ERNIE AND ERNESTINA: The Writer, His Wife, and their Afterlife

Book One, Part One, Chapter 24: Mr. Joe

One April day a call comes from Mary Lee, Ernie’s mother. Her voice is almost a shriek. “Joe’s slumped in his recliner. Blood’s coming out his mouth. His shirt’s soaked. I don’t know what to do.”

Ernie and I rush to their house, and Ernie calls an ambulance for his father, but there’s nothing to be done. He’s hemorrhaging from his lungs. Maybe it’s lung cancer. Maybe it’s emphysema. He stopped drinking years before but never stopped smoking, not from the time he was thirteen or fourteen.

Ernie’s amazed at all the people visiting the funeral home to pay their respects to the man a lot of them call Mr. Joe, who years before owned and ran their neighborhood grocery store.

“Mr. Joe, he always put together a bologna sandwich for me, even when he knew I couldn’t pay,” one gray-stubbled old man said. “Yes sir, he did that for a lot of folks. We always knew where we could get a bologna sandwich. Yes sir.”

That night, Ernie talks to me of his father. “Every morning before he left for the store — he worked long hours six days a week — he always put a dollar under my pillow. I’d wake up, put my hand under the pillow, and there would be the dollar. Even when I was in college, he still did that. Never more than a dollar. Always a dollar. I used to wonder why he didn’t give me more. . . . And a kiss. Always a kiss, every morning, on my forehead before he left for work.”

“He loved you, Ernie. He may not have been able to say the words, but he was showing you he loved you.”

“He showed me what discipline was. I know that. He stopped drinking twice, both times cold turkey. In his own way, he was a man of steel. Came from a small town, saved his money, came to the city, bought a grocery store. I hated working there. He never understood why I hated it, and he never understood the writing. When I sold my first story, The Place Behind the Wall to Fate magazine — this was just before we married — I showed him the check. I was proud of it. He looked at it — from Zolar Publications — and said: ‘Not even fifteen dollars. That’s not much. You can’t raise a family on that.’ Ernie looks at me. “Which is true.” He looks away, shielding his eyes from me. “I want to write and to have a family. Is that too much to ask?”

I don’t answer him. His most important questions, I don’t answer. I don’t know how to. Ernie will figure it out. He has to.