Read Online The Last Odd Day by Lynne Hinton - Free Book Online Page B

they had not had a dream of their own in more than a decade. That’s about the time the lunch conversations changed from lost hope to concrete plans for medicalinsurance and saved-up vacation days. Those were the conversations I deemed as sensible, and joined.
    O.T. and I had planned to buy an RV and travel down to Florida, maybe up to Niagara Falls. But since I kept delaying my retirement because the boss would beg me to, by the time I was free O.T. started feeling nervous, having headaches. So that we never got to Bob’s Vacations on Wheels, and we never camped in the Everglades. Soon Sunhaven collected most of our retirement money; and I didn’t think much about our ideas for a long time.
    In fact, before O.T.’s declining health and the sudden appearance of a woman named Lilly, I hadn’t thought much about anything in a long time. Not the unrelenting spirits of my dead parents and siblings, who refused to leave the old house, or me and O.T. buying a Winnebago or the way Jolly would hold my hand, soft as rain, when he helped me down off the tractor.
    Like the stories of a silent soldier and the way a woman’s body cramps and tears during labor, some memories are simply put away deep, deep down and below, so that former things appear to have passed away and only those events at hand require attention.
    Not since I was pregnant and then not, a mother and then only a wife, had I actually remembered things or felt things or noticed things, like the way a fly sings when it’scaught in a spiderweb, the formidable strength of desire, and my father’s empty eyes, which saw everything I did not.
    I had spent so long turning away from life—refusing it, denying it, pinching and squeezing the sorrow and the pain and the possibilities—that the only emotion I could muster up when I finally met Lilly, other than the physical one of getting sick, was just the sense of being a little surprised.
    Right before fainting, I saw a burst of color and heard my name being spoken. I said out loud, “Hmmm,” like I had suddenly figured something out, nodded my head, and fell forward.

8
    O.T. died on a Wednesday when the sing-along in the dining room down the hall from his room had just started and the nurses had all been called to a meeting downstairs. Since I knew for about a week that his time was close at hand, I had been staying all night, sleeping in the chair next to his bed, and showering in the bathroom down at the end of the hall.
    The last days of his life I, not the nursing staff, bathed and shaved him, read him stories from the paper, and gave him things to smell. Oranges and strawberries, wet grass and lavender. O.T. had always noticed and enjoyed the smell of things, so I had Maude bring me stuff from the house or the barn or pick up somethingfrom the store that I thought might bring him pleasure. My perfume, a homemade brand that was a light floral scent he had found at some boutique in Chicago when he drove to a tractor show years ago, handfuls of dirt, tea with cinnamon sticks, and clove.
    He enjoyed the aromas from outside the most, because when I held old tools or leather work gloves up to his nose, he seemed to soften and relax. I don’t know if he really knew it or not, if it meant anything to him or nothing at all, I only hoped it eased his passing, helped him see that he was only going home.
    When he did die I did not panic. I did not ring the call button on the railing of his bed. I sat beside him, having just placed a small sprig of lilac near his chin, rubbing his hand and listening to a cheerful pianist leading the group in “Bicycle Built for Two.”
    I smiled at the thought of passing to such a tune and wondered if the spirits who heard it would not come and take him until it was over, that they stood along the wall waiting, respectful, thinking it was some unknown tribal chant or worship song meant to send his soul into the next life.
    He died without any