The Cabin I Took My Boy To

The phone rang four times before Tucker picked up, and when he did, he did not say hello.

He breathed into it for a second, the way he used to when he was three and did not know you had to talk first.

“Mama,” he whispered. “Can you come get me?”

I was sitting on my own porch steps outside Mosheim with a glass of sweet tea going warm beside me.

It was 7 o’clock on a Tuesday in early June, and I called him at 7 o’clock every night he stayed with my mother.

“Are you sick, bud? Did you get hurt?” I asked, already standing up off the step.

“No ma’am.” He was quiet so long I checked to see if the call had dropped. Then he said, “I’m not supposed to be on Grandma’s phone. She’s out back with Dale.”

In February I caught what everybody at the pharmacy was passing around, a fever and a cough and an ache that sat in my bones for a week.

I had worked behind that counter in Greeneville for nine years. I figured I would get over it.

Three weeks later I was ringing up a man’s blood pressure pills when my chest went tight and the floor came up at an angle.

The pharmacist, a quiet man named Jeff who had trained me at twenty-two, caught my head before it hit the tile.

The doctors called it viral myocarditis. The virus had gone into the muscle of my heart and inflamed it.

My heart was pumping at about a third of what it should, and the cardiologist said it plain: some people my age recover all the way, some do not, and the ones who do mostly do it by being careful.

Cardiac rehab, if you have never been, is a room full of treadmills and bikes and folks mostly twice my age, all wired to heart monitors, with nurses watching the screens.

You go three mornings a week for twelve weeks. You walk, you pedal, you lift little pink weights, and they write down every number.

Mine was at the hospital in Morristown, Monday, Wednesday and Friday at 7 AM sharp. They do not let you drift in at 7:20.

The nurse who ran my group, a tall gray-haired woman named Pat, said the first week, “Your heart is on a schedule now, honey. So are you.”

My husband, Adam, would have driven me every one of those mornings if he could. Adam is a tree-trimming foreman for a line clearance contractor.

When a big storm takes down power somewhere, his crew gets sent to cut the trees off the lines so the linemen can work.

That spring the storms did not stop. A tornado outbreak tore through Mississippi in May, and Adam’s company sent six crews.

He was gone sixteen hours a day with a chainsaw and a bucket truck, six hundred miles from home, sleeping in a motel with three other men.

He called every night, so tired his words ran together. He would ask how I felt, and I would say better.

He would ask how rehab went, and I would say fine. That was the first lie I told that spring, and it was the one that held up all the others.

Storm pay is good money, and we needed it. My paychecks had stopped in March when my sick leave ran out.

If I had told Adam how I really felt after rehab, gray and shaky and sitting in the car ten minutes before I could drive, he would have quit and come home. Then neither of us would have been working.