Cookie Murphy Milbach in the Cadillac, surging into barn country, somehow moving backwards. Strains of that one Novena still rippling around her brain. Seeping like cave water, old pools of it trapped in the hollows behind her eyes. The echo of it unstoppable, even when she pushes up the volume button on the dashboard, even when the cell phone jangles and Ernest asks if she’s eating eggs these days.
“Okay on the eggs,” she says. “This is a christening, isn’t it?”
“Kind of, Mom. You take your Lipitor today?”
Cookie gives a guilty look at the last crumbs of frosted cinnamon bun dotting the mahogany burl of the console. Fuel for the long drive.
“Your Dad took me off that stuff. I was getting these sharp pains in my arms and legs. He could have told me. I’m not just another one of his patients…”
Ernest’s voice turns sweet and low. He’s so soothing Cookie almost crashes into a Silverado heaped with hay, and thanks heaven she’s in a real doctor’s car, STS with a hood that’s long and strong. Leo Milbach’s slightly less regal Caddy, the spouse car. Queenly not kingly. It’s his twenty eighth since “grand opening day,” his very first surgical invasion of someone’s chest. He buys these cars like socks, two at a time, and trades them still smelling new.
“Limb pain is a Lipitor side effect experienced by a tiny fraction of patients,” Ernest says. “Dad probably didn’t want to worry you. Bet he’ll come up with something even better.”
She listens and goes uh-huh, uh-huh, but still wishes Leo had got off his high horse and told her. Almighty Leo. His stated three-word mission, I save lives. Once described otherwise by Sylvia, the OR nurse, in between licking the glass lip of her third Manhattan. “Sanctioned murder, what else is it? All the skin and ribs know is a knife is plunging in.”
At the time, a thought crossed Cookie’s mind: Here is a woman who could chill that Manhattan with her lips.
The Silverado swerve slams the seat belt tight to Cookie’s belly. Reminds her what a belly it is. Every now and then Cookie sees herself as a whale among barracudas. Blubber for the Milbachs to feed on. Or, as Cookie, the Irish non-drinker, confidentially asked Sylvia, after ordering a wine-spritzer and wishing it were a bowl of fudge ripple:
“Sylvia, they all drink so much and stay so skinny. It’s a Milbach gene, I swear it, they’re all that way. Leo’s always looked like a wire. When we flew to Paris he had eleven scotches and skipped off the plane. If I drank like that I’d outweigh the plane.”
They were in Le Club Cheroot then, and even in the lounge shadows, Cookie watched Sylvia’s eyes turn feline, in a way that made her feel like a mouse that had better run from the claws.
“On the plane to Paris, yes,” Sylvia replied. “But before surgery, nothing doing. His rule is zero alcohol thirty six hours prior. Ironclad.”
It was in the days when every lounge in the Thunderhead Valley was a smoke-filled lounge, and Cookie remembers how she gasped and wished for a window to throw open. How come Sylvia knew the rule? How come she, the spouse with the Leo-approved Caddy, didn’t know the rule?
Shithead in the Silverado. She stares daggers at him in her rearview mirror. Some farmers should stick to driving tractors.
*****
Cookie nearing the truckstop, the halfway point, her mind-tendrils swimming evermore in reverse as the Caddy thrusts ahead. Foot slips over to the brake, automatically. Up ahead the diner floats like a lone silver boat on a fat green lake of pasture. Ernest on the far shore of it, she can picture him gathering eggs.
A bump in the asphalt coiling up to the diner jars her inner gears yet again, shifts them. In her temples Cookie feels the hardness grind, engage. She looks at herself in the rearview mirror, but finds her mind’s eye zooming across the years and down gleaming tiled corridors, squinting into the medicinal glare, the smarting mists of disinfectant. Summoned at Leo’s orders, mother and son have duly arrived at the OR observation suite. Time for Ernest the anointed to enter the holy realm and glimpse the ordained calling, his Hippocratic destiny. “Milbachs may start out as Cub Scouts,” the father had proclaimed, over last night’s brutally delayed family dinner, “but we grow up to be doctors.”
Installed in their box seats at the Leo show, Cookie wasn’t even touching Ernest’s hand. But seconds into the operation she knew his fingers had turned as cold as his face. Forehead to chin, it was missing all blood and color, every pore frozen in sympathy with the slashed patient on the table below. Ernest stood gamely at the glass, knowing he’d been summoned to a performance, determined to be awed. But the sound of the sternum being cracked and yanked open like a butcher-shop carcass threw him back into his seat. He watched the rest as best he could, through a nauseous haze, and Cookie forced him to keep his eyes open for the pinnacle act, Sylvia stemming the gore pooling around the lung while Leo butchered away an alien mass the size of a monkey head.
Hours later – down in the hospital coffee shop – she was still trying to get a spoonful of tea into Ernest when Leo strode in, brisk as Napoleon entering his command tent. “That young man wasn’t much older than you, son,” he said. “Got short of breath just running out of the huddle. Now he’ll be back breaking the rushing record. You’ll see.”
By late in the day Ernest was better and Cookie went ahead with her plan for a celebratory dinner. And once again, Leo wobbled in late beyond reason – the usual “making rounds at the hospital” business - causing the demise of Cookie’s prize huckleberry cobbler.
As she shoveled out the globs of expired and graying crust, she mentally wrote her own ending to his little speech of the previous night - “We also grow up to be mean drunks” – but she spoke not a word of it, just stood there with the spatula and watched him blow his scotch-breath on the untouched dessert plate.
*****
Cookie shutting the Caddy door behind her, deciding to keep her sunglasses on. The early beams bleach the weedy gravel and bejewel the silvery diner, bouncing colors off the windows that strike her as churchlike, deep and shimmering as purple wine in crystal goblets. Stained glass arching skyward is where her mind’s at: re-entering the thrall of the long-ago cathedral morning, her shriveled mother on her arm, nodding to nuns, officiants, the Bishop himself. In three days, Ernest the college senior will go up for the Test of Tests, his med school entrance exam.
Cookie lets the cool of the diner soak in. She tends to her makeup, squeezes in and out of the unisex john and vows to have coffee only. She slides into a torn faux leather booth, accepts a glass of water and stares so hard at the opposite booth it’s as though someone else is there. Her lips move mutely, repeating the words she said to her old friend, Father Kroll, when she was telling him she thought she still had faith, yes, but not necessarily in religion. “The Novena was my mother’s idea. She prayed so long and so hard her bones ached, every ounce of her begging the Lord to send Ernest to medical school. Praying like that, in such pain – it didn’t occur to me that it could do anything but work. Then Ernest took the test. And he flunked.”
*****
If only the diner waitress had zipped her lip. But no, she pours more coffee and pushes those lemon squares, the ones lurking like a golden ambush in the pastry case. “Scrumptious, home-made, just out from the back.” Cookie gives in and hates it all the more because of the waitress’s lankiness, the bare pipestem arms and icicle fingers, so deft setting out the cutlery – she’s an absolute ringer for Sylvia arraying those scalpels and clamps, just so, knowing where Leo’s gifted fingers need to go.
In the funk of Le Club Cheroot her head had been as murky as the room, not a clue in it about why she was even out with Sylvia, let alone spilling all this, the Ernest secrets, the in-law trivia. It dawned on her as Sylvia sashayed back from the cigarette machine, firing up a Pall Mall. She was backlit, silhouetted by the blue neon floor tubes, and at that moment Sylvia had that look, so Milbach, an absolute ringer for one of Leo’s sisters.
“What do you eat, Sylvia, to stay thin as a rail?”
Sylvia sipped then pulled smoke then pulled again.
“Fish sticks,” she said. The words uncoiling in a poison cloud.
“Fish sticks. You’re kidding.”
She puffed until a white-orange ash broke off, like lava.
“Well, I’m not kidding. Have you ever fixed them for Leo?”
“What’s there to fix? You just heat them up.”
Sylvia’s eyes narrowed to slits, razor blades.
“Maybe you ought to.”
Out of the diner and back in the Caddy, Cookie feels four feet tall and four feet wide. She guns it past the barn where Leo keeps his two new horses, a farmer’s gift in lieu of cash, his barter for chest repairs. The hated image flares up and pesters her like a swarm of gnats: Leo and Sylvia off on a long canter. In perfect sync, loping the butte. She hasn’t seen it. But she’s heard.
She consoles herself with another image, savoring the spite. Leo’s father, the Doc Emeritus, finally paying his bar tab to Mother Nature. “Your hands, Dad,” Cookie remembers saying. “How do they feel?”
But the old appendages were more claws than hands, permanently bent in a gnarled cupping position. Sideshow hands. Diagnosis: tendons shrunk by advanced alcoholism. He, of course, with the optimism of an old cowboy surgeon, had his own way of describing the hook-mitts.
“At least they can hold a drink,” he sneered.
*****
Cookie on the winding rutted road, cut for chuckwagons not Caddies. Bleating chorus all around. Windows down a crack so she can hear. It’s her ninth visit to Ernest’s spread since the vows were exchanged, a rampant violation of Leo’s boycott. She knows how to go around back of the house, how to sidestep the hay clumps and animal pellets. Zephyrs of oven-sent cinnamon beckon her, speeding her every step.
Smoochy hugs inside the ranch kitchen from Ernest, then a single stiff embrace from Patrick, the priestly looking boy, his hair cresting in dramatic waves, silver-white since veterinary school. Ernest clearly in his element, aproned and clucking, less polished and more effusive than on the phone. At thirty one he’s a pudgy Leo, larded jowls pooching the inherited cock-of-the-walk jaw. No doubt his instrument of prowess is the spoon and not the paternal knife. Blare of a timer going off bends him to the oven and the bubbling pan within.
Patrick, with the flair of a diplomat, slides a chair out for her while Ernest fetches a glass and presents a jumbo Bloody Mary pitcher. “It’s an occasion,” he urges his Mom.“You can bend the rules.” But Cookie notes, with alarm, that the pitcher appears to be half-gone at too early an hour. “Just a cocoa for me,” she says, and Ernest shrugs cheerily and reaches up for the Ghiradelli tin – “same thing, it’s all sugar, Dad would tell you that.”
“There’s sugar and there’s sugar,” Cookie says, and adds, with a shudder, “Do you want hands like your grandfather had?”
Patrick drops extra ice in his Bloody Mary then sits with his lean legs crossed and his right hand pressing the tall chilled glass against the side of his face, which is flushed that priestly pink. She’s struck by how he angles his chin and cheekbone to meet the ice-red cylinder. To Cookie such preening seems so other-worldly, so Parisian or something, a kind of facial ballet no male she’s ever known would even be able to dream up. She remembers Ernest’s forays into girl-dating, the tepid and the dismal, the obligatory and the mandatory, and finally the night he summed it all up for her:
“Women who hate their fathers take their revenge on me.”
After that, the closet creaked and creaked, and then pinched open. Ever wider. No tirade in Leo strong enough to slam it shut. Out strutted the various pre-Patricks and, at graduation time, Patrick himself - the two of them in the gowns of academe, side by side for the procession, and touching - all the way down the stately lawn. Leo on campus for precisely two hours and twelve minutes, about the length of the ceremony.
Cookie sips her cocoa and idly picks at the scatter of magazines and catalogs, expecting something with a cake or a roast on the cover. But most of it is dry do-gooder and conservationist stuff, principally from the Yellowstone Coalition, to which Ernest and Patrick mail money faithfully. Of all the sheep ranchers she’s known in her day these two are unique – and to Leo they are insane. Pro-wolf. Pro-bear. More copper pans on the walls than firearms. Ernest stood there and declaimed his position two visits ago:
“We can’t eliminate the predators. It’s not right. We have to live with them. We have to be creative.”
“Creative?” she challenged him. His answer was a doozer, and Cookie still doesn’t know if he was only pulling her leg.
“They say a guard donkey works well against coyotes. But it has to be a female. A male gets too crazy.”
“Will you be getting a guard donkey then?”
Gentle shrug, gentle smirk, no answer.
*****
At long last, the presentation of the Blessed Arrival. Ernest gives a nod, Patrick cradles it in from the barn. Pick of the litter, a black furball.
“Hold him while you can,” says Ernest. “He may outweigh all of us soon.”
“But why a Newfie?” Cookie asks.
“We considered a Great Pyrenees first. White as snow. Same dog, but it’s not us – we’re the black sheep people.”
“Newfies and sheep?”
It’s a silly question, she can see. This furball will do no work outside – it’s obvious from the way Ernest and Patrick hold her, passing her back and forth like a human newborn. She’s family – Cookie envisions the toys, the trips, the snapshots. Is this to be the grandchild she can bake and knit for?
She examines the Newfie’s face, the features – expressive and facile, not unlike a baby gorilla.
“And her name is?”
Ernest chokes up. He clinks his Bloody Mary against Patrick’s Bloody Mary, then against Cookie’s cocoa mug.
“It’s Novena, Mom. I hope you like that name.”
She goes blank, then stammers that she does. But at this moment, Cookie is dry-eyed and has no idea of what she likes. The tears do come, though, soon after the Eggs Benedict, when Ernest opens the oven and sets before her something he calls a very, very special surprise. Deep and golden and purple – she wonders if a blackbird will fly out.
“Huckleberry cobbler,” he says. “Your recipe.”
But the tears that drop aren’t sadness and aren’t joy. She tastes them, in the first bite of the cobbler.
Salt. And too much of it.