Full of Grace (11 page)

I listened carefully as the caseworker spoke, and the obvious choice was clear to me. Nonna’s fear and resistance would have to be dealt with or she and my mother would surely drop dead in short order.

“Mom, taking Nonna home would mean that she becomes the epicenter of your life, twenty-four/seven, and it will ruin your life. Even with the best help coming and going, your house will completely revolve around Nonna. Even more than it does now. Doing it without help would roughly be the equivalent of giving her a Kathy Smith
Walk Fit
video and telling her to have at it because she’s not gonna listen to you! So forget it. Forget taking her home. You just can’t do that. No way. She’s gotta go to rehab!”

Poor Mom. The first of many dreaded moments to come was on her
plate. In some ways it would be easier to deal with Nonna’s death or, God forbid, an amputation than this decision.

“I don’t know,” she said. “I just don’t know.”

“Look, let’s talk to Zia Theresa and Dad. Dad can talk sense to Nonna, right?”

“I don’t know,” she said. “I just hate this.”

“Look, Ma, kids don’t want to get shots, but if they don’t they could die, right? So you drag them to the doctor and hold them down while they get their shots. I mean, what are you gonna do? It’s your responsibility to see that they don’t get polio and all that stuff. The same deal goes for Nonna, Mom. She may not like it, but this is what’s best for her.”

“Your daughter’s right, Mrs. Russo,” the caseworker said.

“Absolutely! I mean, for your mother to have her best chance at maximum mobility and independence, she really needs to be in a rehab facility,” the physical therapist said.

Mom burst into tears. It was too much for her. I put my arm around her shoulder and said, “Come on now, Mom. Let’s take this one to Big Al. Nonna thinks he’s God, right? He thinks he’s God, right? So let’s let God tell her what she’s gonna do.”

“You know, Mrs. Russo,” the caseworker said, “one thing to consider is that she’ll have the support of a whole community of other people going through various kinds of rehabilitation. The company might do her a whole lot of good. And she’ll always have her medication on time, a good bath every day, all her meals served to her, and a whole team of people to encourage her and monitor her progress. That would surely be a lot off your shoulders.”

“Ten anvils,” I said.

“Maybe eleven,” Mom said, and finally smiled.

They gave us some brochures and a video of the facility and now there was nothing to do but wait for Dad’s opinion and hopefully his help. It didn’t look like I was going back to Charleston in time for dinner.

I called Michael. His cell phone rang and rang and finally voice mail kicked in. I left a message, knowing he would completely understand, and as the evening wore on and jet lag got the better of me, my old bedroom started looking pretty good.

By the time Dad got home, Mom had her facts organized to have the big chat with him, and I agreed to help her make the case.

“How’s my princess? Come give your old man a kiss!”

I kissed and hugged him, hanging on for a few minutes.

“Wassamadder, baby doll?” he said, his heart the size of Yankee Stadium.

“No joy in Mudville, Daddy. We spent most of the day with Nonna.”

“How’s she doing, huh? No good?”

“Oh, Daddy. Come on, let’s eat. We made lasagna. Where’s Nicky?”

“With Marianne. He’ll be home later. How’s my wife? Over here!” he said, giving Mom a little whack on her butt and opening the oven to take in the irresistible smells of tomatoes, garlic and onions cooking with beef, sausage and cheese. “Smells like a little bit a heaven, right?”

“Oh, Al, we have to talk.”

Over dinner and two bottles of homemade red wine from a friend of Dad’s in New Jersey, Dad listened. We could see his mood change as he stared at the ceiling after we had recounted all that we had learned.

“
Ah, fongule!
Get Tony and Theresa on the phone, Connie, and you go get on the extension to listen in case I forget to tell them something.”

I could feel my eyes begging to slam shut for the night and it was barely eight-thirty. I listened as my dad told my mother’s sister and her husband all the grand and gory details.

“It’s like this,” I heard him say before I nodded off on the sofa. “If she doesn’t go to this rehab place and stay there, she ain’t never gonna get over this like she should. She won’t walk as good and she’ll have a lot of pain for the rest of her life. Yeah, yeah. I know. It’s a sin. But what are we gonna do? No, next Monday. They want to transfer her next Monday. Sure. No, you don’t have to come. I’ll let you know.”

Dad hung up and sank into his chair that Nonna always sat in and I could hear him sigh again and again. Mom came in from their bedroom and sat on the couch next to me, taking my feet into her lap.

“I feel terrible about this,” Mom said.

“We all feel bad,” Dad said. “You always will. But we all feel bad.”

I didn’t say anything then because there’d been no hateful or
mean tone in Dad’s voice as he said
You always will, you always will
reinforcing Mom’s guilt. And suddenly I remembered a curious thing my mother had said earlier. What had she meant when she said that Dad had been
good to marry her
? That she was no prize? I was too sleepy to open that up to discussion and didn’t want to provoke my father. It wasn’t worth it then. Maybe I would ask her later.

I
returned to Charleston the next morning, thinking throughout the drive that Big Al had his work cut out for him. I felt sorry for them all. I recognized that part of being the family’s patriarch was attending to unpleasant business, such as putting your mother-in-law in a place she thought was the worst insult she’d suffered in her entire life. Nonna was too old and too set in her ways to ever understand why professional rehabilitation was in her own best interest or even how it worked. And even though my father, whom she adored, would be the one to explain why she must go, she would take it out on my mother. Big Al had to be dreading the conversation with Nonna; Mom had to be dreading the inevitable backlash, and Nonna was probably mustering what strength she had to fight back.

It must be a terrible thing to be strong all your life and then in the flip of one second everything changes. Nonna was very old, there was no doubt of that, but she had enjoyed her independence and got around well, despite her arthritis. One wet floor, one careless step, and the entire world as she knew it was gone forever.

I had read somewhere that most people incur eighty percent of their lifetime’s medical bills in the last eighteen months of their life. I wondered if Nonna was in the last eighteen months of her life. If she was, that meant plenty of things were about to change for the whole family, my mother especially. In many ways, Nonna was the anchor of my par
ents’ marriage. A rusty anchor, a crabby anchor—but the anchor. What would they do with themselves when Nonna was gone and Nicky was married—most likely to Marianne—and gone from home, too? Would they fight like cats and dogs? Would they go on a cruise? Would my father take a mistress? Would my mother finally throw out all the wedding favors Nonna had saved—the faded almonds wrapped in net and secured with little silk bows and tiny silk flowers that were too pretty to eat? The Christmas cards with family pictures that went unframed but that fanned out from a contraption that looked like a wire peacock, each feather clip holding a curled and drooping photograph. Would she put away all of Nonna’s crocheted creations?

And most bizarre, would Mom inherit Nonna’s curse or gift of seeing and talking to the dead? If she did, would Nonna still be able to badger my mother anytime she chose? If that happened, I think Mom might consider plucking out her eyes like Saint Lucy did so that she couldn’t see the Roman soldier who wanted to rape her and who, as a result of Lucy’s self-gouging, found her less attractive and may or may not have taken a pass on the rape. I certainly didn’t want to think about Nonna picking on my mom for all of eternity, but the probability of Nonna’s death was real. Not imminent, but real.

It was early in the day, so I decided to go to the office for a while. Things were pretty quiet as it was the end of the week. In the summer, Fridays were days to clean up your desk, surf the Internet looking for interesting new restaurants, spas and shopping in your upcoming destinations, and to return long-unanswered phone calls and e-mail. There was plenty waiting for me.

The group I was taking to Napa Valley was made up of hospitality-industry people. Under twenty people was a manageable group and foodies were right up my alley. True, I wasn’t going to have dinner at the Hermitage like Bomze, but I wasn’t complaining. As it turned out, the group shrank, and that was a plus from my point of view. Not to Bomze and not to the hotel, but I was still getting over Sardinia, so I was perfectly fine with fewer clients for once.

I loved Northern California and often thought it would be a great
place to retire to. It was astoundingly beautiful and the people were shockingly nice. I remembered my first trip to San Francisco and then to the wine country. I had thought that all that perfect landscape and gorgeous weather sort of naturally put people on their best Prozac behavior. And maybe it contributed something to the general attitude there.

The longer I was away from New York, the more I realized how competitive I had been in that life and that acquiring things and more things was not the only measure of success. Not that money was bad, of course. Obviously—obvious to me
now,
that is—getting bundles of it shouldn’t be the single fixation of your life. The price of wild ambition was that you missed too many other worthwhile things. But with each return visit to Napa and Sonoma, I felt my pulse slow down and I breathed differently, more deeply. Moving to Charleston had had a similar effect. And New York had given me a lot of ammunition for living because it taught me how to be a warrior and how to take care of myself. In Napa first and then in Charleston, I had learned that I didn’t have to do everything gung ho and at warp speed.

We were booked in at the Meadowood, which was right in the countryside surrounding the outskirts of St. Helena. My only regret was that Michael wasn’t with me, but this wasn’t my vacation, it was a business trip. He loved the area, too, and we had said many times that we would go there together. I made a mental note to plan a long weekend for us.

Meadowood had a fabulous spa, and working with their concierge, I had put together a package for the Monday-through-Thursday excursion that included dinners at all the phenomenal restaurants and wineries we could squash into four days. We were skipping the usual hot-air-balloon rides and concentrating instead on lesser known but highly thought of winemakers like Colgin and Turley. Thus far the folks from Turley could not have been less interested in meeting us, even if we had been traveling with the wine guru Robert Parker himself. But when Ann Colgin realized we were southern, her doors swung wide open.

“I’m originally from Texas, you know,” she said.

Well, Texas and South Carolina are different planets, but I wasn’t
about to make that point. I imagined that when you were as far away from the South as Napa Valley, the southern borders could be blurred by nostalgia.

“It will be like old home week!” I said, and made a note to bring Ann a pound cake from that bakery over on Shem Creek. Yes, I would do that.

So I had that trip just about in hand when I decided to call it a day. I phoned Michael on my cell while walking back to my car. He answered right away.

“Hey, baby! Dinner?”

“Let’s go east of the Cooper,” I said. “I feel like zooming across the new bridge.”

“Why not? We haven’t done that in ages. We can stop for a drink on Shem Creek.”

“Perfecto! Ciao!”

“I love it when you go to Italy—I get the benefit of a little Berlitz here and there.”

“O, ma non rompere!”

“Which means?”

“It means you are my love machine, baby boy.”

It meant nothing of the sort.

By six o’clock we were flying over the new Daniel Ravenel Bridge, heading to cocktails and dinner. The sky seemed within reach, bulbous white clouds drifted through the impossible blue of the Carolina sky, and I had never felt better in my life. Dozens of tiny sailboats circled below us in contrast with the enormity of the
Yorktown,
the famous retired aircraft carrier that had a permanent home at Patriots Point, just to our right. Even the most hardened cynic would have had to agree that the world at that moment was a beautiful place.

“Want to go to Zinc?” Michael said.

“I love Zinc, but I was thinking Jackson’s Hole,” I said.

“Yeah, it’s a little more casual and we’re not so dressed up.”

We pulled into the gravel and oystershell road that ran along Shem Creek and the restaurants that populated its shores. The shrimp boats were tied up along the docks and scores of gulls swirled and swooped,
calling out for supper. We got out of the car and climbed to the top of the restaurant and its wildly popular sunset bar.

It was early and there were only a few people there, having a beer or a cocktail, engaging in Thank-God-it’s-Friday conversations. I took a seat at the bar a few stools from where the bartender was listening intently to the gal seated in front of him. He excused himself from her and turned his attention to us.

“What can I get you folks?”

Michael looked at me for a clue.

“White wine?” I said. “And maybe some crab dip?”

“Sure thing,” the bartender said. “And you?”

“Same,” Michael said.

The bartender attempted to put in the order for the crab dip on the computer, but for whatever reason, it wasn’t cooperating.

“I’m just gonna run this downstairs,” he said, then turned to the woman he had been listening to. “Linda, will you watch the bar?”

“Yeah, sure,” Linda said. “I’ll make sure these two don’t run off with the paper napkins.”

“Yeah, we look like a flight risk, right?” I said.

“Nope. Hey,” she said, “I’m Linda Jackson.”

We introduced ourselves, shook hands, and she nearly crushed our knuckles.

“Oh, sorry!” she said. “I always forget to shake hands like a lady! Are you okay?”

“Sure, no problem, but that’s some grip you’ve got there.”

“Yeah, got it from throwing bundles of newspapers, sorry.”

We learned that she was married to the bartender and that they owned the place. Most important, I found out she was from New Jersey.

“I knew you weren’t from around here,” I said. “I’m from Bloomfield!”

“No way!” Her eyes grew large like saucers. “How do you like that?”

“How’d you wind up here?” Michael said, sipping his wine.

“It’s a long boring story, but basically I got sick of the weather and my job and I missed my sister who lived here, so I just took the jump. My
sister owns the bakery downstairs—she makes banging pound cake, like my daughter says.”

“That’s your sister? Every pound of fat on my body came from her oven! She’s an amazing baker!”

“Yeah, thanks. I’ll tell her you said so. She even made our wedding cake.” Linda reached into the cooler, pulled out a bottle of wine and refilled our glasses. “It’s on me. So how did you guys wind up here?”

“Um, well, Michael’s from here, but I moved here to work—I’m in the travel business and…”

Brad, the bartender, returned with the crab dip and the conversation continued until the sun finally began its descent. By then the bar had filled with patrons for drinks or dinner or both. Michael seemed especially quiet, but there was a lot of noise and I thought maybe he was just having some trouble hearing. There was no question that the chat between the Jersey girls was at a more fevered pitch than he was used to. Linda and I promised to stay in touch and I even offered to plan a honeymoon for her and Brad if they ever took the time for one.

I decided to drive to Sullivans Island and Michael’s mood seemed to improve a little as he changed radio stations looking for one not playing obnoxious ads, until he found Alison and Leo on
102.5
, the oldies station, and began to sing “Under the Boardwalk” so off-key that we were soon both snorting with laughter. Everyone in the South knew all the words—even children.

We got a spot across the street from Station Twenty-two Restaurant and parked. Parking spots on Sullivans Island were highly coveted and, like the locals say, about as scarce as hen’s teeth. Michael took my hand as we walked through the sandy lot, which was filled with potholes, and after a few stumbles, I finally took his arm to avoid certain neck fracture. It was dark and starry, music and laughter spilled out from Poe’s Tavern, and we debated eating there or at Station Twenty-two.

“I’m feeling like Aunt Mattie’s crab cakes,” he said, indicating a preference for Station Twenty-two.

“I could go for fried flounder,” I said, agreeing with his choice.

“You have that every single solitary time we come here! Why don’t you live a little and get the fried oysters?”

“Nope. Fried flounder. That’s it. Fried flounder and hush puppies. And fries.” Michael stopped in the middle of Middle Street and stared at me. “Well, at least I know what I want,” I said, and squeezed his arm.

We waited at the crowded bar, enjoying a glass of Matanzas Creek Sauvignon Blanc. I was busy people-watching and chatting away with some tourists on the various merits of a home on the developed end of Isle of Palms versus the natural splendor of Sullivans Island. I heard the rustle of barstools and someone said, “Hey! Watch it!” In my peripheral vision I saw Michael falling. Before I knew what was happening, Michael was on the floor, writhing in a seizure. Someone turned him on his back and called out for Marshall Stith, the owner. Anthony, Marshall’s brother and the chief of the fire department who was experienced in first aid, came rushing through the crowd and knelt down by Michael, who was twitching and jerking. I thought my heart was going to leap from my throat and that I was going to drown in a faint so deep I would never wake up. Neither of those things happened. What did happen was that I glimpsed the possibility of what I dreaded most—losing Michael.

“Please stand back,” Anthony said.

In a matter of minutes it was over and he turned Michael over on his side. I knelt down beside him and smoothed his hair back from his face.

“It’s all right, sweetheart,” I said, not knowing what else to say.

“Are you his wife?” Anthony said.

“No, but we are very close,” I said, unsure how to describe our relationship.

“Do you know if this was his first seizure, or has he had them before?”

“I can speak,” Michael said, and struggled to a sitting position. “I am a doctor. I’m fine.”

“Well,” Anthony said, “you may think you’re fine. But you’re not fine. I called EMS and they’re gonna take you over to the ER in Mount Pleasant just to get you checked out.”

“I think you can cancel—”

Before Michael could finish the sentence I spoke up. “We’re going to the emergency room, Michael. Something’s not right and we both know it.”

They wouldn’t let me ride with him in the ambulance, so I followed
behind in my car. The ride to the hospital took minutes, but in those few minutes everything in the world ran through my mind. I was consumed by a nauseating fear I had never known. Then, a moment later, I was terrified beyond my wildest imaginings, and then, unable to comprehend and accept that this might be act one of an unfolding tragedy, I told myself that everything would be fine. It had to be. I didn’t know how else to console myself.