Читать книгу The Homer King - Larry Fournier - Страница 5

CHAPTER ONE

The Family

It was a Saturday morning in May 2017, and Blain Duncan’s cell phone was ringing. As he picked it up, he noted that the time was 7:35 a.m. As it was a nonworking day, Blain was trying to enjoy some extra sleep time, so he was somewhat annoyed to observe that the early caller was his older brother Kyle, who lived in their hometown of Burley, Idaho. Blain thought, Why couldn’t he have respected that hour time-zone difference and called me at a decent time?

“Hey, man, what’s with the early call?” Blain inquired with a little testy strain in his voice.

“Blain, it’s Dad. He went in for medical tests in Twin Falls yesterday, and he has been diagnosed with prostate cancer. The doctors think it is possibly stage III level. Mom and all of us are still in shock. Sorry we did not call you last night, but we weren’t exactly thinking clearly on how to deal with this shocking news.”

“That’s terrible. How bad is it? Is it going to be treatable?” Blain inquired.

Kyle replied that their dad was due to go back to the clinic the following Tuesday, and they would be better informed on a course of action then. He promised he would get back to Blain after the next doctor’s visit and give him an update. Kyle suggested that Blain should call home and talk to their mom and dad directly.

“Good idea, Kyle. I’ll do that today.”

“What’s wrong?” Blain’s wife, Alene, asked, as she was now awake and hearing only one end of the conversation.

“It’s Dad—he has cancer, and it doesn’t sound good.”

“What! That’s awful,” she replied. “So what can we do about it besides lots of prayers?”

Blain told her that he had no knowledge yet if it could be treated but said that his father would be going back to the clinic in Twin Falls on Tuesday and that he should know more then.

Blain was not looking forward to making the phone call home, as he could just imagine the shock and gloom that would prevail following the news from yesterday. However, he knew it was what he should do, so he dialed the phone, and his father picked it up.

“Hi, Dad. Kyle called me with your bad medical news. How are you doing? Better yet, how is Mom?”

“Thanks for calling, Blain. We are just digesting the diagnosis, and right now, we will have to leave it in the Lord’s hands.”

“Great, Dad. I feel kind of helpless here in San Diego and with you being 1,500 miles away from here.”

Terry Duncan, Blain’s father, assured him that he should just carry on, and they would keep him informed as more became known.

Blain’s dad called him on Tuesday night and said that he would be honest and not try to hide the truth. “They had done a lot of tests last Friday, and now the doctors tell me that it is definitely stage III prostate cancer and that they have assigned it level 8 on the Gleason scale.”

“What’s that, Dad?”

“It is one of the measures that they use to more accurately describe how far it has advanced.”

“Okay, so where does yours measure at?”

“Not good, and that is all I know right now. I will be starting to take some treatments soon, and they think that a combination of chemotherapy and radiation is the best course.”

“Wow! I think that means a lot of side effects from the treatments and that you will be out of action and resting a lot,” Blain responded.

“Probably. The treatments will most likely take place in Salt Lake City at the Huntsman Cancer Institute. I am not sure how much that I will be able to do down at the dealership during the treatments. It is going to make Kyle’s job a lot more intense.”

The Duncan family owned a long-existing farm equipment sales and service dealership in Burley called, not surprisingly, Duncan Farm Equipment, which had been started by Terry’s father, Roscoe Duncan, back in 1955. Terry grew up around the business, finally taking over when Roscoe retired in 1983. By then, Terry was married to Helen Jean McDermott, known to everyone as Jean, and soon they had two sons—Kyle, born in 1986, and then Blain, born in 1990. Like their father, the boys spent a lot of time at the dealership learning about farm equipment and doing various odd jobs, like prepping machines prior to delivery and cleaning up around the place.

Blain was a straight arrow whom his parents could always trust, and like his older brother, they would have few worries throughout his teen years. He became an Eagle Scout and was a star baseball player for his high school team. Unlike Kyle who, after high school, had stayed on in Burley working at the family business, Blain wanted to go on to college and study engineering. He was always good in math and science and thought it would be a career path for him. Four months prior to his high school graduation, he applied to several colleges that had a reputation for having a good engineering department. He was accepted at Montana Tech University in Butte, Montana, and enrolled there as a freshman in 2010. He had done well at the university, graduating with a Bachelor of Science in Electrical Engineering in mid-2014. He had studied hard, stayed close to his Christian beliefs, and graduated with honors.

Back in Burley, his family members were all very proud and supportive of him and his career plans to work in the field of engineering. After many interviews, he accepted a job offer from a large national wind power-generating company that owned and operated several wind farms in Southern California. While its headquarters were in New York City, it maintained a large regional office in San Diego. That was where Blain began his first employment for someone other than his father, arriving at his new job in August 2014.

He found a suitable Christian church right away, and on his third Sunday at church, he was invited to go along with some other single fellows and girls to a group singles dinner. The hosts were two girl roommates with a condo in Mission Valley, where the social get-together was held. There, he met Alene Scott—who was to become his future wife, although they scarcely knew each other yet. Alene was from Yuba City, California, and had attended college at San Diego State University, graduating with a degree in microbiology.

After her graduation, she decided to remain in San Diego and take a position there with a biotech firm. It paid well, the weather was great, and she had lots of single friends from work and her church.

Alene was a pretty girl with blond hair and the most strikingly beautiful hazel eyes. At age twenty-two, she still had not met anyone with whom she wanted to make a lifetime commitment. Some of her girl pals from church had immediately noticed the tall, good-looking new guy who had just moved to San Diego from Idaho. Alene made a point of talking with him at the Sunday get-together, and in their discussion, they soon learned the basic facts about their respective backgrounds. No red flags went up for either of them, and so it was not surprising that Blain asked her out on a date for the coming Friday evening.

Soon they were dating exclusively, then became engaged, and finally made the step of introducing each other to their families back home in Northern California and Idaho. In June 2015, they were married in her hometown of Yuba City and moved into an apartment in north San Diego. Both their jobs were in that part of the city, and with their two cars, they could commute separately because their hours were not quite the same. Life was as good as it could be for these newlyweds with their good jobs and lots of friends.

It was two years into their marriage that their settled, calm life was interrupted by the urgent phone call from Kyle with the bad news of the cancer diagnosis. Three weeks later, Kyle called Blain again to inform him that due to the side effects from the cancer treatments, their father could no longer come to the business despite some valiant efforts to do just that for a few hours a day. He could give Kyle advice and direction from home, but it became obvious that the day-to-day management and supervision of the business was suffering.

Kyle had always been more of the hands-on mechanical type, overseeing the prep and delivery of machinery, running the parts and service department, and doing most of the field service calls. He had little knowledge or ability with the administrative management duties of the dealership, like overseeing sales and marketing, the accounting and payroll function, and equipment ordering and trade-ins, just to name a few of the important duties that their father had responsibility for. The two salesmen, one full time and one part-time, needed day-to-day direction. Another factor was that the long-time bookkeeper, Jane Woodall, had given notice that she would be retiring as soon as a suitable replacement for her could be hired. She was willing to stay on and help train the new person.

The bottom line was that Kyle was just overwhelmed by taking on all their father’s duties on top of his own. Could Blain please come back home and help run the company? It was not being said out loud, but the brothers knew by then that their father would not be around too much longer. Blain responded that he would discuss the situation with Alene and get back to Kyle.

The discussion between Blain and Alene that followed was, they knew, life-changing. To give up two excellent-paying jobs, their friends, the great San Diego weather, and all they were enjoying and make the move to a farming town in eastern Idaho was a challenge, to say the least.

They did a lot of praying about it, and Blain came to the conclusion that if Alene would support the idea, it would be the right thing for them to do. His family needed his presence and help at the family business at this critical time.

Alene told him, “I love you, Blain, and I would go to the North Pole with you if that is what you needed to do.”

He responded, “Well, I will hold you to that thought when it is minus ten degrees in January in Burley.” She said she would expect him to keep her warm and cozy at all times.

So they gave their resignation notices to their employers, who were sorry to lose them but understood that the family crisis was the reason. They packed up what they wanted to take with them, gave away the rest to friends or to Goodwill, sold Alene’s car, and drove north in a U-Haul and their other car, arriving in Burley in early September 2017.

They moved into the downstairs area at his parents’ large home, which comprised a separate living quarters with a kitchen and two bedrooms. It would be just fine for the time being. Terry and Jean were, of course, just thrilled to have them there, as well as the prospect of Blain stepping in to help Kyle at the family business.

It was decided that Alene could help out part-time at the dealership, splitting her time there and also helping Jean out at home now that Terry was bedridden most of the time, except when he was gone for treatments in Salt Lake City. It was a new role for her after being a career gal, but she knew that this was what she should be doing—supporting her husband and his family. At the dealership, she took on some administrative duties, like keeping the place clean and orderly for customers and arranging the paperwork for equipment purchase and sales.

Blain became the general manager, replacing his father, which was okay with Kyle, who wanted only to do what he had always done—the service calls and running the equipment repair shop. Blain and Alene made some new friends who were young couples from the local church they had decided to join, some of whom had been high school friends of Blain. They also spent quality time with Kyle and his wife, Katy, who by now had a five-year-old son and two-year-old daughter.

A new bookkeeper had been hired and trained by the departing Ms. Woodall. It was not long before Blain realized that he had a problem with the new person. She was a divorcee in her late twenties with two young children and was quite attractive. Unfortunately, she started to make it obvious that she was strongly attracted to Blain, and by her actions, it made him start to feel very uncomfortable being around her. Despite making it clear to her that he was happily married and not interested in her, she continued her rather forward remarks; and when she pressed herself against him while going over some financial statements, he knew that he needed to end the situation by replacing her. He gave her a month’s severance pay and hired a middle-aged, competent lady to take her place. Fortunately, Ms. Woodall volunteered to come back for a week to train the new lady.

Alene wondered why the sudden change in bookkeepers, so Blain felt that he should level with her and explain the reason for the change. Things settled down as they lived this rather routine, farm-country lifestyle, but little did they know that soon everything would change due to a series of life-altering events.