Читать книгу Betrayal In Blood - Michael Benson - Страница 22

CHAPTER 15

A Bad One

In 2001, Chris Winebrenner lived with his brother, Cyril, for a couple of months.

“While they were staying together, they had gotten into an argument. I don’t know what it was about. I never asked. I figured that was between the boys,” Ginny said.

Chris moved back to Minnesota, living not far from home, and was working at a McDonald’s. Cyril was working at Lakeside Casino, in Osceola, Iowa. He was a dealer there.

Ginny’s sister Denise and her husband, Jimmy, both worked at the Lakeside Casino. Denise was a dealer and Jimmy worked security.

“Cyril got hired on and he wanted to be a dealer. That’s what he got hired on for, and they trained him. He could deal all the games,” Ginny said.

It was autumn; Thanksgiving approached.

“My husband had gone deer hunting, and he came back on a Friday,” Ginny said. “That Sunday, Chris was going to stop over and see him before he went to work at McDonald’s. Well, they called him in early at McDonald’s, so Chris called us and said he’d see us afterward.

“Well, we heard the helicopters go, and me and Cleo were saying, ‘That must have been a bad one.’ About an hour and a half later, we got a call from the hospital that Chris had been hurt in a head-on collision. They thought we should get there right away.”

They got in the car and Cleo somehow managed to drive down to the hospital. Chris was in the intensive-care trauma unit. He had been driving a compact car and had crashed head-on with a truck. He was being treated for massive trauma to the head.

“For the first three days, they said we couldn’t talk to him, and we couldn’t touch him. The only thing we could do was go in once a day and say, ‘Hi. We’re here. We love you.’ That was it. We couldn’t actually touch him because he would react. And with the head injury, they didn’t want the added stimulation.

“Cyril couldn’t get there until Wednesday night. That was the same time my daughters got there. I had called them and told them he wasn’t going to make it. So they were all there. Cleo and me hadn’t had any sleep, so they sent us home, and we wanted someone there all the time.

“By Wednesday evening they said we could talk to him all we wanted. He could have visitors. And on Thursday morning, he died—and that was Thanksgiving Day,” Ginny said.

Samantha recalled, “Mom called to tell us that Chris had been in an accident. He was in ICU. Tab and I flew out. They said for a time that he was getting better. Then he wasn’t and they said there was nothing they could do and it was just a matter of time. So we took off his life support, and he died.”

The whole family gathered for Chris’s funeral. Ginny’s dad was there, and the man, who had spent a lifetime in industrial hard-facing, was not acting himself. He recently had been diagnosed as suffering from dementia.

“My dad was there, even though he wasn’t too sure who I was,” Ginny said, adding that his senility was “only getting worse.”

Chris’s November 27, 2001, obituary in the Elk River Star News & Shopper read:

Christopher L. “Chris” Winebrenner, 18, of Mount Ayr, Iowa, formerly of Big Lake, died Thursday, November 22, 2001, as a result of an automobile accident. His funeral service was held November 24 at Dare’s Funeral Service in Elk River. He is survived by his parents, Cleo and Ginny of Big Lake; grandfather, Cyril Hentges of Blackduck; brothers and sisters, Samantha Bassett, Tabatha (Kevin) Bryant of Rochester, N.Y., Cyril (Patricia) of Jasper, N.Y., Rick of Osceola, Iowa and Charlie of Indiana; Nephews, Steven and Kevin Bryant and Brian Winebrenner; special aunt, Tammy (Russell) Hentges of Princeton; cousin, Emmy Lu (Brian) Howard of Big Lake; and many other aunts, uncles, cousins and friends. Memorials are preferred.

Chris’s death started a family tradition to celebrate his birthday, which was July 15. Ginny said, “We have a special thing we do every year on his birthday. Chris always wanted to go to the casino, so we saved nickels. We were going to do that when he turned eighteen, but we took him to New York instead. Now we still save nickels and on Chris’s birthday we take someone else and they get to be Chris for the day.

“I know it sounds morbid. Last year, 2004, we didn’t do it because we couldn’t afford it, so my niece Jamie went to the casino and spent twenty bucks. She said Chris had no luck at all.”

After Chris’s death Ginny located the knife that Samantha had given Chris for his eighteenth birthday, but the shirt with the dragon on it that Tabby had given him couldn’t be found.

“I don’t know what happened to that,” Ginny said.

After Tabby returned home following Chris’s funeral, she and her mom talked on the phone frequently—certainly a lot more frequently than the once-a-month they had spoken when Tabby was a child.

“Tabby and I talked a lot,” Ginny remembered. “She would call me once or twice a week. Sometimes she would call me up and just say, ‘Mom, you’re awesome.’ I’d say, ‘I love you, too.’” And she’d say, ‘Well, gotta go,’ and hang up. That was kind of the norm for her.”

When Tabby and Kevin were having marital problems, a situation that grew progressively worse, Tabby would call her mother in tears and they would have long conversations.

“We would talk for three, four hours sometimes,” Ginny said.

Sometimes when Tabby was having trouble getting her boys to go to sleep, she would call her mom so Ginny could sing them to sleep, the way she had sung her to sleep when she was a baby.