Not Yet

The doctor had the conversation with him in October. It was a good conversation, as these things go — measured, honest, appropriately grave. The doctor had done it many times and knew which words worked. He used the right ones.

Howard listened. He nodded in the right places. He thanked the doctor for his time.

Then he went home and planted garlic.

His daughter flew in from Portland. She sat across from him at the kitchen table with her hands folded and her eyes already grieving, which Howard noticed and found considerate, if premature.

“Dad,” she said.

“There’s coffee,” he said.

She talked for a while. She had clearly practiced. Howard listened and thought that she had gotten better at this than her mother had been, which was not a criticism of her mother, who had been good at most things.

“The coffee’s decaf,” he said.

“I know,” she said. “I made it.”

“Right,” he said.

The pastor came in November. Howard hadn’t been to church since the Carter administration, but the pastor came anyway, which Howard thought well of him for. They talked about the garden mostly. The pastor mentioned, once, that there was comfort to be found in acceptance. Howard said he’d found comfort in raised beds and that the drainage was better. The pastor agreed that drainage mattered.

He came back twice more. By February he was helping with the beds.

His son called from Austin on a Tuesday.

“We think,” his son said, “that it might be time to talk about arrangements.”

“I’ve got a guy,” Howard said.

“For — “

“The gutters. They’ve needed doing since September.”

There was a pause.

“Dad.”

“He’s coming Thursday.”

Spring came. The garlic came up. Howard harvested it in June and braided it and hung it in the kitchen the way his wife had shown him, back when showing him things was still a project she had time for. He thought about her while he worked. He thought about her most days.

The doctor saw him in July and reviewed the charts with the expression of a man who has misread a train schedule and is trying not to show it.

“Your numbers,” the doctor said.

“Garlic,” Howard said.

“That’s not — “

“Probably not,” Howard agreed.

His daughter called every Sunday. She had stopped practicing what to say and now mostly just talked, which Howard preferred. She was building a deck. He told her about drainage.

His son visited in August and they watched baseball and Howard fell asleep in the third inning, which his son later described to his wife as harrowing, until Howard woke in the seventh and complained about the relief pitching.

October again. He planted more garlic.

His neighbor Frank, who was ten years younger and had no diagnosed anything, died in his sleep in November. Howard went to the service and stood in the back and thought that Frank had been a decent man and a poor judge of tomato varieties, which was a forgivable thing.

He brought a casserole to Frank’s wife. She asked how he was doing.

“Fine,” he said, because he was.

The doctor’s expression by the second October had moved past confusion into something that looked, Howard thought, almost like respect. Or possibly bewilderment. The two were easy to confuse.

“I don’t have a good explanation,” the doctor said.

“No,” Howard said.

“You understand the original prognosis — “

“Yes.”

“And that statistically — “

“I know what statistically means,” Howard said, not unkindly. “I worked in insurance for thirty years.”

He had not decided not to die in any dramatic sense. He had not stood at a window and shaken his fist. He had not bargained with anything. He had simply, when presented with the information, found it unpersuasive.

There was still garlic to plant. The gutters had needed doing. His daughter was building a deck and her drainage plan was going to cause her problems and someone was going to have to tell her that.

These were not large reasons. He understood that. But he had lived long enough to know that large reasons were mostly invented after the fact, to explain things that had happened for small ones.

In the third October he started a second bed. Hardneck this time. His wife had always wanted hardneck.
He figured he’d see how it came up.