Chapter 40

It was hard to adapt to life without Dave.

In my younger days I had been a pretty independent person, mostly responsible only to and for myself. Back in my college days Cat and I had been together for a long time and we had learned to take care of each other, but that had ended when she got married and I had to go it alone. It had been hard to learn to stand up by myself without her around, but I did it.

Then came the years I spent with Dave, and we had been very co-dependent, much closer than I had been with Cat. You would think that I would have been able to draw on the experience of my independent years to reorder my life once again, but it proved harder than you would think.

The big reason for that was that I now had Jayde (and I have to spell it that way now, since the change came along somewhere about that time.) I hadn’t had to take care of a teenager when I was in my free years, but this was different.

Jayde had been a good kid, nothing like the problem that some children that age were. We were pretty close in a number of ways, and she had been a huge help in Dave’s last years. I had thought that she managed herself pretty well during the period of Dave’s illness and incapacity; only later was I to learn how deep an impression it had left on her.

Dave’s businesses and investments had left him (and us) relatively wealthy. In the last few years, as his health was continually heading downhill he had slowly divested himself of most of that with my help, especially the things that needed careful attention. Most of the money was moved into relatively safe ongoing investments such as low-risk mutual funds that would provide for me comfortably for the rest of my life, and also cover the cost of Jayde’s college assuming that she didn’t try to become a lifelong professional student. That meant that I would never have to go back to work again, and that was not as joyful a prospect as you might believe.

Moose wound up buying several of the businesses, and while the debt load was high for a while, he was on the way to being a wealthy man himself. He also bought the shop that Dave had used for his car hobbies, since I had no further use for it, and helped me sell off most of Dave’s collection of cars, a couple of which were very valuable.

I was still a relatively young woman, only fifty-two when I became a widow. I had always been an active person, and it was clear that I was going to need something to fill my time. I couldn’t just sit around the empty (oh, so empty!) house and stare at the four walls; I had to be doing something.

Jayde was still a freshman in high school when her father died. Once it had a chance to sink in, we sat down and had a talk about the future, and whether we wanted to even stay in the house or move somewhere else. I even suggested that we move to Hawaii, just to get away from the San Francisco damp in the winter. While she liked the idea of Hawaii, she didn’t want to leave her friends, and didn’t want to leave the house that contained so many pleasant memories of her father. I couldn’t disagree with her, although it was years before I could walk in the door and remember that Dave wasn’t there and never would be again.

After the death of her father Jayde turned to her schoolwork with a vengeance. She had always been a good student, but now she approached her studies with a single-minded devotion that was a little scary to witness. Many times I had to remind her to stop and smell the roses, and that there was more to life than schoolbooks. I had taught Jayde the basics of bouldering when she had still been a rather young girl, and while we never did anything extreme there were times when I just about had to drag her out to some cliff just to get her to ease up on life a little.

It was not until some years later that the depth of the impression that her father’s death had came home to me, and I’m not sure Jayde realized it fully herself at the time. When the time came for her to go to college, she immersed herself in her studies, and at the end of her freshman year she declared a pre-med major. It was only then I learned that while looking at her father lying on his deathbed, Jayde had decided she was going to be a doctor – and not just any doctor, but an oncologist specializing in research. Cancer was her personal enemy, and she wanted to be there for the kill.

I could not fault her judgment nor stand in her way, and I did everything I could to help her achieve her goal. She did her father and me so proud that I wished there were some way I could tell him of what a wonderful daughter he had fathered.

By the time Jayde was in college she did not need me hovering over her all the time, and if anyone knew the value of giving a child the room to grow, I did. Besides, I knew that another crisis was approaching.

A little after this time on Joe’s timeline my father had started to show the signs of suffering from Alzheimer’s disease. Although it was not particularly noticeable at first, he steadily deteriorated, and Mom went through several years of caring for him. I, as Joe, had helped where I could, but I had been on the road in the truck most of the time, so most of the weight fell on Mom. It dragged on for years, a terrible ordeal for both of them and it took a lot out of Mom, who had been rather frail and weak after he died.

With Dave gone I decided that as soon as Jayde was comfortably in college, I would spend as much of my time as I could in Simsville helping Mom care for Dad. It was something I felt I needed to do, if for no more reason than to make up for the lack of help I had been the first time around.

It didn’t work out that way. I hadn’t been noticing many discontinuities between timelines in recent years, but mostly because I hadn’t been looking. In those years in his timeline Joe had not been paying very much attention to events very far beyond the cab of the truck; in my timeline, dealing with Dave had taken much of my attention. Between them and the fact that I had little contact with Joey anyway, there just hadn’t been much that attracted my notice.

So it was a huge surprise when a welcome discontinuity struck: Dad died of a sudden heart attack on September 12, 2001.

I remembered well the Twin Towers going down; as Joe, Tom, and I had been having a break in a truck stop and saw it on TV. Though we knew we should have gotten back on the road, we sat there watching, mesmerized at the scene.

But in this timeline I was surprised when the towers went down on September 11; it was September 13 on Timeline One, and it was called “Black Thursday” instead of 9/11. Despite the discontinuity of the date change, it would have been nice to do something about it, but I realized there was nothing I could do. Oh, I could give a warning, but who would believe me, and why would they have reason to? Trends don’t change . . .

In any case, Jayde and I had to get to Simsville for Dad’s funeral, and we couldn’t fly because the airlines were shut down. However, we had an acquaintance who desperately needed to get to Chicago, so the three of us piled into my car (a Chevy Impala, if you must know – I was never one to have ostentatious cars even though I could now afford them.) We put the pedal to the metal and let ’er roll, to use a phrase that Joe would have used in his timeline.

Jayde had only had her driver’s license for a few months at that time, but she carried her share of the load. We only stopped for fuel, potty stops, and to raid the snack racks. I think our longest pit stop was something on the order of ten minutes before we were on the road again. Even with a brief stop in Chicago to drop off our friend, we made the crossing in thirty-two hours straight, and in plenty of time for Dad’s funeral.

Of course I could say nothing about it, but Dad’s death created a problem for me: I had intended on spending my next few years caring for him, and now I didn’t need to. While it was hard to lose my father, who had given me a great deal of freedom and even more love without as much as I should have given him in return, at least we were spared the long agony of his drawn-out death.

Now it was going to be Mom who was going to be at loose ends. As a recent widow, I was very familiar with the problem, and as Jayde and I returned to California at a somewhat more sedate pace, I thought about what I might be able to do.

Mom and Dad had never been able to do much traveling, and they had often said that they’d envied my globetrotting in my younger years. Mom really wasn’t much to want to visit some of the places overseas where I had been; perhaps she had taken my tales of some of those armpits a little too seriously. But she was interested in seeing some of the west, and some of the places I had climbed.

By spring she was predictably going nuts from boredom, so I suggested we take a little tour, and I was a little surprised when she took me up on it. I bought a moderately sized motor home, and with Jayde the three of us spent much of the summer touring the west.

Since Mom had been spared much of the agony of Dad’s long death, she was in a little better shape than she had been at this point on Timeline One, so she could get out and walk a little. We did, and we even went up some easy mountains so she could get some idea of why I had that passion in my life. She was even perfectly willing to watch Jayde and I climb the odd cliff here and there, although she was not exactly willing to join us since she was over eighty now. That trip was something of a revelation to me as well; we went to several places that I had missed in my younger days when I was racing from one piece of vertical topography to another.

The trip did a remarkable amount of good for Mom, and it was good for Jayde, too. Until then her only grandmother had only been an occasional presence in her life, so that turned the two of them into friends. It was so much so that when Jayde was admitted to the University of Michigan medical school a few years later, Mom’s house in Simsville became something of her second home. I just wished that Jayde had been able to know her grandfather better, and when he had been in better shape, although heaven only knew what hot rod he might have built for her . . .

That trip went so well that the three of us did a similar if somewhat shorter tour in the east the following summer. We stopped off to see Steve and Cat along the way, of course; their kids were all grown and out of the house by then, off having families and adventures of their own, and they had recently become grandparents, something Cat was having a little trouble learning to deal with. They were now only a few years from retirement, and they had little idea of what they wanted to do when that happened.

The trip around the east ended early because Jayde was off to college and we had to get home in time to get her prepared for it. She had done very well in high school, and was her class valedictorian, another thing her father would have been very proud of; her mother was just bursting with pride. But now, with Jayde off in college, I had more time on my hands than ever.

In Jayde’s last few months of high school the Second Gulf War had broken out. I had paid relatively little attention to the first a dozen years earlier, since I had a small child in the household and my mind was more on that. Though the buildup was long, the war was brief, and there had been little of the acrimony that had so polluted the country during the agonizing days of Vietnam.

The Second Gulf War was different. There was opposition to the war, and in my mind it was legitimate, but it was admittedly muted compared to Vietnam. As the war dragged on endlessly, even longer than Vietnam, I halfway started expecting the solders to start to be blamed for the war by the public and the anti-war activists once again, but fortunately it didn’t happen. It seemed as if there had been a few lessons learned from those bad days of the sixties and the seventies. Vietnam may have been a bad war, but to demonize the men who had no choice but to fight it was incredibly disgraceful, cruel, and mean-spirited at best. The people who did so brought themselves no honor and deserve all the contempt they can be given.

One day I was at the airport terminal baggage pickup waiting for Jayde, who was flying in for a few days for a break from medical school. I knew it would be good to see her again, for our lives had grown apart and she was wrapped up in her studies, even though we stayed on good terms. Her plane was late, and I had little I could do but wait around for it to show up.

While I was waiting, a uniformed soldier – a sergeant – came into the baggage pickup. It turned out that there was a whole group of people waiting for him, with “Welcome Home” signs and the like. I stood there and almost cried at the memory of Joey coming back from Vietnam with only his family and Cat there to greet him, and then getting spat on.

I soon realized that there were people there greeting him who were not his family and friends – some of them had come off the plane or other planes and were looking for their baggage, but they stopped and shook his hand, greeted him, and hugged him. How times had changed, I thought; such a thing could not have happened in the Vietnam era.

On impulse, I joined the throng, and spent a quick second hugging him. “Thank you for serving your country,” I said to this stranger.

“Thank you,” he replied. “That means a lot to me. I was proud to be there to do it.”

There were other people waiting to greet him, so I stepped back to just watch this incredible scene I could not have imagined happening forty years before, and found myself standing next to a man about my age. “It’s good to see, isn’t it?” he said.

“It certainly is,” I agreed.

“I was in Vietnam,” he went on, “And I never even dared to wear my uniform when I came home, since we were hated so much. Now while I’m glad to see that times have changed, I look at some of these people and wonder, ‘Where were you when we needed you?’”

“I can’t agree more,” I told him. “But I’ll tell you where I was, and it wasn’t carrying anti-war signs or spitting on returning soldiers. I was there, mostly to let guys like you know that someone still cared.”

“You were there?” he replied, eyebrows raised.

“I was a Red Cross worker,” I explained. “I was in Phan Loc for fifteen months trying to help guys remember that they had a home to go back to, and that not everyone hated them.”

He stepped back a little, looked at me, frowned, and then exclaimed. “My God! You’re JoJo!”

That was a name I had heard very little over the years. Dave had quit calling me that before we were off the plane to Taiwan, but it took a little while for us to break Moose of using it. Now, at this moment, thanks to that young soldier I had hugged a minute before, I was especially proud to have been JoJo and do what I had done. “I used to go by that name,” I smiled.

Before I had a chance to react I was wrapped in a big hug. “Thank you, JoJo!” he cried, his eyes literally filled with tears. “Thank you for everything. I have wanted to thank you for years and years, and now I can.”

“I just tried to do my duty like that young man over there,” I told him.

“Honey,” he said to a woman standing nearby. “This is JoJo, the woman I told you about, the woman who saved our marriage by setting me straight about Mom.”

I started to have a vague recollection of the incident. I had counseled a lot of young men who were torn up over family problems, but this one had stuck in my mind as being a little unusual.

Then both of them were hugging me at the same time. “Oh, thank you!” she said. “I’ve wanted to thank you ever since he came back from Vietnam and we figured out what his mother was up to.”

“I’m sorry I don’t remember your name,” I finally managed to tell him. “There were so many names, so many faces, and it was a very long time ago. But I think I remember the story. If I recall correctly, your mother was telling you that your wife was cheating on you so you would get a divorce and marry the daughter of some friend of hers, right?”

“You were dead right,” he smiled. “I mean, having my girl cheating on me was something I could believe was happening to me since it happened to a lot of guys back then, but you told me to stop, think it over, and do some investigation before I did anything rash. You gave me good advice, JoJo. Kathy went with me when I was ordered to Ft. Gordon, and we stayed in Georgia after that. The gal Mom was trying to push on me has been married five times since then, cheated on every one of her husbands – and the last I heard was a while ago so it could be more now. Kathy and I have been together nearly forty years now and it’s thanks to you.”

“I suspect that the two of you had something to do with it, too,” I laughed. “But I’m very happy to hear that I gave you some good advice.”

“I’ve thought about you a thousand times,” the woman said, “And I can’t understand how a woman could have been so brave to do what you did. I mean, it must have been hard enough for the men, but a woman, it had to be even harder.”

“It was all part of the job,” I told her. “I think the Red Cross realized that sometimes a man needs a woman to talk to so he can make sense of things. There was no bravery involved. Well, not much. It was more a case of being willing to care.”

We talked for another few minutes; it was rare that I ran into someone who had been in Phan Loc in those days, other than Moose, of course. It took me back to something that was long ago, yet still very fresh in my memory. In my mind’s eye, I could see the ugly hooches, the roar of the helicopters, the blowing dust, and the men, all far from home, many lonely and troubled with nothing much for solace except the bottle – and the Red Cross Canteen and the handful of us who worked there.

Like that young soldier, I was proud to have been there and serve my country.

While I haven’t exactly shouted it from the rooftops, I’ve never made a secret of my time as a donut dolly, either; there are some of us who were strong in the job but couldn’t take the abuse when they returned home. There were never a lot of us; there were only about six hundred and fifty in the six years the Red Cross had SRAOs in-country. When people asked me about my time in Vietnam, I didn’t know how to answer. You can’t possibly make people understand what it was like. How do you tell someone it was the most wonderful and the most terrible experience of your life? How can you tell them that you don’t regret the bad times since your life has been so much richer for having the experience?

Eventually the young soldier and his family and friends left to go home or wherever they were going, and my old acquaintance and his wife left too, leaving me standing there waiting for Jayde. My mind was full of memories of good times and bad, but with the satisfaction that I really had done the right thing and that after forty years the country had finally caught up with me.

I don’t know how long I waited, but eventually Jayde came down to the baggage pickup, and came into my arms. “Mom,” she said, “you’ve been crying. I can see it. Is something the matter?”

“No, Jayde,” I told her. “There’s nothing the matter. I was just remembering some old times, some of them good, some of them not so good. It’s nothing you’d understand. In fact, I’m not sure I understand it myself.”