Antsy Does Time

covered her mouth and found a new wellspring of tears, so I knew this wasn’t so good.

“It’s a long operation, but your husband’s a fighter,” the doctor said. “I have every hope that he’ll pull through.” And then he added, “There’s a chapel on the second floor, if you’d like some privacy.” Which is not something you say to someone if you truly believe their loved one is going to pull through.

The doctor said he’d keep us posted, and disappeared through the double doors. Mom said nothing. Christina and I said nothing. But Aunt Mona said, “It’s all that cholesterol in his diet. I’ve warned him for years. Our father, rest his soul, went the same way, but did Joe listen?”

Back in eighth grade, I had a geology unit in science. We studied volcanoes. Some erupt predictably, spewing magma, and others just explode. The rock is so hot it actually becomes gas, and the blast is more powerful than a hydrogen bomb.

That’s the closest I can come to explaining what happened to me next. I could feel it coming the moment Aunt Mona opened her mouth, and I had no way to control it.

Mom saw me about to blow. She tried to grab me, but I shook her off. There was no stopping this—not by her, not by anybody.

“Shut your freaking mouth!” I screamed. Everyone in the waiting room turned to me, but I didn’t care. “Shut your freaking mouth before I shut it for you!” Mona gaped, unable to speak as I looked her in the eye, refusing to look away. “You sit there and complain every day of your stupid life, passing judgment on everyone, and even now you won’t shut up!”

And then I said it. I said the words that had been brewing inside since the moment my father went down on that stage.

“It should have been you.”

She looked at me like I had plunged a dagger through her heart.

“Anthony!” my mother said, losing all her wind with that single word.

I kept Mona locked in my gaze, feeling as if my eyes could just burn her away. “It should be you in that operating room. I wish it was you dying instead of him.”

So now it was out. I meant it, she knew I meant it—everyone in the waiting room knew.

And from somewhere beside me, I heard Christina, in a tiny voice say, “So do I...”

Suddenly it felt like there was no air in that room, and the walls had closed in. I had to escape. I don’t even remember leaving. The next thing I knew I was in the parking garage, searching for our car, and I found it. I didn’t have the keys, but Mom, in her panic, had forgotten to lock it. Good thing, too, because I was fully prepared to break a window. I almost wanted to.

I sat in the car that smelled so strongly of Aunt Mona’s perfume, and I pounded the dashboard. Mona was the one with all the anxiety. She was a human propeller churning up stress until everyone was drowning in it. Why couldn’t it have been her? Why?

I was starting to cool down by the time my mom came, and sat in the car beside me.

“No lectures!” I yelled, even before she opened her mouth.

“No lectures,” she agreed quietly.

We sat there for a while in silence, and when she finally did speak, she said, “Aunt Mona decided it was best if she took a hotel room across the street from the hospital. That way she can be close.” Which meant she wouldn’t be staying with us anymore. I wondered if I’d ever see her again. I wondered if I cared.

“Good,” I said. I might have cooled down, but it didn’t change what I said, or the fact that I meant it. But then my mother said something I didn’t see coming.

“Anthony... don’t you realize I was thinking the same thing?”

I looked to her, not sure that I had heard her right. “What?”

“From the moment I knew your father was having a heart attack, I had to fight to keep it out of my mind. ‘It should have been her, not Joe—it should have been her...’” Mom closed her eyes, and I could see her trying to force the worst of those god-awful feelings away. “But honey, there are some things that must never be said out loud.”

Knowing she was right just made me angrier. I gritted my teeth so hard I thought I might break them—and then what? We’d have dental bills on top of bypass.

“I’m not sorry.”

Mom patted my arm. “That’s okay,” she said. “Someday you will be, and you can deal with it then.”

Somewhere in the garage a car alarm went off, echoing all around.

“No word from the doctor?” I asked.

“Not yet. But that’s good.”

I knew what she meant. It was a four-, maybe five-hour operation. There’s only one reason it would end early.

“I’d better get back,” Mom said. “Come when you’re ready. We’ll be in the chapel.” And she left.

My anger at the unfairness of it all still raged inside, but some of that anger was bouncing off of Mona and sticking to me. Wasn’t I the one who dumped that pitcher of water on Boswell, making life that much harder on my father? Wasn’t I always talking back, creating problems, making things harder at home? Could I have been the one who pushed him one step too far?

And then I got to thinking about the time contracts, and how I, in a way, had been tempting fate—playing God. Was this my punishment? Was this, as they say, the wage of my sin?

My brain had already turned to cottage cheese, and now it was going funnier still. You can call it another volcanic burst, you can call it temporary insanity, you can call it whatever you like. All I know is that in my current dairy-brained state, the letters in my own mental Boggle game suddenly came together and started talking in tongues.

Fact: My father’s heart attack happened within moments of him signing a contract for two years of his life.

Fact: It was my fault the contract even existed.

Fact: There was a fat black binder filled with almost fifty years sitting in Gunnar Umlaut’s bedroom.

... but I could get those years back.

Maybe if I got all those pages and brought them to my father—or better yet, brought them to the chapel and laid them down on the altar ... Did a hospital chapel have an altar? If not, I would make one. I’d take a table, and sprinkle it with holy water. I’d renounce what I had done—truly renounce it, and those pages would be my bargain with God. Then, once that bargain had been struck, the morning would come, the operation would be a success, and I would still have a father.

This wasn’t just an answer, it felt like a vision! I could almost hear the gospel choir singing the hallelujahs.

I left the car, my breath coming in fast puffs of steam in the midnight cold, and took to the street, searching for the nearest subway station.

18. Go Ahead... Tenderize My Meat.

There were things I didn’t know, which I didn’t find out until much later—like what happened in the auditorium after my father was rushed out.

My God—he gave two years of his life and he died!

It hadn’t occurred to me that others had heard that—and even though news of my father’s death had been greatly exaggerated, it didn’t matter. What mattered was the possibility that he’d die. Just like my eruption at Aunt Mona, it was something everyone was thinking, but it was too dangerous to say aloud.

In the awkward, uneasy moments after we had left, Principal Sinclair tried to get things back on track—the show must go on, and all. It was no use. The crowd was murmuring up a cloud of worry—not about my father, but about themselves. Then someone yelled, “Hey, I want my month back,” and all eyes turned to Gunnar.

In less than a minute, people were asking him, tugging at him, grabbing at him, demanding their time back —and when he didn’t give it back right then and there, things started to get ugly. People were yelling, pushing one