’s a silly question, Sheila Renfro,” I say. “Of course I am.”
“Do you know how far we’ve gone today?”
“No, but I can look up the distance from St. Joseph Hospital to Cheyenne Wells, and I can account for this detour.”
“Can you account for the different route I took through Denver?”
I don’t like where this conversation is headed.
“You took a different route?”
“Yes. There was road construction and bad traffic, so I went a different way.”
“Which way did you go?” This situation, while not ideal, is not irretrievable (I love the word “irretrievable”). I can still use the Internet to figure out the mileage.
“I don’t remember.”
This situation has become irretrievable.
“Shit,” I say.
“It’s no big deal, Edward. Also, don’t cuss around me.”