Implosion at Day's End

Implosion at Day’s End

By Ken Ely

“You associate with some of Blaine’s more dysfunctional citizens, councilor,” the police sergeant laughed.

“To be sure, Jon,” I agreed, “but, then, you’ve been called to my house, too.” (The son of one of the other police officers had come to our house on an evening when my wife and I were out and had slapped our eldest daughter – ill-advised horse-play made more ill-advised by beer.)

Jon laid his hand on my shoulder.

“Well, Doc, my house was pretty dysfunctional not long ago, too.”

As we parted company, my mind resiled to the previous day. Not that the cops were in it; it was simply a day that had run along like any other until, near its end, it had toppled in upon itself. Imploded, if you will.

The topple had begun about four o’clock with a call from a young man I had not heard from in almost twelve years. I had taken care of him and his brother when they were young. He called collect from the county jail to request I bail him out.

“Have you asked your dad or your mother to bail you out?”

“Yes,” he admitted, “and neither of them will do it.”

“Well, that’s a pretty good indication that I shouldn’t either,” I told him.

He began to cry.

“But I don’t like it in jail.”

“You’re not supposed to like it in jail, Brandon. That’s the whole idea,” I replied, but I assure him I would discuss his situation with the Blaine police in the morning.

Next, I completed and exam on a patient that did not feel he needed an exam.

“I’ve had this same problem off and on for years, Doc. Just crack my neck.”

This I was not about to do.

“Maybe you think it’s the same problem, but this time you’ve got all the clinical signs of spinal nerve root compression. I will treat you but by other means than ‘cracking’ your neck.”

“You’re not going to crack my neck?” he asked, dumbfounded.

“No, I’m not.”

“Well, then, this visit’s a waste of my time,” he declared.

“You’re the one that’s wasting it,” I told him.

He saw himself out.

“Rachel is on line one,” my receptionist informed me as the man departed.

“Aunt Flow is here,” my wife’s voice said into my ear.

“Ah,” I temporized, wondering why she would call to tell me this. I could always tell when it was that time of the month by her disposition.

“Not me,” she laughed. “I mean Alyssa. She’s a woman at last. She asked me to bring her some supplies.”

“Where is she?” I asked.

“At soccer practice.”

So, the baby of the family had begun her monthlies and had called her mother from the locker room at school – just where the defining cycle had begun for my wife some thirty years earlier.

“Well, give her my condolences.”

I had just hung up the phone when my receptionist announced another call from my wife.

“Jaci just phoned me in tears,” she said. “She’s wrecked her car, so Tyler and I are going to Lynden.”

(Jaci is Alyssa’s older sister.)

“Tyler?” I answered. “Why isn’t he working?”

(Tyler is our second son, older than Jaci and Alyssa.)

“I don’t think he has a job anymore, but we’ll talk later. You’ll have to pick Alyssa up after soccer. At the Ken Waters gym.”

“What about her supplies?”

“I’ll drop them off to her on our way to Lynden. Bye.”

“Bye.”

I put the phone down and stared at it.

Jaci, actually my step-daughter, was living in Lynden with her father and attending Lynden Christian School. He bought her a cute little SUV as one part of his attempt to make living with him worth all the grief involved in living with him. Now the car, in all probability, was not so cute and the grief involved in living with him would become more involved.

Tyler, at 22, had just moved back home for the second time ‘to get his life together’. Apparently, divesting himself of his job was part of that process.

Going out to the receptionist’s desk, I glanced over her shoulder at the appointment book and muttered, “There must be some sort of pollen in the air.”

The phone rang again. It was the patient I had just seen. He had talked to his employer who would not accept his worker’s comp claim.

I took the call in my private office.

“It’s not up to an employer to accept or deny a worker’s comp claim,” I assure him. “That’s the State of Washington’s decision.”

“Well, I’ll just pay cash,” he argued.

“Not until the state denies the claim,” I said and rung off, not wishing to go very deeply into the obligations and liabilities involved in work-related injuries over the phone.

Immediately, another call – from my wife, on her cell. She and Tyler were now in Lynden with Jaci. Jaci had slid around a corner, her car fetching up all-standing on the gas meter at Maple Leaf Auto Body. She had not been speeding – she assured Rachel of that in round-eyed terms. The pavement was wet.

I made the observation that she’d been lucky on two counts: 1) she hadn’t blown herself up and 2) she was right where she needed to be to get her car repaired.

Rachel then informed me that Alyssa now had her supplies but had called back and asked if we could go out to dinner to celebrate her pivotal occasion.

Dutifully, at the appointed time, I parked in front of the Ken Waters gym. After waiting a considerable time with no Alyssa in evidence, I decided to call Rachel.

“Oh, she won’t be coming out of the gym, exactly,” my wife clarified. “She’ll come round the back corner of it. Have you seen any of her teammates?”

I rattled off the names of some girls I’d seen. None were on Alyssa’s team, just every other team. But while I was rattling, I caught a glimpse of Alyssa’s pony tail bobbing through the field of my rear view mirror.

“Ah! There she goes! Bye!” I rang off and bounded out of the car.

“Oi! Alyssa! Where are you going?”

“To the Performing Arts Center, to wait for Mom!”

“The Performing Arts Center? She said to pick you up at Ken Waters! Well, never mind. Mom’s in Lynden. You need to ride home with me.”

Sliding into the right-hand seat, Alyssa asked why Mom was in Lynden.

I told her in brief and diverted to why she was going to wait for Mom at the Performing Arts Center rather than at the Ken Waters.

Alyssa shrugged and said that Mom always picked her up at the Performing Arts Center.

“Why did she tell me to pick you up at the gym, then?”

“I have no clue. How did Jaci’s wreck happen? Did somebody crash into her?”

“No. She went round a corner and slid on wet pavement.”

I was still focused on the Performing Arts Center.

“It’s a good thing I saw you in my mirror. If you’d gone on by, I’d have been sitting here like a hound waiting for his owner and you’d have been standing over there like Evangeline under the oak tree.”

Alyssa let this observation pass and said flatly, “Jaci was prob’ly going too fast. I told her the other day that she drove too fast and didn’t watch where she was going.”

“Indeed?” I replied, anticipating she might elaborate.

Instead, she asked if some of her friends could come with us to the restaurant to celebrate – female friends, of course. Just three of them, in fact.

I replied, rather plaintively, that I had anticipated that this was to be a limited celebration: herself, Mom, me, and maybe the jobless Tyler. I added, a little sourly, that I did not relish spending my evening meal with a gaggle of her girlfriend, probably all on the same cycle as her.

Alyssa’s very large eyes became larger.

“You and Ty would be coming?”

I must have looked hurt. (I was.)

She backpedaled immediately, “Well, you can, of course. I didn’t mean you couldn’t. I just didn’t think you’d want to since it’s going to be a ‘red’ party.”

I confirmed that, if it was going to be a sorority event rather than a family dinner, I would happily sit it out, especially as I had a city council meeting to go to and would have to rush the party, anyway.

As a consolation, Alyssa offered to do a family thing the following evening.

I suggested that a two-night celebration of her onset might be a little over the top.

When we arrived at the house, a group of young people were milling about on the lawn. They were not the menstrual celebration; they were Young Life leaders.

“Did you get my message?” the leader in charge asked, stepping out of his car.

I had not.

He had called some forty-five minutes ago asking to use the downstairs of our house for a Young Life meeting. The message was on the answering machine.

No one, of course, had been at home to listen to it. I suggested that, to ask to use the basement of our house for a meeting of thirty to forty teens, he should probably call a week in advance.

He accepted this as a good plan.

I informed him that I had a city council meeting to attend and that none of the rest of the family would be home this particular evening (unless the fallow Tyler chose to opt out of the ovular dinner).

The leader pledged upon his sacred honor that he would be fully responsible for our house and the conduct of his evangelees.

“Just so,” I concurred, wondering if his notion of timely communication defined his concept of responsibility for personal property.

Alyssa and I entered the house by the side door. She went directly to her room but I was promptly summed to the front door by three girls attired in various red garments. As soon as the door was opened, they trooped gaily in and marched back to Alyssa’s room.

Then the phone rang. It was Rachel.

“Please go and comfort Alyssa,” she said.

I could hear peals of laughter coming down the hall from Alyssa’s room.

“Why does she need comfort?” I asked.

“She just called me in tears. She’s afraid she’s hurt your feelings – about the celebration dinner.”

“Well, she’s not crying now. In fact, her friends are here and the red party has already begun. Judging by the hilarity, I can’t forecast a particularly sedate rite of passage.”

When Rachel and Tyler returned, I was gratified by his assurance that he would remain at home on ‘anchor watch’ while I governed the city and his mother took the lunar girls away.

I heated some left-overs and wolfed them down, driven more by and urge to escape the cacophony that filled the house than hunger or any urgency of time.

As I made my departure through the laundry room, the Young Life leader intercepted me, asking, “Do you have a bucket we could use?”

“What sort of bucket?”

“One that will hold a chicken.”

“A live chicken or a dead one?”

“A dead one.”

I provided the bucket and retreated to the comparative sanity of city politics, not wishing to contemplate what sort of evangelism might occur below decks with a dead chicken while the disengaged Tyler stood watch above hatches, entranced by the TV.

My return home after council was, I congratulated myself, mercifully late. Gratifyingly, I found some subduction in the activity in the house. Only quiet conversation and shuffling emanated up the basement stairs. Alyssa was alone, in her room, doing her homework. Rachel was reading in our bedroom.

The party had been a resounding success, she informed me when I entered it. The staff at the Mexican Restaurant had sung Happy Birthday to her.

“Why did they sing that?” I asked.

“Because they didn’t have a song for a girl’s first period.”

“No. I daresay they might not. Probably should, though.”

I heard someone in the kitchen followed by a voice booming down the hall ahead of his body, “Excuse me, has anyone seen my car keys?”

Rachel’s eyes met mine with an unspoken, “Must be a trait common to all males.”

“Have you looked in the furniture downstairs?” I called back. “Everything gets lost between the cushions. You have to dig deep.”

I was an accomplished cushion sounder and accompanied the leader downstairs. As we passed the open laundry room door to the garage, I looked out the open garage door to the street. The leader’s car, jumping up and down to the thud of a battery-powered boom box, was loaded with writhing passengers waiting to be taken home.

Arriving in the basement, I found several other leaders and some teens milling around in that aimless, vacuous, fruitless way they do when they look for something they have lost.

“What were you doing the last moment you remember having your keys?” I ask the key-loser.

“You were opening the chicken wrapper with them,” one of the millers-around answered for him, and he picked up the bucket to gaze blankly at its contents.

To my relief, the chicken was a commercially prepared roaster and not some beheaded bird with the feathers still on. I was also glad the chicken had been brought to my attention since it was still in the basement: abandoned by the kids and unknown by me, the house might have become redolent of rotten meat in a matter of time.  

The leader grabbed the bucket from his friend and plunged his hand into the carcass.

“Here they are! Inside the chicken!” he joyfully proclaimed and held the keys, coruscating with chicken slime in the incandescent light, aloft for verification.

“Eureka,” I said sotto voce, and suggested, “Perhaps you’ll want to rinse them off – before the little globs of fat dry.”

The leader darted off to the bathroom to rinse his keys, dripping a trail as he went.

I now had the bucket and handed it back to the lad who had first picked it up.

“Take the chicken with you when you go. I’ll get you a plastic bag so I can keep my bucket.”

As the leader’s car bounced away, I pulled the garage door down and returned to the bosom of my family. My wife met me as I came through the kitchen.

“Alyssa needs help with her homework. It’s the big Civil War paper.”

“It’s 10:15 and Alyssa needs to go to sleep. And if she doesn’t, I do.”

I switched off the kitchen light for emphasis.

“I’ll write her teacher a note in the morning explaining that the Civil War has been delayed due to Alyssa receiving her red badge of courage. It’s a point arguable under the Women’s Reform Movement, which helped to bring the war on. I’m sure the point will carry.”

Alyssa could not be convinced the point would carry but she did agree to go to sleep.

The indigent Tyler, however, was not disposed to going to sleep. He was disposed to watching TV. In fact, he could see no arguable reason for going to sleep at such an immature hour since he had no job to get up for. My point that he was going to get up early and go find a job was not well received. However, it did carry.

As I stretched out under the covers beside Rachel, she put her book down and said, “Want to hear some good news?”

I allowed that it might be a laudable way to end an absurd evening.

“The gas company is going to be responsible for Jaci’s accident.”

“Because the gas meter struck her car?”

“No. Because the stanchions that are supposed to protect the meter – well, protect the traffic, if it goes up on the sidewalk – were only set into the cement three inches. They are supposed to be set a couple of feet down into the cement. So the gas company is liable.”

“Fortunate,” I admitted, “for Jaci. But it must be some throwback to Roman law because it’s very near bizarre.”

I rolled over and switched off my lamp.

The next morning I conversed on the curbstone with Jon, the police sergeant, about the jailed Brandon. As I suspected, there was a great deal of background to his story and jail was the most appropriate place for him.

In the office, the patients arrived on time and were not argumentative.

Tyler, inching toward mutatis mutandis, was out applying for jobs and had enrolled for a second time in a class to get his GED.

Alyssa, besides fretting over the Civil War, was preparing for a school field trip to California. How the paper was to be achieved, I could not imagine. Well, I could, if I wrote if for her, but I was not going to do that. (It became a community effort accomplished by her girlfriends.)

Jaci had called first thing to complain that her dad had grounded her from her only-slightly-crumpled car because she had gotten eight tardy notices and was now consigned to riding embarrassingly around Lynden on her bicycle.

Pausing between patients, I looked out the window at the sunshine and offered a brief Deus Misereatur. After all, the day was still young.

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Copyright © February 2017 Kenneth E Ely