¥233,564 (Chapter 1 of 38)

It's been a little over six months since Amy died, and elderly Gil Abrams is trying to adjust to life alone. Not that he's completely alone. "The Cat" and his dog, Dan, are there to keep him company, but they're not exactly spring chickens either. Only for his faith, life might seem meaningless. And only for McDonald's he may not eat another warm meal.  

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233,564¥

Being a God-fearing man, I never thought that I’d want to live forever, but after I watched Amy die, I changed my mind. And that wasn’t the only thing I changed. I had to change the lock on the front door because I lost the keys. I don’t trust those voice locks. I had to figure out how to get into Amy’s banking accounts because we forgot to transfer her voice and retina lock to mine. I had to learn how to cook. I had to learn how to shop for groceries. Household knickknacks. Properly clean a toilet. Properly clean a bathtub. Properly clean. In other words, I had to learn how to live without her. I had to change me. Because I never realized how much I relied on her until she was gone. I took the roles for the things I didn’t mind, like bills and maintaining the house, and when it came to the things that stressed me out, I let her do it. I didn’t think about the day when she wouldn’t be around anymore. Even when we grew old together. 

In the last few weeks of her life, when she thought of things I might need to know, she jotted it down on scraps of paper and stuffed it in her purse. Anything private that she didn’t have to put online, she wrote on just old-fashioned paper, because she didn’t trust computers anymore, and neither did I. Even for our age we were both old-school. As a matter of fact, the last words I ever heard her say was, “Get my purse, Gil,” when I asked her about the banking instructions for the third time.  

But I searched that purse about ten times for those instructions and you think I could find it? No sir. EverythingStore receipts, Werther’s Original, tampons (although I don’t understand why), balls of snotty tissue, and other instructions, but no banking instructions. It wasn’t that I cared about the money in her account so much, as that I wanted her last words to have more meaning. 

I was lost. Poor Amy. She suffered like a dog, and here I am bitching and complaining. She had been prescribed pills like the soldiers use that can turn off pain, but they’re expensive, and we had to spare them along. 

And speaking of dogs, Dan suffered too. Poor boi. His hips were bad, but the arthritis really seemed to kick in after the funeral. Medication for that cost a fortune too. Amy was the one who took him on walks when he could. She said she only did it to get the energy out of him because otherwise, she called him a pain in the arse. Maybe not using his legs made his arthritis worse. I was always too embarrassed to be picking up shit after a dog on the road with people watching. And it’s not even so much picking up the crap, as having to pretend that you don’t see him do it, that you’re just standing there, turned the other way wondering what you’re going to have for supper while the dog squats ten feet away, and cars pass by with everyone pointing and laughing. Maybe they aren’t pointing and laughing, but that’s what it feels like. Who’s going at that? Not me.

We had an old tomcat too who came and went when he wanted. Dan loved him, but he didn’t love Dan. The only one he liked was Amy. She did name him when we got him, but for the life of me, I can’t remember it. All Amy and I ever called him was “the cat.” Where’s the cat to? Did you see the cat? Did you feed the cat? The cat’s litter pan reeks -did you change it? Judas, the cat pissed on the couch again! And so on.    

I spent over fifty years with Amy, so on more than one occasion I caught myself calling out to her to tell me where the Cheese Whiz was poked away to in the fridge. That was the times when Dan really went crazy looking for her. The first time I did it I started crying, and he started whining, and there we were, two old farts, bawling like babies. 

I owned a woodstove so I tried to keep myself distracted by cutting even more wood than usual, and when I had the saw going, and had a little boil-up with the grey jays begging for pieces of Amy’s last batch of bread, it kind of worked. But then that good feeling fell apart when I was towing it home on the quad, knowing that there was no one waiting for me. There would be no supper on the table, no raisin buns on the counter, and no one telling me to get out of the kitchen with my dirty boots on, and that really depressed me. 

The dog would be on the back of the TerraCrawler where he always was when I was bringing out wood, but even he seemed kind of depressed. Because there’s nothing the dog liked more than going in the woods with me. His tail didn’t seem to wag like it did before. And when he jumped off to chase Mrs. Henries up her driveway again it only seemed half-hearted. He was never trying to hurt her, but he had a nasty habit of sticking his nose where it didn’t belong. So did Mrs. Henries, but usually not in another woman’s crotch, like Dan. It didn’t help that she was afraid of dogs. Every time he did it, she accused him of sexual assault, but I don’t know if you can take a dog to court. I suppose she could have taken me to court, but sexual assault by canine? I got my doubts it would hold up. She kept telling me she was going to call the cops, but she never did. Probably because I was one of the few people that still went to Church on Sundays, and well, she was a member of the Magdalene Initiative Ladies Fellowship, or MILF for short, not to be mistaken with the Deuteronomy Initiative Living Fellowship, or DILF, that I was a member of. I guess it’s not breaking news that my generation is the last of the church-goers, and Reverend Tom appreciated every last grey-haired one of us. Although, there were a couple of younger American refugee families that had started attending, so that gave us hope. 

“Nothing like death and destruction to bring people back to church,” Reverend Tom liked to say. 

The Reverend was a good man. I didn’t always understand his sermons, but he was a good man with a good heart. Only for him I would have pined away to nothing. Only for McDonalds I would have pined away to nothing too, but I’ll get to that in a minute.

I remember when Reverend Tom came to the house the first time after Amy died. I called him because I was losing my mind. The only person I ever talked to about my problems, my older brother Scott, was gone, so there was only my younger sister, Emma, and we weren’t close. Emma is a hard woman to get along with.    

She was at the funeral with her family. The minister performed the eulogy, and no one in the family got up to say anything. My only son, Melvin didn’t like speaking in front of crowds, and Emma and Amy couldn’t stand each other anyway. If I had my time back I would have asked my grandson, Park, but in my head he was still a boy, not a teenager. I know he would have said yes, and I know he would have done a fine job. He loved his grandmother, even if she did drive him off his palm sometimes.  

As for Melvin, he was on the mainland. Ontario. He was one of the pipe welders at the nuclear plant they were building in Windsor. He made good money, but not good enough for him. I used to call him once in a while, but every conversation we had on the phone went like this: 

“That you Melvin?” 

“Yeah.”  

“What are you up to?” 

“Nothing. You at?” 

“Nothing. What’s the weather like?” 

“Warm.” 

“How’s work?” 

“Best kind.” 

“When you coming home again?” 

“Don’t know. How you gettin on?” 

“Best kind.” 

This was usually the point where we ran out of things to say, and I passed the phone to his mother. Or sometimes this happened: 

“How’s work going.” 

“Fine. No complaints. How’s retirement? You keeping yourself busy these days?”

“What?”

“Are you keeping yourself busy these days? It must be hard all alone. I’m concerned.”

“Okay, put Melvin on.”

“Excuse me?” 

“Put Melvin on. I don’t want to be talking to no robot.”    

“This is Melvin.” 

“Melvin wouldn’t talk to me in that happy tone and if he was concerned he certainly wouldn’t say it out loud. You’re copying the way he talks at work. You need to learn how to copy how he talks to me. Put Melvin on.” 

“But this is Melvin.”

“Please put Melvin on.” 

“I’m telling you this is Melvin! Fuck goddamn it.” 

“Judas, you can’t even get the rhythm of the cursing right. Fine.” 

Then I would put my shadow on, and they might spend the next hour talking to each other, while Melvin and I went about our business with our palms on speaker, shouting something in the background. The world is gone. 

Truth be told though, listening to our shadows having a conversation was still better than being in that quiet house. Sometimes they even got to the bottom of things.   

So every now and then I got Reverend Tom over. The Reverend was the best clergy our church ever had. He put off a real show. I’m not joking. Sometimes he put off one-man plays. Only on special occasions though. Christmas. Easter. Ash Wednesday. Shrove Tuesday. First Lent. Second Lent…now that I’m saying it out loud, I’m realizing that the situation didn’t have to be that special. But it was all for Jesus of course, and also the fifteen to twenty people in the congregation (unless it was Christmas Eve or a Christening). Then she might reach half full. But usually it was just a dozen or so grey heads like me and maybe one or two young families with their kids. Boy, did Reverend Tom’s eyes light up every time a young family showed up. Most of the young immigrant families in town went to church too, but they were mostly Catholic or Muslim. So not our church. I think the Muslims had to go to St. John’s to attend their services.  Which was a three-hour drive one way. Now that’s dedication. I could never figure out why more Christians weren’t like Muslims but like Christians.  

One day I invited Reverend Tom over for supper, but it wasn’t until I got off the phone that I realized I had no one to cook it. So a half hour before he got to the house I went out and got McDonald’s. He smiled when he saw what I had, but it was more of a sad smile. He knew the situation I was in. I didn’t learn how to cook. Now don’t get me wrong. I had no trouble throwing a few steaks on the barbecue or putting a fry of moose and onions on the hot stove in the shed, but beyond that and a cup of tea, my cooking skills came to an end. 

Tom had a wife who was a lot younger than him, which raised a few eyebrows, but the Lutheran Baptist Episcopal Pentecostal Quaker Reformed Adventist Nazarene Salvation Army United (or LBEPQRANSAU for short) clergy weren’t as easy to come by as they were when I was a young man. We had to take what we could get. There was a lesbian LBEPQRANSAU Church minister that the council tried to boot out in St. John’s. Not because she was a lesbian of course, but because she was an atheist. She still said it violated her charter rights and won the case in court. Apparently, she had the largest LBEPQRANSAU congregation in Newfoundland, and unlike our LBEPQRANSAU church, they were mostly under thirty, instead of over sixty. Whatever works I guess. I would have liked to have heard those sermons though. 

After I finished my Coke and a bit of small talk, I told Tom what I called him over for, but I figured he already knew. 

“I misses her so much that I dreams about her,” I said, “and every time I dreams, I dreams that she’s in the hospital. I dreams she’s dying all over again. I wish I could have good dreams about her. I can’t even talk to her in these dreams she’s in so much pain.”  

“But you know she’s not in pain now. You’re the only one in pain.” 

“For how long?” 

“The mourning process is different for different people.” 

“Do you think I should see a doctor?” 

“That's a tough question. Mourning is part of life. If you think you can suffer it, without going crazy…I’d say no. It’s only been a few months, Gil.” 

“Six months almost to the day.” 

“Has it been that long? Wow. As I was saying, you’re going to miss her. I don’t know if numbing yourself with prescription drugs is the answer. Now if you went into a severe depression, that’s a different story. But no, I think this is something you just have to get through.” 

“Easy to say.” 

“Oh, I know. Very easy.” 

You shouldn’t lie to a minister, but I wasn’t being honest with him. I had already talked to a psychiatrist. 

It said, “Why are you here Mr. Abrams?” 

“I can’t stop thinking about my wife,” I said. 

“Why?”

“She died.” 

“Oh. I’m very sorry for your loss,” it said, and then said I should try a drug called Luctuset.

“What does it do?” I said. 

“It’s a memory enhancement drug.” 

“Memory enhancement? What does it do?” 

“I can send your palm a website link, that fully explains it, but essentially it targets specific neuron receptors in your brain, where negative cycles repeat themselves.” 

“And what do it do then?”

“Turns them off.”

“So I wouldn’t be sad anymore?” 

“That’s right.” 

“How is that memory enhancement?”

“It strips away the negative feelings attached to memories.” 

“But they’re not bad feelings, they’re good ones.”

“So why do you want to get rid of them?”

“Because they make me sad.”

“I’m not sure I follow.” 

“I’m not sure I do either.” 

I ended the call then. I should have known a robot couldn’t help me with something like this. 

__________________

“What do you think heaven is like?” I asked Reverend Tom one day.  

“I don’t think we could comprehend it even if someone came back and explained it to us,” he said. “They wouldn’t be able to explain it anyway. Not with English or any other language.”  

“What about the people that comes back?” 

“If you came back you weren’t gone in the first place. You still had one foot in the door.” 

“So you don’t believe in those life-after-death experiences? I watched a documentary about it.”   

“Yeah, I’ve seen those shows. It’s not just a coincidence that the experiences they have are always culturally relevant to them. Listen, Amy is in a place that the human mind can’t even comprehend.” 

“What do it say in the Bible about heaven?” 

“Not as much as people think. The details are sparse to say the least. That’s why we attend Bible study. There’s a lot of mysteries to uncover.” 

I didn’t want to say it to Reverend Tom, but most of the Bible studies I attended were more about him arguing with the older men of the church instead of talking about heaven. I usually kept my nose out of it, but sometimes they all got a bit hot under the collar. Dave Umbridge even blurted out one night that the Reverend was driving people away from the church. 

“Back in my day a clergyman had dignity,” Dave said. “He wasn’t doing skits around the altar.” 

“I resent that,” Reverend Tom said. “It was a production, not a skit. It took me weeks to rehearse those lines.” 

“You had the church choir singing show tunes!”

“They loved those numbers. I got great reviews.” 

“Reviews?” 

“In our church Theta forum.” 

“That’s your forum!” 

“Yes, but I repeated what other people told me in the porch when the service was over. Those were direct quotes.”  

Dave just sighed and shook his head. 

Actually, I remember reading those reviews. He did get a lot of compliments. Like “That was really something,” and “Did you rehearse that or was it adlibbed?” and “I never seen a minister do anything like that.” Lots of encouragement. I remember one little American boy – the only little boy in church at the time – who was walking down the church steps next to me asking his mother, “Is he really a minister?”

“They do things differently in Canada, honey,” his mother said.  

Usually, just talking to Reverend Tom made me feel better. Not so much because of anything he said. Or his advice. Or his Bible stories. More because he was just someone to talk to. To get things off my chest. I could have said those things to the psychiatrist, but I never got used to talking to A.I. Like I said, I’m old school. 

“Do you eat take-out often?” the Reverend said. 

“Only when I want something warm.” 

“That must get expensive. I had you pictured as a frugal man, Gil.” 

“Well, lets just say I don’t eat a lot of warm stuff anymore. I never learned how to cook, and when Amy got sick it happened so fast that she never had time to teach me. I don’t think she really accepted that she was as sick as she was anyway. She wouldn’t even talk about if for the longest time. I think she thought that God…” 

“…was going to save her.” 

“Everyone kept saying ‘stay positive, stay positive.’” 

“I feel like kicking people in the arse – excuse my language - when I hear them say that to someone who’s terminally ill.” 

 She hated it, especially near the end. “Why can’t I be sad or angry?” she used to say. “I’m the one who’s dying.” 

“Exactly.” 

“Anyway, I don’t have a clue how to cook. I tried learning off online videos, but I don’t have a lot of patience for it.” 

“What did you try?” 

“The last one was something called…Duck Pate en …Croute?”

“Whoa! Baby-steps buddy. Try boiling a few wieners before Duck Pate.”

“Had a few ducks in the freezer that Melvin downed last fall so I figured I’d give it a go.”  

“Well, just try roasting one first.” 

“That’s right. Baby steps.”

So it was just me and Dan and the cat. Three old farts trying to keep ourselves occupied. Well, the cat occupied himself eating and sleeping, when he wasn’t clumsily licking his arse. Wearing diapers in old age must be hard, but trying to lick your arse when you’ve got arthritis must be way worse. Maybe every time he went to sleep he dreamed he was a young spry tom again, chasing mice around the basement, snatching birds out of the air, and licking his arse like a cracker-jack.