The Hundred Story Home Read online

  “Can we come back tomorrow?” Kailey asked.

  In the car on the way home there were more questions.

  “Mom, can a food stamp mail a letter too?”

  “Dad, how can a man have a gold chain but no house?”

  “Why did that nice lady have a black eye and no front teeth?”

  I had grown up familiar with the income disparity between El Paso and Juarez, but here in Charlotte, I had become much more insulated from poverty. That first visit to the soup kitchen triggered my slow realization that less than three miles from my comfortable Charlotte home was another world.

  Month after month, my education evolved. Eventually I took Beverly’s job and became the Fourth Sunday Soup Kitchen Captain for the church, recruiting our daughters’ friends and families to join us. Mostly I stayed safely behind the kitchen counter, but I came to know the names of some regulars. Ruth was the tiny, surly woman who, despite her size, seemed to rule huge men with her biting tongue. Staff told me Ruth had been at the UMC on the day it opened and had come every day since. Jay was the incredibly loud drunk who was wildly disruptive when he had too many beers but unrecognizably sweet when sober. Bill was the quiet cowboy with huge blue eyes under a leather hat who always said, “Please” and “Thank you, ma’am” when handed his tray. And Samuel was the gentle giant with the smile of a seven-year-old boy on Christmas morning just about any time you even looked his direction.

  Though I’d never found religion in a pew, each Sunday in the soup kitchen made me feel a little more like someone I wanted to be. Each month at the end of our shift, I could take off my apron, hug my girls, drive out the gates, and feel I had done a little good in the world.

  For a long time that was enough.

  It wasn’t until our den ceiling started to leak that homelessness inched a little closer to my home. I called our plumber, Johnny, who had been working for us ever since he had replumbed the entire house Charlie and I bought as newlyweds. Johnny had been upstairs all morning looking for the source of the water dripping onto our hardwood floor below. He came into the kitchen before lunch and apologized. “I need to go meet my brother at Freedom Park and give him some money.”

  “Just tell him to come here,” I offered.

  “You don’t understand,” he said, dropping his gaze to the floor and shifting his feet uncomfortably. “My brother lives in the park.”

  He was right. I didn’t understand. Freedom Park was less than half a mile from our house, and we went there all the time for the girls’ soccer games or to ride bikes. His brother lived there? Did Johnny mean in a nearby house?

  He saw my confusion and clarified with visible shame. “He’s homeless.”

  Johnny tried to explain the unexplainable.

  “My brother did something bad when he was seventeen and went to prison. When he got out, he was never quite right. Nothing seems to help, but he calls me when he needs something, like his radio . . .”

  “Radio?” With that clue, I connected the dots. “Johnny, is your brother that guy with the white hair and tattoo on his forehead? Chilly Willy?”

  Johnny nodded, cringing at the street name. “His real name is Larry. William Larry Major. He’s my brother.”

  I had no idea what to say. All those times serving soup, I had never thought about the families of the homeless.

  “I worry he’s going to die out there and we won’t know,” Johnny confessed.

  Since that very first meeting when I had served Chilly Willy soup, I never thought that he had a given name: Larry. I never thought about who his family was or how he ended up in a soup kitchen, a twenty-four-inch-wide stainless-steel counter between us. Me on the right side, Chilly Willy on the wrong side.

  “Everybody in town knows him, and when they don’t see him for a while, they call and ask me if he’s dead. I have to call the police stations and hospitals to find out if he’s still alive,” Johnny admitted, tearing up.

  I couldn’t say anything to help Johnny, but I started looking for Chilly Willy when I was at the park and at the UMC, just so I could tell Johnny I had seen his brother very much alive.

  Chilly Willy was William Larry Major.

  He had a brother, a family, and a story behind how he had ended up on the streets of Charlotte.

  And like my mother, Larry had people who loved him and worried about him all the time.

  seven

  FAILURE IS NOT AN OPTION

  It’s not hard to decide what you want your life to be about. What’s hard, she said, is figuring out what you’re willing to give up in order to do the things you really care about.

  —Shauna Niequist1

  I decided early on in my life that failure was not an option. If I couldn’t succeed pretty quickly at something I tried, I usually threw in the towel at the first moment failure emerged as a possibility.

  I generally felt there were two reasons to quit. One: failure was probable, like piano playing. My sister Allyson had innate, unfathomable talent that I couldn’t possibly measure up to, so I begged my mom to let me quit Mrs. Wade’s piano school after only two years. The second reason I felt it was acceptable to quit was if the work needed to attain success was not fun. This is why my tennis career ended.

  Dad was not a gifted athlete when he was young. In Texas, football was the only real sport for boys, but Dad was too small to be a star player. Gigi and Poppa wanted to find something he could excel at beyond the classroom, and they found it on the tennis court. Dad practiced religiously, realizing this was his avenue not only to avoid being teased at school but also to gain entrance eventually to the prestigious Davidson College. Dad loved the game and wanted his three daughters to love it too.

  Teaching us tennis began as his way of giving Mom a break on the weekends after he’d kept long work hours during the week. But Dad also used his expertise at tennis to impart his wisdom to us.

  Every Saturday morning Dad had a standing doubles game with the same guys at the El Paso Tennis Club. On Saturday afternoon he would come home to play tennis with his three girls. He kept an overflowing hopper of tennis balls in the trunk of his blue Ford El Torino, and we’d drive to the public tennis courts where he’d patiently hit to each of us.

  As it became apparent that I had been blessed with the best hand-eye coordination of the Green Girls, these group outings thinned as first Louise and then Allyson dropped out. Saturdays became my father-daughter time, and I treasured the weekly one-on-one attention.

  “Everything in life is about hard work, Kathy! Hard work and practice!” he would yell across the net as he fed me balls. This was his chance to mold both my game and my character.

  Though I never tired of the time with my dad, my love of tennis began to wane—it was just too difficult for me to become really good at it.

  I had stuck with tennis because I was reasonably proficient and because it gave my dad so much pleasure. But to win tournaments, I realized, was going to take a lot of work.

  At my father’s insistence I entered the citywide under-thirteen girls’ doubles competition with my friend Susan. Her father worked at the same law firm as my dad, and they loved to compare notes on their daughters’ swings and stats. Much to my surprise, but not to my father’s, Susan and I won. Instead of trophies we were each given small silver medals, and our names were printed in the newspaper the next day.

  “I told you! I told you!” he exclaimed, grabbing me in a bear hug that lasted a full minute. “You can do anything, Kathy! Really, anything!”

  His smile lasted through breakfast and beyond.

  “We can start playing on Sundays after church before you go back for youth group. I can get the club pro to give you some lessons too. I think he can help your serve.”

  It took almost a full year of those extra lessons before I worked up the courage to quit. The disappointment was crushing for Dad, but I couldn’t take any more. I had reached the point where I knew the work needed to attain success was not fun. I now hated tennis.

&nb
sp; Dad was sitting at his desk in the den when I got up the nerve to tell him. To his right were the bookshelves that held some of his favorite tennis trophies and lifetime achievement awards. My heart was in my throat as I approached with the precious medal that meant so much to him. I reached for his hand, pressing it into his palm.

  “Dad, you are right; maybe I could do it,” I confessed. “I’m sorry I just don’t want to.”

  It would be twenty-five years before I picked up a tennis racquet again.

  I could feel his disappointment in me every Saturday when he’d come home from his men’s doubles game at the tennis club. Instead of rushing inside for me and heading to the park with his hopper of balls, he’d sit heavily on the den couch.

  Without the excuse to take me to play, we stayed in the house on Saturdays. He’d hint around the edges of conversation, but he never had been good at small talk with us. Without that court full of sunshine, he didn’t know how to teach life lessons.

  I know there was so much he needed to tell me and so much we should have been talking about. But back in that house that held all our secrets and sadness, Dad just couldn’t find the words.

  I didn’t realize how important that time with my dad was until I was in my forties. It was 1997, and it was supposed to be a very good year.

  The twins were turning three. Maddie’s scars from her heart surgery had healed, and I thought medical worries were behind us.

  I was stirring a big pot of meat sauce for spaghetti when the phone rang. Emma was at my feet chewing on the Tupperware cup that had held her Cheerios, which were now spread across the hardwood floor. I could hear Maddie pretending she was in a race car zooming from kitchen to den to living room.

  My Buddha Baby and my Tasmanian Devil.

  The phone shrilled insistently. Carefully stepping over Emma, I reached for the receiver.

  “Hey, it’s Dad,” he said. I checked my watch. My dad never called this early.

  “Is it Mom? Is she okay?”

  “Actually, it’s me, Kathy. I have cancer.”

  I struggled to think. I readily absorbed bad news about my mom. We all worried about my mom. We had experience with that. I had no idea how to process this.

  “What kind, Dad? Is it bad?”

  “It’s leukemia—acute myeloid leukemia. We are going to MD Anderson in Houston. Their doctors are the best, and you know me—I will fight this!”

  He left off the “and win!” but I supposed it went without saying that he believed he would.

  He always won. He worked hard. He practiced. He never gave up. Winning was the natural, logical outcome to perseverance.

  I hung up the phone, shattered.

  Word of Dad’s diagnosis spread quickly—El Paso is basically a small town. Unlike my mom’s illness, everyone talked about Dad’s cancer. The Presbyterians and all my parents’ friends showed up strong.

  Cards. Casseroles. Compassion. We were inundated.

  Dad and Mom spent nine months in Houston so he could receive an experimental treatment that we learned was his only option. Trial therapy doctors told us they would take his blood marrow cells down to zero and build them back up again with the hope that the new marrow would not have the cancer cells. Dad lived in a sterile environment at MD Anderson, and my mom lived in the hotel attached to the cancer center.

  Dad’s new home was a twelve-by-twelve-foot room with a hospital bed. He was confined there twenty-four hours a day connected to tubes on rolling IV poles he could push around his cell of hope. A five-foot glass window on one wall allowed him to see visitors and my mom. She was his constant companion on the other side of the glass, reading and needlepointing.

  Our girls made cards for “Poppy” and “Lili” that Mom taped to his window on the world. Dad would proudly point to the artwork, telling the nurses about each of his four granddaughters.

  His room had no natural light and no way to escape to a tennis court, so Dad asked hospital staff to bring an exercise bike into his solitary confinement. He would pedal furiously while watching tennis tournaments and wearing a T-shirt that proclaimed “Never, never give up!” It was given to him by a cancer survivor.

  Louise, Allyson, and I rotated weeks visiting our parents in Houston. While I had been to visit Mom on psychiatric wards, I was unprepared for the distinct difference on cancer wards. So much of the disease of the mind happens on the inside with so much invisible to the eye. With cancer and disease of the body, so much was plainly visible. Weight loss. Hair loss. Hollow eyes. Gaunt skin. There was no question who were the patients and who were the caregivers. But in both cancer and mental illness, I learned, families’ hopes held on to pills and protocols that took far too long to reverse the course of suffering.

  I always worried I would arrive on one of those visits to Houston to find Mom battling extreme depression or mania. Yet during those agonizing months, she was the strongest, best version of herself. The one who had dazzled in college, planned my gorgeous wedding, and created old-fashioned paper dolls for her granddaughters. Dad needed her in this medical crisis, and Mom was steady and fully present. She seemed to summon an uncommon strength to be there for him as he had always been there for her. Mom became an expert in AML blast cells and CBC counts, always a calm but insistent advocate when a nurse was late with pain medication.

  Witnessing this new side of my mother meant in some strange way that I enjoyed those visits to Houston. It may have been the first time in decades we really had a conversation. Mom and I would go to dinner each night, escaping the medical compound in search of chile con queso (for me) and a good crab cake (for her). We found ways to distract ourselves from the ever-present worry, but the conversation usually circled back to Dad and God.

  “Are you worried?” I’d ask.

  “Your dad and I have a strong faith,” she’d answer, which did not really answer the question.

  Each day my parents waited, prayed, and read the Bible just like on their first Valentine’s Day date.

  Faith, hope, and love abide.

  At the end of that first trial, the doctors told my parents that research indicated 60 percent of patients responded to treatment. My dad was not one of them.

  The oncologists told Dad he could repeat the treatment. More living in Houston. More tubes. More weeks in the glass bubble. In the second round of treatment, research showed that nearly 80 percent of the unlucky 40 percent who did not see results in the first trial would achieve success in the second round. My dad was not one of them.

  He went home to El Paso, a little more shaken in his belief that a medical miracle might occur. Since he had worked so diligently all his life for his law firm, for the church, for the community, he had delayed time for himself. Cancer had arrived unexpectedly with his retirement package. Dad would not concede that it was possible all his plans to see the world might not happen. The train trip across Europe might never leave the station. Doctors advised him to save his strength, but he kept playing tennis with his regular Saturday foursome; only he didn’t run for every ball. When doctors said it would be impossible to get on a plane to New York for Allyson’s wedding because his white blood cell count was too low, he stubbornly walked the bride down the aisle anyway.

  Over the years I had imagined many times what it would be like to lose my mom. But I had never imagined losing my father. While my mother had always been somewhat of a question mark in my life, Dad was the exclamation point. He was solid and steady. He anchored me and our family. He encouraged me, believed in me, and dreamed for me dreams I didn’t even have for myself.

  Although I didn’t want to think about it, Dad began to make plans for that eventuality. I was the youngest daughter, and he let me know he was leaving me in charge not only as executor of his estate but also of all of Mom’s ongoing legal and financial affairs. Even though I had never gone to law school, Dad said he trusted my logical mind and Charlie’s financial savvy to handle whatever eventualities might arise. Just as he had for his clients, Dad planned ever
ything meticulously. He created a five-page document with every account, investment, and obligation listed with his specific wishes spelled out. One afternoon when I phoned to check on him, he said he was writing his obituary.

  “Dad! Stop! That’s morbid!” I told him.

  “No, it’s not! I’m just at the good part about the loving wife and three daughters!”

  Even as he carefully planned for the end, I think he had a secret hope that the illness was a test of his faith. Maybe if he just believed and prayed enough, there would be a miracle cure.

  As he grew weaker, Dad’s anger flashed.

  He had lived a good life. He had been a good servant. Why was this happening?

  He wouldn’t yell at God, but he could yell at Mom.

  She didn’t yell back—at God or Dad. Whatever she was thinking, she kept to herself and remained resolutely loving and soothing.

  But the greatest of these is love.

  I did not share my father’s hope that God would intervene. But I was unreasonably hopeful for Dad’s recovery because his resilience and optimism convinced me he had years ahead of him still.

  He didn’t look sick. He still played tennis. There was no way he could die.

  Still hopeful, I met my parents at Dad’s favorite beachside resort in La Jolla, California, where my family had rented a home during several summers when I was growing up. I spent that week with him and my mom revisiting our favorite places. By then I had taken up playing tennis again, and Dad challenged me to a match. Even in his weakened state, he easily won both sets. Dad still had a mean drop shot. Throughout our match he grinned mischievously as he forced me to chase balls on the baseline before sending a wily short shot for a winner.

  I wish I had used that trip, that court time, to say more. With the court between us full of sunshine, I wish I had called joyously across to him, “You are the best, Dad!”

  On the changeovers as we sipped water, I should have whispered, “You have always been here for me, Dad. No matter what happened to Mom, I always knew you’d never leave me alone.”