Flat to the Rim
They moved Dad from Morehead to Lexington at 7:25 on a Saturday morning in October. I stood in the hallway outside room 214 at St. Claire Regional and watched two paramedics roll him out on a stretcher, with an IV pole clipped to the rail and a heart monitor beeping on the shelf beneath his feet. He was wearing a thin hospital gown and the brown wool socks I’d brought from his house the night before, because his feet always get cold and he hates hospital socks with the rubber dots on the bottom.
As they wheeled him past, he turned his head and found my face. For a second his eyes were clear, and I let myself hope. Then he smiled at me the way he used to smile across the supper table forty years ago and said, “Inez, did you feed the calves?”
Inez was my mother. She has been gone six years.
The nurse at the station had already told me that family couldn’t ride along on a transfer. It was an insurance rule, she said, something about liability, and the crew would have him settled in Lexington long before I got there. She patted my arm and told me to drive careful, that it was sixty-five miles and there was no sense racing down the interstate. I nodded, grabbed my purse, and ran.
Down the elevator, out the side door by the emergency room, across the back lot in the gray morning light. The hills around Morehead were still wrapped in fog, and the asphalt was dark and wet from rain that had come through sometime in the night. My car was in the far row under a light pole, right where I’d left it at four o’clock Friday afternoon when Marty called to tell me Dad was in the ER. I had my keys out before I reached it, and then I stopped so hard my shoes skidded.
Both back tires on my silver Accord were flat to the rim. Not low, not soft, but completely flat, the rubber puddled on the asphalt like something that had melted in the sun. The whole back end of the car sat tilted and sad on its wheels. Behind me, I heard the transfer ambulance pull out of the bay, and I turned in time to watch it swing left onto Flemingsburg Road and head toward the interstate with no lights and no siren, just an ordinary white truck carrying my father away.
I knelt beside the car in my brown suede jacket and ran my thumb around the left rear tire. I fix road graders for the Rowan County Road Department, and I’ve changed more tires than most men in this county, so I knew what I was looking for. There was no nail, no screw, no slash in the sidewall. I checked the right side and found the same. Then I looked at the valve stems, and that’s when my stomach turned over.
The stems were whole. The little black plastic caps sat on the asphalt beside each tire, set down neatly, the way a careful person sets something down. I picked one up and looked into the stem, and I could see straight down into the empty tube. The brass valve cores were gone. Somebody had unscrewed them and taken them, and the air had rushed out of both tires in less than a minute, with no damage and no noise. You only do that if you know exactly how.
I looked down at the key ring in my hand. Between my house key and the key to my county truck hung a small red metal tool, about two inches long, worn smooth by twenty-four years in my pocket. Dad put it there the day I got my driver’s license, standing in the barn lot on Christy Creek. He showed me how to unscrew a valve core and put it back, how to check it for leaks with a wet fingertip, and then he folded my hand around the keys.
“A woman who can fix her own tire,” he said, “doesn’t have to wait on anybody.”
He bought two of those tools that day at the Tractor Supply in Morehead. He put the other one on my brother Bert’s key ring, even though Bert was twenty-one and already had his license, because he said he wanted his kids to be able to get each other unstuck. And Bert had left the hospital at six o’clock that morning, after we’d both been up all night in the second-floor waiting room, saying he was going to run home to Clearfield and grab a shower. He’d gone out through the same side door I had just come through, the one that opens onto the back row of this lot.
Chapter Two: The Gate Post
My father is seventy-six years old. His name is Delmar Sizemore, and he was born in the farmhouse where he still lives, eleven miles south of Morehead on Christy Creek. He has run cattle on that place for sixty years, black baldies mostly, and though the herd was close to a hundred head when Mom was alive, he keeps forty now. He’s a big man, or he was. He has shrunk some since Mom died, but he is still up at five every morning to feed, still stubborn as a fence post, still laughing at things nobody else thinks are funny.
On Friday afternoon he fell in the barn lot and hit his head on the post beside the calving pen gate. Marty Lewis found him. Marty lives a mile down the creek, a retired school bus driver who drives past Dad’s place every afternoon just to wave. That day Dad wasn’t on the porch, the barn door was standing open, and the truck was in the yard, so Marty pulled in. He found Dad lying on his back in the mud by the big swinging gate, awake and bleeding from the forehead.
“Hey, Marty,” Dad said, as calm as Sunday morning. “I believe I tripped.”
The ambulance took him to St. Claire, and Marty called Bert, and then he called me. I was flat on my back under a road grader in the county garage on the east side of Morehead, changing a hydraulic hose, and I came out from under it with grease to my elbows and my phone buzzing in my back pocket. I didn’t even wash my hands. I drove to the hospital in my work clothes and found Bert already in the ER waiting room, pacing.
The CT scan showed a bleed. The emergency room doctor sat us down in a small room with a box of tissues on the table and drew it for us on a sheet of paper. A subdural hematoma, he called it, blood pooling between the skull and the brain from the hit on the post. It wasn’t enormous, but it was growing, and it was pressing on things it shouldn’t press on. He said it would have to come out, and that St. Claire didn’t have the neurosurgeons for it, so they would transfer Dad to UK Chandler in Lexington in the morning.
By Friday evening, the bleed had him confused. He drifted in and out, and when he drifted in he’d talk to you normally for a minute or two, asking about the weather or the price of hay, and then something would slip. He called the night nurse Wilma, which was the name of his oldest sister, who died in 1998. He called the respiratory therapist Pearl. And every single time he looked at me, all night long, he called me Inez.
Before we left the little room, the Morehead doctor explained that the surgeon in Lexington would want to meet the family at 8:30 Saturday morning to choose between two operations. He drew both of them on the back of his sheet. The first was a small one, burr holes, two holes about the size of a nickel drilled in the skull so the blood could drain out through tubes. It was quicker and safer, he said, but sometimes it didn’t get everything, and sometimes the bleed came back. The second was a craniotomy, a larger opening, where the surgeon could see everything and clean it all out. It was a longer surgery with more risk and a harder recovery, but it was less likely to need doing twice.
“At his age, it’s a real choice,” the doctor said. “Either one could be right.”
“The big one gets all of it,” I said. “Doesn’t it?”
“The big one gets all of it,” he agreed. I remember that Bert didn’t say a word. He just looked at the drawing for a long time and then folded it in half and put it in his pocket.
Bert holds Dad’s power of attorney. He has since a month after Mom’s funeral, when Dad drove to a lawyer’s office on Main Street in Morehead and signed papers putting Bert’s name on everything, the money and the health care both. I never asked why it was Bert and not me, or why it wasn’t the two of us together. I told myself it made sense, that Bert lived closer and he was the oldest and he was the son. I didn’t ask because I was afraid I knew the answer, and I wish now that I had asked anyway.
Because six years ago, my mother died at UK Chandler Hospital in Lexington, on the seventh floor, after open heart surgery. She’d had a heart attack in the checkout line at the Kroger in Morehead, and they flew her to Lexington, and the cardiologist laid out two choices for us the same way the Morehead doctor had laid them out for Dad. A triple bypass, or a slower path with stents and medicine. Bert and I argued about it in a waiting room on the seventh floor. Bert wanted to try the stents. I wanted the bypass, because the bypass fixed everything. Dad listened to both of us with his hat in his hands, and then he looked at me and said, “All right, Greta. We’ll do it your way.”
Mom never woke up.
So I knelt in that parking lot at 7:31 on Saturday morning with two flat tires and no valve cores, and I understood exactly what had happened and why. I could call the Rowan County Sheriff and report it, and somebody might come out eventually and write it down, but that wouldn’t get me sixty-five miles down the interstate by 8:30. And with Bert’s name on that paper, the surgeon would sit down and talk to Bert whether I was in the room or not. I already knew which operation he would choose.
Chapter Three: Percy
My husband, Otis, was three hundred miles away on a storm crew. He’s a lineman for Clark Energy, and when a storm tears up power lines anywhere in the region, the co-ops send crews to help each other. A line of tornadoes had come through Jackson, Tennessee, on Tuesday, knocking out power for forty thousand people, and Otis had been there since Wednesday. I called him anyway, standing beside my crippled car, and it went straight to voicemail. He was probably forty feet up a pole somewhere.
