ERNIE AND ERNESTINA: The Writer, His Wife, and their Afterlife
Book One, Part Two, Chapter 89: Stormy Night Revelations
A strong summer storm knocks out electricity and street lights.
Coming back from buying a bag of suckers — no storm is going to keep me from my suckers — I see Bella, two flashlights in hand, at my door. Down the hall, flashlight in hand, Pam opens her door. Across the hall, Jason opens his door.
“Everyone okay?” Jason — tall, dark, bearded — asks. “Everyone have candles or flashlight?”
“Yes,” we three women say.
Jason’s girlfriend is a meteorologist for a local TV station. “Kristy just called me. Power is out city-wide. The storm’s passing, but lightning will go on for another hour or so.”
“I smell popcorn,” I say.
“My corn finished popping just before the electricity went out,” Jason says. “I’m waiting for Kristy. She’s on her way.”
At Bella’s invitation, Pam and I follow her into her apartment. She up-ends her two flashlights on an iron-legged tray table in room’s center and takes her usual place on the sofa. Tweed, her long-haired cat, leans on her knee. Pam and I take armchairs across from her.
Pam, of the smoky voice and big bosom and bigger heart, lives in Nashville with her husband. She’s in town to help her mother care for Pam’s stepfather, in a nursing home with pre-leukemia, a side effect of the radiation he received to treat his prostate cancer. Tom, Pam’s husband of thirty-five years, usually stays in Nashville.
Perhaps the room’s low glow — we three are shadows to each other — allows Bella to ask Pam a probing question. “What’s the secret to your long marriage?”
Bella’s truly curious. Her first marriage, to the father of her three sons, lasted eight years. She wanted more children and he, an attorney, wanted only more clients and wanted Bella to entertain them. Her second marriage lasted six months; this man didn’t welcome her sons. Her third marriage ended when her husband’s verbal abuse turned even nastier.
Pam does not respond immediately to Bella’s question. Finally, she answers. “Trust and forgiveness. Tom’s never strayed, and the one time he was drunk, I said to him: ‘Never, never, never do this again. If you do, I will leave you.’ Perhaps this was a bluff. I don’t know how I could have left him. Our son was only two. But he didn’t think I was bluffing, and he hasn’t been drunk since.”
Pam’s father was an alcoholic. She loved him dearly. When he was dying, she climbed into his bed. “To comfort me as much as to comfort him. He was my daddy. I was his little girl. He always looked after me. I didn’t want to lose him. I wanted to hang on to him. Never to let him go.”
He was my daddy. I was his little girl. He always looked after me. I didn’t want to lose him. I wanted to hang on to him. Never to let him go.
This is true for Pam and also true for me . . . except I mixed up husband with daddy, didn’t I? And wife with little girl.
