Homesick

When I was a little girl my best friend lived across the street. She would often invite me to spend the night and I’d pack a small bag with my pajamas and toothbrush and proudly walk over with my mom for my overnight adventure. At some point during the night, I’d get homesick and start to cry and Nancy’s dad would wrap me up in a blanket and carry me home to my mom who would be waiting for me by the back door. This happened over and over, and I don’t know why my mom or Nancy’s dad just didn’t give up, but we all kept trying and after many attempts I was finally able to sleep there all night.

Such was the early start of someone who preferred home to most other places. When Mark and I were first married we lived in a basement apartment in Champaign, Illinois, and we would find out within days that there was a massive roach problem. During that time Mark developed a deep and long-lasting hatred for the smell of RAID because I used it so much that he said he could smell it from the parking lot. It got so bad that we had to put baggies over our toothbrushes because the roaches would sit on top of them and eat the dried toothpaste. Six months of that and with both of us teetering on some kind of breakdown, we were able to get out of our lease and move to less creepy digs. I never considered that crappy apartment with its constant parade of cucaraches a home, but Mark? Mark was home.

From there we lived in three different townhouses in three different states before we found our one and only house. I’ve always loved this house and told Mark that often. He loved other things more and wasn’t nearly as enthusiastic as me. Nevertheless, he would proudly show it and the yard off and say, “It’s all Kath. She’s the one who’s made everything look so great.” Now without him here, I don’t even know what to call it. It’s no longer “our house” and saying “my house” sticks in my throat and burns with loss. It doesn’t feel so much like a home but more like a bed and breakfast with phantom hosts.

Last week I had to go to the med center for a dermatology appointment. The fact that I could get in after calling two days earlier was some kind of miracle and I was feeling pretty good about taking care of something that I’d neglected for two years. That didn’t last long as the campus came into view and I started crying before I made it to the parking garage. On prior late afternoon appointments I’d have, I would call Mark when I was done to see if he could meet me for coffee. He always had some fire to put out and would say he wished he could but that he was too busy. I’d be disappointed and say, “Or we could grab an early dinner and you could get those chicken wings you love, but if you’re too busy that’s okay. Maybe another time.” He’d tell me to hold on, that maybe he could hurry and finish things up, that he’d meet me at the back of his building in twenty minutes. I’d park by the loading dock and wait for him and he’d come running out the back door, get in the car, kiss me, and tell me what a great idea I had. All the while I’d congratulate myself for using the ace-in-my-pocket-chicken-wings that he’d fall for every time.

At my appointment the nurse kept looking at me and said that I looked really familiar to him. I said he probably had me mixed up with someone else but I wondered if maybe he was on one of the buses that came from the med center for Mark’s funeral. “Maybe you saw me in a church two years ago,” I wanted to say. “When I stood in front of a couple hundred people and talked about the life of my husband and my voice had only the slightest crack at the end. How I told stories of how funny and passionate he was, how I begged everyone to remember how he lived rather than how he died, how I asked them to tell our kids stories about their dad because they were looking at me in the front row and all I really wanted to say to them was that I was so goddamn sorry that I wasn’t able to keep him here for them.” But instead of saying all that I shoved a fingernail into the palm of my hand to keep from crying as he kept looking at me and saying, “I swear I’ve met you.”

That afternoon I got three pre-cancerous spots frozen off the side of my face. A different nurse said I got the award for strongest patient of the day because I never flinched. “People always flinch,” he said. “You were perfectly still and a dozen shots of liquid nitrogen to the face just about makes everyone jump off the table.”

“I’ve been through worse,” I said. Then I walked to the parking garage, paid my parking fee, and drove away from Mark’s other home without him running out of his building towards me, without him getting in the car and tilting my head to take a long look at what they did, without him saying, “I’m glad you took care of that so you’ll be around to keep bribing me with chicken wings.”