ALL THE YOUNG MEN

ALL THE YOUNG MEN

A Memoir of Love, AIDS, and Chosen Family in the American South

RUTH COKER BURKS

&

KEVIN CARR O’LEARY

Copyright © 2020 by Ruth Coker Burks

Names and identifying details of some of the people portrayed in this book have been changed.

Jacket design by Becca Fox Design

Jacket photograph by Thomas Jordan © 2018

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FIRST EDITION

Published simultaneously in Canada

Printed in Canada

This book was designed by Norman E. Tuttle at Alpha Design & Composition

This book was set in 13 pt. Spectrum MT by Alpha Design & Composition of Pittsfield, NH.

First Grove Atlantic hardcover edition: December 2020

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication data is available for this title.

ISBN 978-0-8021-5724-9

eISBN 978-0-8021-5726-3

Grove Press

an imprint of Grove Atlantic

154 West 14th Street

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For Paul & Billy

Part One

Chapter One

I watched the three nurses drawing straws.

The tallest one drew the short straw, which I thought was funny. She was a redhead, wearing a lipstick so purple you knew she didn’t have a good friend to tell her it wasn’t right for her.

I was at the hospital that weekend looking after one of my best girlfriends. Bonnie was stuck at the Med Center in Little Rock, recovering from cancer surgery. She was thirty-one and I was twenty-six —both too young for this stuff. She’d gotten tongue cancer and never smoked a day in her life. For years, Bonnie had worked at the newspaper, typesetting at night, but quit when she got sick.

They had her on a feeding tube in the hospital, and she couldn’t talk, but she was good with a pen, and I was good at translating her scrawl to make sure she got what she needed. Bonnie spent a lot of time sleeping, so I spent a lot of time pacing the halls. I have never been able to sit still.

“Let’s do four out of six,” said Red.

“You said best two out of three,” said the short one. She looked up at an older brunette who seemed to be in charge.

“Well, I am not going in there,” said Red.

All three of them kept glancing down a long hall. At the end was a door covered in a blood-red tarp with a sign I couldn’t quite read. As the nurses argued, I got curious. So I just casually started pacing down the hall, kind of walking on tiptoe so my heels wouldn’t click on the floor. As I got closer to that red door, I saw there were about six Styrofoam food trays on the floor of the hall, left with no care, like they were feeding a dog. And right outside, a cart full of head-to-toe isolation suits and masks. I could read the sign now: BIOHAZARD.

There was the slightest sound coming from the room, and I leaned in closer to hear.

“Help.”

It was so plaintive and small that I pulled the tarp aside to peek in. And there he was, this young man, stretched out on the bed and down to all of about eighty-five pounds. You couldn’t tell him from the sheets. I stood right in the doorway. “What do you need, honey?” I asked.

“I want my mama,” he said. I had a little three-year-old, Allison. She spent the weekends at her daddy’s house. I knew from wanting your mama, and I knew his mother would want to help her sweet child.

“Okay,” I said, stepping farther into the room. “I’m gonna call her. What’s your name, honey?”

“Jimmy.”

“Okay, Jimmy,” I said. “I promise you I’ll call her.”

Well, I marched out to the nurses’ station, this time letting my heels click on that damn floor so they would know I was coming. I had just become a blonde—thanks to bleach and my hairdresser cousin Raymond—and I found that I could get people’s attention quicker than when I was a brunette.

“You didn’t go in that room, did you?” said the older one.

“Well, yeah, I did,” I said. “Listen, that young man, Jimmy, is asking for his mama.”

“Are you crazy?” said the short one. “He’s got that gay disease. They all die.”

I’ll admit, I got scared. This was in the early spring of 1986, and there was plenty of fear to go around about how you really caught AIDS. When I visited my cousin Raymond in Hawaii, I had asked him about it because I was scared for him and his friends. We were all alone in his salon, so he could speak freely. “It’s only hitting the leather guys in San Francisco,” he told me. “God knows what they’re doing to get it.” I didn’t know what the heck a leather guy was, but he wasn’t dressed in leather, so at least it wouldn’t happen to him.

AIDS was spreading, and people were swearing you could get it from gays sitting on toilet seats and using swimming pools, from doorknobs and licked stamps on envelopes in the mail. I lived in Hot Springs, the Sin City of Arkansas, a resort town an hour down the road from Little Rock. It had about a quarter of the population of Little Rock but untold numbers of visitors who came for a good time. Brothels, bathhouses, you name it. So if gays touching doorknobs was gonna kill you, we’d all be dead already.

“I’ll call his mama if I need to,” I said. “Would you please give me the number?”

“She ain’t coming,” said the old one in charge. “He’s been here six weeks. Nobody is coming.”

“Just give me her number,” I said. “If she knew her son was this bad . . .”

“Suit yourself,” she said, as the others smirked. She made a huge production of finding a next-of-kin form and scrawled the number down. Instead of handing it to me, she kinda tossed it, like now she was scared of me.

“Thank you,” I said, all Southern charm and malice. I went to reach for their phone, and she pulled it away quick.

“Unh unh,” she said. “There’s a pay phone right over there.”

I turned on my heel like I wouldn’t want to use theirs anyway and went over to the pay phone. I picked up the phone, all bravado, but then I lost my nerve, thinking about telling the poor woman her son was dying. I turned back, and I could see those nurses eyeing me. I put the coin in and dialed.

“Hello,” this sweet voice answered.

“Good afternoon, my name is Ruth Coker Burks, and I am trying to reach the mother of Jimmy—”

Click. She hung up. Now, I had a mean mom. And I’d had a meaner ex-husband. I’d stopped letting things slide. I put in another coin, cursing her as I dialed again.

“You hang up on me again, and I swear to Almighty God I will ask your Jimmy where he’s from and put his obituary in your town paper with his cause of death.” I knew I had her complete attention.

“My son is already dead,” she said, not a touch of sweetness to her now. “My son died when he went gay.”

“No, he is alive, just barely, and he is here begging for you.”

“I don’t know what sinner you’ve got in that hospital, but that thing is not my son.”

“Well, listen to me,” I said, turning to see those damn nurses hanging on every word I was saying. “If you change your mind, he is at the Med Center, fourth floor. And you better come soon.”

“I will do no such thing,” she said. “I won’t claim that body either, so don’t even think about calling me again. Burn it.”

She hung up again. Now I had to figure out how to tell Jimmy his mama wasn’t coming. I walked right by the nurses’ station and refused to look at them for fear of giving them the satisfaction of being right. I click-clacked my heels past them and turned down the hall to his room, walking in before I changed my mind or they stopped me.

I went in, farther this time, walking almost to his bed but still keeping my distance. The room was dim, lit mostly by sunlight from outside. Jimmy looked even frailer up close, and so skinny. With such effort, he turned his head toward me.

“Oh, Mama, I knew you’d come,” he said, in that small, reaching voice. I was so confused I just stood there, my feet glued to the floor. Then he started to cry. He was so dehydrated he could muster only one little tear, but his body was heaving in sobs, and it was so sad that I began to cry for him. Tears rolling right down my face as I just stood there, dumb. But then he tried to reach his hand out to me. I couldn’t not take his hand in mine.

“Mama,” he said again.

“Yes,” I said, squeezing his hand gently. “I’m here.” I don’t know if his vision was going or if he was just so close to dying his mind was seeing what he wanted most in life and death. This was probably the first time someone had touched him in six weeks without two pairs of gloves on. His face was grimy from sweat and drool. You could see the tear marks from the last time he was able to really cry.

“Let me clean you, honey,” I said, in my softest voice. I filled a small basin with warm water, and the smallest amount of soap. I washed his face the way I did my Allison’s when she was just a baby, smoothing a cloth slowly and softly over his skin.

“Mama, I’m sorry,” he said. “I missed you so much.”

“Hush,” I said. “Do you remember what I used to call you when you were just a little thing?”

He paused a long time. “Your angel.”

“That’s right,” I said, brushing back the hair they’d let get greasy and making it as nice as I could. “My angel. Don’t you worry about nothing.”

I pulled a chair over, and I sat with him, holding his hand for about an hour, until he fell asleep. I started to get nervous about abandoning Bonnie, so I gingerly got up and tiptoed out the door. The brighter light of the hallway shocked me into a realization of what I was doing. I’d gone down some kind of rabbit hole, but this was real life. I went right to a bathroom, turning the handle with my elbow and backing in like I’d seen surgeons do on doctor shows.

I grabbed a paper towel without touching anything and used it to turn the hot water on. There I was, scrubbing my hands and arms till they were red raw with about as much soap as they had, then rubbing soap on my face, paying special attention to my mouth and nostrils. I was so scared I’d breathed in something. I swished soapy water in my mouth to be sure, spitting it out, then looking up at my face in the mirror. I stared at that scared blond girl, dressed so nice so people would listen to her if Bonnie needed anything. I took a huge breath. Then another. Big heaving breaths to flush out the air in my body. “Okay,” I said aloud. “Okay.”

Bonnie made smiley eyes at me when I walked in, then furrowed her brow at my face.

“There’s this young man who’s real sick,” I said. “Well, he’s close to my age, but he doesn’t have anyone coming, and I swear to God he thinks I’m his mama. Bonnie, I think he’s gonna die really quick.”

Bonnie took a pen to her pad. HE NEEDS YOU, she wrote. I’M FINE.

“You don’t mind?” I think maybe I wanted her to need me so that I could stay in good conscience.

She shook her head, pointing again to her pad. HE NEEDS YOU.

So I went back to that hallway with the red door. Before I went back in, I stood there and had a little conversation with God. I knew that was Him working through Bonnie telling me I had to go back to Jimmy. “Lord, I’ll take care of this young man if this is what You want,” I said. “But don’t let me get it, okay? I’ve got a daughter I have to raise.” I looked up, waiting for a sign. That’s the thing about God: He keeps you guessing.

When I went in, I took Jimmy’s hand again. He seemed even weaker. I sat there with him all night. Thirteen hours in total. At one point, he got a really frightened look.

“What’s gonna happen?”

“Oh angel, I’m not letting go of this hand here until Jesus takes the other one. I’m gonna stay right here until He says He is ready for you.”

His face softened. People just want to be sure of things sometimes. I spent the next hours holding his hand, singing songs to him, as his breathing grew slower and slower. I had an ache in my belly from not eating, but I didn’t want to leave him, for fear he would die alone. The nurses didn’t visit one single time. No doctor, nothing.

It was just before midnight when Jimmy took his last breath. There was no big moment. He was just here on this earth and then he wasn’t. The room seemed empty. I sat with him for a while after he died. And I cried.

I went out to the nurses’ station and told them Jimmy was dead. It was a new shift of nurses, but they brought the same indifference to him. They seemed relieved, to be honest. Now they just needed to get rid of his body.

“What funeral home?” one asked. Like, let’s move this along and get that thing out of here.

“Well, darned if I know,” I said. “What do you usually do?”

“There is nothing usual about this,” she said. “We need to think of our patients.”

“That young man was your patient too,” I said, but I was too tired to have a fight. “I’ll call someone in the morning.”

I checked in on Bonnie before I left. She was asleep, so I left a note on her pad. “The young man passed,” I wrote. “See you tomorrow.”

As I made the hour’s drive home to Hot Springs, I thought about how cruel people can be. I imagined me in some hospital, lying there unloved and then unclaimed. When I got home, FooFoo greeted me at the door, slinking through my legs looking for dinner. My little house seemed empty with Allison at her daddy’s, and before I went to bed I instinctively checked her room. The moonlight was flowing in, and I went in and sat on her bed. And I cried. I cried more than I did in Jimmy’s room. I just couldn’t imagine not caring what happened to my child. Allison got away from me once at the Arkansas fairgrounds, and the only one more scared than me was her. It was three minutes, and I couldn’t breathe right until I found her and held her. It doesn’t matter if your child’s two or twenty-two. That’s your baby. I couldn’t imagine anyone deserting a child for any reason.

The next morning, I got out the Yellow Pages, and I proceeded to call just about every funeral home in the state of Arkansas. I started close to the hospital, but I had to expand my reach. Every call, as soon as they asked the cause of death, they refused to take him. This was the bubonic plague and leprosy all in one. Finally, I called a black mortuary over in Pine Bluff.

“We’ll do it,” the man said after a very long pause. “But we’ll only cremate him. No viewing. And nothing in the paper.”

I didn’t have the money to spend on a cremation, so when I got to the hospital I told those nurses they needed to figure out a way for the hospital to pay for it, if they wanted him out so bad. This was the first set of nurses again, and when I walked up they all backed away. All of a sudden, they had a fund they used to pay for indigent cremation. There was just one catch: I needed to call his mother one more time to secure permission to cremate. So it was back to the pay phone.

“Jimmy passed, and I have one question,” I said, not giving her a chance to hang up. I actually had a lot of questions, but right then I needed the answer to just one. “Are you okay with him being cremated?”

“Do whatever you want,” she said.

“What about his ashes?” I said.

“They’re yours now,” she said. I heard the receiver click.

The funeral directors said they would only come after hours. I arranged to be there for Jimmy. They came late, wearing these horrible moon suits like they were from outer space. They shoved him in a bag and carried him off without one shred of dignity. I followed them as they hurried out the back door, keeping even this mercy a secret.

Bonnie stayed in the Med Center about a week longer, so when I visited, I saw that Jimmy’s room was closed up for many days, biohazard tape all around the door so no air or germs could escape and catch someone by surprise. No one wanted to even go in there. In the meantime, Bonnie continued to get better and then went home. In Hot Springs, I had plenty to keep my mind off Jimmy. For one, the big drama was that Bonnie’s fiancé, Les, who I think visited her once in the hospital, could not deal with the facts that she’d just had her tongue ripped out and she was bald from chemo and had radiation marks on her face. So he packed up and left her. And there was always sweet Allison to tend to and bills that needed worrying over. This was normal life.

Then Jimmy’s ashes came in the mail. They’d just thrown them in a cardboard box. And I realized his mother was right. They were all mine now. And there was only one place I knew of to put them: Files Cemetery.

When I was ten, my grandmother died in an automobile accident and was buried, like all of our kin since the late 1880s, in Files Cemetery, a quarter-acre lot on top of a hill in Hot Springs. My mother had a big family fight with her brother, my uncle Fred, pretty soon after. At the wake, to be exact. Uncle Fred was standing at my grandmother’s casket on the raised platform at Gross Funeral Home. He’d done something with family land. “Oh Mama, oh Mama, forgive me,” he said, so loud we could all hear him. He was sobbing and rocking the casket. “The greed got in me, and I wanted that property. The devil got in me—”

Here came my mother, running down the aisle. “It’s too late now, you sonuvabitch!” she screamed as she jumped on his back. She pounded on him, and they came rolling down the wheelchair ramp.

As vengeance against him for whatever he had done, my mother then, very casually, oh so quietly, used what little money we had, to purchase every single available plot in Files Cemetery. Two hundred and sixty-two spaces, to be exact. She put a C marker for Coker on each plot, so everyone would know they were hers. When she was done, she spoke to Uncle Fred one final time. “You will never rest with your kin,” she told him. “You will be alone for eternity.”

My uncle had to buy spaces at Memorial Gardens, among what he considered the common folk in town. He died when I was sixteen, and I drove my aunts to the cemetery because I was the only one who was still talking to all of them. Mama said she wasn’t going, but someone hid behind the pillars at the entrance and shot off Roman candles over the hearse as it entered. High in the sky so they would fall over all of us. She wasn’t missing that moment.

So, it would be kind to call my mother eccentric. I’m told she was nice once, before she was sent to the Booneville Tuberculosis Sanatorium when I was six months old. She was a nurse, and she didn’t have tuberculosis, but she did have some rare lung disease. They didn’t believe she didn’t have TB and picked her up in handcuffs to take her up the dirt roads to Booneville. The sanatorium was built so people with TB would never have to leave. It was a village, with its own chapel, grocery, and fire department—and endless rules about contact with the outside world. They put her up on top of that mountain, sleeping on a screened-in porch, and whatever happened to her up there made her lose her mind. They finally let her come home when I was four, just in time for my father to get sick with lung trouble of his own. He died in front of me on Thanksgiving Day when I was five.

In my teens, my mother and I would walk by the graves after church on Sunday. I would stop at my daddy’s grave, still missing him so much. He was nearly sixty when I was born, and I nursed the memories I had of him to keep them fresh in my mind. The times he took me to his parents’ homestead in Florida, where we would float in a tiny boat down the Peace River. He taught me not to be afraid of the alligators we passed or the snakes that hung from the trees. Or at home in Hot Springs, a singular moment I held onto, of me crawling to the TV, racing to the jingle of a Maxwell House coffee percolator commercial, and him putting his finger right in the top back of my diaper to hold me in place. His laugh as he picked me up to tickle me and love on me. That feeling of being lifted and held.

My mother was not the sentimental type, and each time we visited his grave, she would take a deep breath and make a sweeping motion with her arms. “Someday all this will be yours,” she would say with this sarcastic laugh. Even as a kid, I would think, Couldn’t I just inherit a ring? I was an only child. What was I going to do with a cemetery?

Now, I had Jimmy’s ashes, and I felt like his soul couldn’t really rest until he was safely returned to the earth. I knew I would have to do it at night. If word got out that I had buried an AIDS patient, much less taken care of one in a room for hours, there was not a judge in the state of Arkansas—or in America, for that matter—who would not have taken my daughter away from me and given full custody to her father. This was a state with a sodomy law that made consensual sex between two men punishable with up to a year in prison.

I couldn’t afford anything nice to put Jimmy’s remains in for burial, so I went to a friend, Kimbo Dryden, who worked at Dryden Pottery over in Whittington Park. He was a hippie, with long brown hair that made him look like the picture of Jesus that everybody’s grandma has up in her house. But with a patch of snow-white eyelashes that I couldn’t help but stare at. I asked Kimbo if he had anything he could spare. I didn’t tell him what I needed it for. He had a chipped cookie jar he was willing to part with. I got home and poured Jimmy’s ashes in it. Now I had to do it.

I waited for a full moon. Files Cemetery sits up on a hill covered with pines and oaks, plus one magnolia tree. It’s right next to Files Road, so I had to be quick. The ground was covered all year in a carpet of brown pine needles that crunched with every step you took. The sound competed with the caws of mockingbirds, our state bird. The males will sing all night for love, sounding like a mess of porch swings in need of oil, creaking over and over again. I was strangely calm. I know there are people who are afraid of cemeteries, but I have always found them comforting. Especially Files. Maybe because I missed my daddy so much. He was a kind man. I knew that he would like what I did for Jimmy, so I decided to put the hole in the very center of Daddy’s grave. This way I would remember where Jimmy was if Hot Springs found out and I had to get him.

I placed Jimmy by my daddy’s marker to sort of introduce them. I ran my fingers along the raised letters reading “James Isham Coker” and “World War I & World War II.” Born in 1900, he’d just made it into the Navy for the first one and then went back for the second one. When the legion of young veterans returned from World War II to kick out the Mob and run Hot Springs the right way, he was one of the older guys they treated as a respected elder. They were all good men.

“My daddy’s going to look after you, Jimmy,” I said. It’s hard work digging in a cemetery, because they’re always full of rocks. Cemetery land is never worth a damn. If you could grow something on it, it would never have been set aside for the dead.

I managed to pull out a neat circle of red Arkansas dirt. “I’m sorry we only had a short time together. But you’re safe now, okay?”

I placed him in the grave, and I said a prayer for him. I rearranged the pine needles to hide what I’d done, and I looked around as a wind moved through the trees in the cemetery. Once he was safely buried, the magnitude of what I had done hit me. It felt like I was harboring a fugitive. A fear took hold of me that this secret would be my undoing. I thought: What have you gotten yourself into?

Chapter Two

It was spring, so the dogwoods were in bloom. White flowers filled the hills, which were dotted with lavender and pink dots of redbuds. That’s when the white bass start running. They’re mating, and everyone else in Hot Springs is too. If you find a creek where they’re at, you can literally dip-net them. The fish, I mean, but that was also my friend Sandy’s approach to men. In 1986, she was on a mission from God to get a husband. She was so fun, and she was the one who taught me how to be blond.

“I saw Richard last night,” Sandy told me, adjusting her bikini straps for the sixteenth time to avoid tan lines and ensure a little attention. We were lying out on lounge chairs by the pool, sunning ourselves at work and not knowing how lucky we had it. We sold time-shares on the weekend at the Lake View Resort on Lake Hamilton. We did a two-hour tour of the condos at nine in the morning and then another at two. The middle of the day was ours to do with as we pleased at the resort, and we were encouraged by our bosses to sunbathe and get beautiful. Two blonds in bikinis, coming attractions for what you’d see here every day if you rented for a week.

“How’s Richard doing?” I asked. He was a merchant marine bringing supplies from one ship to another in the Gulf, so he would be gone for weeks at a time. He’d arrive at Sandy’s door, a man just out of prison.

“Good as always,” Sandy said, sighing out the always and throwing her hands back.

“I like Richard,” I said, which was true. It was hard to find a man worth a damn, and he was nice. Good-looking and funny, like Sandy.

“Ruthie, when are we gonna get you a man?”

“Aren’t you the one who says I can’t see any man you dated?” I asked. “You’re not leaving me many to pick from.”

“I can’t help it if I’m popular.”

“You can’t help it, is right.”

She would think I was stealing her man, and with the type of men Sandy dated, that would be petty theft. Not worth losing a friend like Sandy over. She was the only one I’d found as outdoorsy as me, and we could go on twenty-mile hikes in the hills and not run out of people to talk about.

“You gotta go where the men are,” said Sandy.

“The only men interested in me have wedding rings,” I said. If Sandy’s was the I-saw-him-first rule, mine was no married men. “I didn’t even like my husband, why on earth would I want someone else’s?”

“How is that bastard?” she asked. We never said his name. It was a sort of superstition, and you’re still not gonna hear it from me. It’s like inviting the devil. “He’s late on Allison’s money again,” I said. He was supposed to pay a hundred dollars a month, but the only thing reliable about him was that he wasn’t going to come through. I married him when I was a month shy of twenty, because he was the first person that asked. He was thirty-five then. My mother had done a good job of convincing me I was born ugly and would die ugly, so I thought I wouldn’t get another chance at saying yes to any man. My mother’s plan for me was to marry the retread-tire man’s son, because he would always have a job. On top of being just evil, Allison’s daddy couldn’t keep a job, so maybe I should have listened to her.

“Well, we need real men,” she said. “Get Allison a better daddy than the one she got.”

I shrugged. And there he was, right in my head. Jimmy. I pulled my hair back, trying to distract myself. I’d done this all week, ever since I buried him on Daddy’s grave. I was so close to him in that hospital for all those hours. My hand still felt like his skin was on it. The look on the nurses’ faces . . .

“Sandy, tell me again you’d take Allison if something happens to me.”

“I do so swear,” she said. “I’d raise Allison as my own . . . maid.” She laughed, and I gave her a chuckle even though I didn’t want to.

“I just don’t want her daddy’s family involved if . . . You know. Not that they would want her.” One time, when Allison was a year old, we were out eating with her daddy’s parents. They were taking a break from watching Pat Robertson on the TV. Their friend stopped by the table and oohed at Allison. “Oh, where’d she get that pretty red hair?” she asked. My mother-in-law didn’t wait a beat: “That’s what we wanna know.”

Sandy sat up and lowered her sunglasses, but I wouldn’t look back at her for fear she’d see I was really scared. “Nothing’s gonna happen to you, Ruthie.”

A husband and wife walked by us, so Sandy and I got quiet. He was doing that thing men do when they’re trying to face front and not get in trouble with the wife, but they’re straining their eyes to see you. The wife grabbed that hand of his real quick, so I made sure to say, “Hi there,” just to her. People came here to look at the time-shares for the free lunch and use of the pool, and my job was to sell them something they didn’t need. A week cost sixteen thousand dollars in the summer red week, but I was good at selling. Hot Springs actually had five seasons when you counted the racing season, and those were red weeks too. You could get a blue winter week for five thousand dollars, but I would always work to upgrade the renter and then get the sale from that too. Blue weeks were all Sandy really sold, but it was only because she thought she couldn’t sell higher. “Sandy, you think that’s a lot of money,” I’d tell her every time she lowballed herself. “You need to quit thinking like that. They don’t think it’s a lot of money.”

Larry swung by behind the couple and winked at us. “Ladies,” he said. Larry Nelson was our boss, and he was a good one. One of the few I’d ever had who let me work and left me alone. I’d get a job, and they’d expect sex on top of my other work, so I’d have to quit. From the start with Larry, I had that “I’m not sleeping with you” air about me, so he didn’t bother asking. I knew Larry’s wife, and I also knew she thought I was sleeping with him, but I never was.

“Well, we should get moving,” I said. There was an empty condo where we could shower and change back into our “let me sell you a time-share” clothes.

“Let’s go make some more money,” said Sandy. “Put on our lucky selling dresses.”

Larry had us all up in this great big room we called the office. There were about sixty of us working selling time-shares, each at a little table, side by side. You could hear everybody’s conversation; it was kind of like a circus. You took whomever came to your table, but if the people looked like they were going to be a waste of time, there were ways some sales people had to deflect them, like looking busy or suddenly having to run to the bathroom.

One time there was this little old man who came in wearing a stained T-shirt and overalls that were frayed at the bottom where he’d cut them. You could practically hear people saying, “I don’t want him. All yours.” Well, I didn’t care what you looked like. He had come over from the Delta, and as he walked toward me I saw he had on these steel-toe boots that he had cut the toes out of.

He caught me looking. “Diabetes,” he said.

“Well, it is a pleasure to meet you,” I said. “I’m Ruth.”

The guy didn’t look like he had a penny to his name, but I gave him the same tour I gave everyone else. At the end, he reached into his overalls and pulled a snuff bag from behind the bib. And from that he pulled out sixteen thousand dollars in cash and put it on the table.

“I think I want one of these,” he said. Everybody was just gobsmacked. So I had a reputation.

This couple I had that afternoon was more the usual type. They were in their thirties, he in a dark blue polo and she in a summer dress that looked new. They had a little money, I could tell, but these ones had their arms crossed tight, so I knew I had to warm them up. The tighter the buyers’ arms were crossed, the tougher they were to crack. You knew they’d made a pact that morning that they weren’t turning loose any money and they weren’t listening to you. So you would sit with your arms crossed exactly the way they had theirs crossed. And you would just eventually, throughout the conversation, uncross your arms. A little bit at a time. And they would uncross their arms, a little bit at a time. Then, sometimes, they would pull them back up, and you had to start all over again. You had to keep breaking that pact, and it was always about the money.

I put my right hand over my left and leaned in. “Look,” I said, lowering my voice as if I was leveling with them, even though I was about to tell one heck of a little white lie. “I bet you did the same thing my husband and I did when we first came here. ‘Honey, we’re not buying a thing today. We’re not making a decision today, I don’t care how great it is or how much we like it. We’re not buying today.’”

They looked at each other and laughed, their bodies relaxing. It was always the same.

“I get it,” I said. “Now that we’ve got that straight, let’s do the tour.”

As we walked over to the model condo, I talked up Hot Springs. I know a lot of people who love Hot Springs as much as I do but nobody who loves her more. My grandmother’s grandfather, Grandpa Gardiner, came here from England in 1836 and opened the first general store and saloon. Well, one of the first. Everybody says theirs was the first. He owned the land from Central Avenue to Mount Riante, and he was always having somebody at his homestead digging a grave. “He lost another slave,” the locals would say. “That boy from England, he doesn’t know how to keep a slave. He buys ’em, and then they die on him.”

They didn’t know his slaves weren’t dead. He was secretly putting them on the wagon train to the Indian Territory and freeing them. He hated slavery, didn’t understand it at all. He would get the slaves when they came up the river, and he would buy them through his store, and then he’d help them escape.

“This used to be known as the Valley of the Vapors,” I told the couple as we walked up a hill. “The warring Indian chiefs, way back about five hundred years or more, they would come into the valley where the hot springs were. It was the healing valley, so they couldn’t bring their weapons in.”

I paused for effect. “They would divert the water. I think there are forty-seven springs coming down from Hot Springs mountain, about a million gallons a day. It’s hot, 147 degrees Fahrenheit, and they would divert the creek so that the hot water would come down and mix with the cool water. That way the chiefs just had their own little bath. They would soak out the problems and talk out what they needed and wanted. Instead of fighting about it. It was a sacred valley. It still is to me.”

That was for her. I saw her put her arm in his as I continued. “You probably know Hot Springs was the original home of spring training for baseball. Babe Ruth loved it, but did you know Al Capone loved Hot Springs too?”

“No shi—” he said, and the wife pulled his arm but good. “Really?”

“Oh sure. He used to stay at the Arlington Hotel, and he even had his worst enemy living here at the same time: Bugsy Siegel. Hot Springs was neutral territory.” Here came the trump card. “And Owney Madden, of course.”

“Who?”

“Owney Madden? They called him ‘The Killer.’ The Mob sent him down to Hot Springs to cool off after he killed someone he shouldn’t have. That was the thirties, and by then Hot Springs was the place to be in the South for organized crime. Wide open.”

My grandfather was Owney Madden’s doorman. I remember when Papa had his leg amputated and was recovering out at our house, and Owney used to visit him. This big black Cadillac would pull up, and a man would be standing by the car at all times. Owney always gave me graham crackers. I thought he brought them because he liked me, but when I got older I realized it was because I would just sit and be quiet because I had a mouth full of crackers.

We entered the condo, which was nice and big. Two-bedroom, two-bath—Larry really did do a good job. “Now, see how it feels to live here,” I said. “It’s not a museum.”

She walked out on the balcony to look at the lake, closing the glass door behind her to keep in the air-conditioning. He sat on the couch and turned on the TV to find a ball game. This is how a lot of people want to live. Alone together.

“It’s the life,” he said to me, but more to himself. She turned back to look at him through the glass, and I busied myself straightening a pillow. I caught her nodding.

“Sold,” he said.

I had the windows open the whole drive home in my little gray Toyota Celica. I’d never bought a new car, but I kept this one shiny enough that it passed. This was the first time I had four take-offs that were the same brand of tire, so I knew I had made it. I pulled into the driveway of my house, a buff-brick ranch, a thousand and change square feet.

I was doing all right on my own. Sandy was right though: I did want a husband. Just because you don’t really need something doesn’t mean you wouldn’t like to have it.

I could hear the phone ringing as I got out of the car.

“Is this Ruth?” It was a stern voice.

“Yes?” I said.

“This is Sister Angela Mayer.”

“Oh,” I said, starting to straighten the kitchen counter as if this stranger could see me. “Hello, Sister.”

“I’m an administrator at St. Joseph’s Regional,” she said. “I was given your name.”

St. Joe’s was the Catholic hospital in Hot Springs. “Yes?” I said, drawing it out.

“We have a patient that we need removed,” she said. “We cannot care for him here.”

“Do I know him?” I said.

“I don’t know who you know,” she said. “This hospital is not equipped to handle people with AIDS. It is not safe. And we don’t want the reputation.”

“Well, I don’t see what I . . .”

“You’ll come tonight?”

“Uh, let me . . .”

She hung up. I realized I hadn’t asked his name.

I sat in the kitchen. The room was already darkening from the sun setting. I’d rushed in to answer the phone and hadn’t turned on the light. Allison would be away until her daddy brought her back in time for me to take her to Sunday services.

I cradled my head in my hands for a minute. And then I picked up my keys.

“Well, shoot,” I said to no one.

Chapter Three

Sister Angela Mayer met me by the giant cross in the lobby of St. Joe’s. She wasn’t in a habit, but she had the look of a nun to her, so I went up to her right away.

“Are you Ruth?”

“Yes,” I said, extending my hand. She didn’t even look at it. Pretended it wasn’t happening. The Sisters of Mercy had founded this hospital a hundred years before. I wondered if she’d been around then.

“Come with me,” she said, already moving to the elevator. She didn’t say a word until the elevator doors closed and we were alone. “As I said on the phone, this hospital is not equipped to handle this case. We need to transport the patient elsewhere.”

“Where?”

She looked at me, and her true voice glinted through her administrator voice. “I don’t care what you do with him.”

The doors opened. I wanted to press the L button. To get out. She must have known, because she moved her arm as if to touch my back to usher me out, but stopped just short of actually touching me.

The nurses were waiting but made no move to greet me, just stared at me.

“Can I see him?” I asked.

Sister Angela led me down a hall, and a nurse handed me a pile of protective clothing. It felt like I was getting ready to go into space. The sister stared at me, nodding, as I put on the booties, the gown, balloon-cloth pants, a hat, and a mask. Just like with Jimmy, the hallway had trays of food lined up on the floor.

Before I put on the mask, I turned to the sister. “What’s his name?”

She looked at me. “It’s on the chart,” she said. “He was dumped at the ER doors.”

She said it like it was an excuse. I don’t think she even wanted to touch the chart, which said he was Ronald Watkins. I didn’t know any Watkins people, and I knew a lot of people.

I walked in alone, and he was so far gone, I could tell death was a matter of hours. I could just tell, and if anyone had actually gone in his room they would know too. He was a skeleton. I walked out quickly to tell Sister Angela there wouldn’t even be time to move him, but she was gone.

So I went back in.

“Ronald, I’m here for you.” I sat down.

I held his hand, and it just felt wrong to do it with a glove. I took it off. I left the stupid space suit on, but I took off the mask and the silly cap. My hair wasn’t going to get AIDS.

I sat and talked softly to him. I was talking to a body, he was that close to death, but it felt wrong to just sit in silence. Like Jimmy, Ronald simply stopped breathing, but this time I was less scared. I watched the artery in his neck pulse a few more times, slower and slower, until it too stopped. Seeing how long his soul would stay.

More calls started coming.

I guess the nurses and doctors all went to the same places to drink and unwind, because I later found out they got to talking.

“Oh my God, we had this insane woman come in, and she went right in the AIDS patient’s room.”

“Wait, you had someone come in to take care of him for you? What’s her name? What’s her phone number?”

They all wanted to get rid of them. I had two calls that first month, which I thought was crazy. Then three the second. Little Rock had the Med Center, a Baptist hospital, a Catholic hospital, and Doctors Hospital. Hot Springs had AMI Medical Center and St. Joe’s. Those were the big hospitals. Then there are all these little towns around Hot Springs that had little clinic hospitals. If it was bad—and with AIDS, by the time the patient got help, it always was—those little clinics sent patients to a hospital in Hot Springs.

As the months wore on, they had more and more of these gay guys coming into the hospital emaciated, alone or left at the ER. They were all my age or younger, twenty-three or twenty-four. They’d been afraid to get help, or maybe just didn’t know what was happening. It was a six-week thing from the first sign of symptoms. The diarrhea, a fever that wouldn’t go away, night sweats, and what I saw most then, pneumonia. They wasted away, their bowels evacuating so much they were down to sixty or seventy pounds. By the time I was brought in, they were at death’s door.

My work schedule selling time-shares was flexible, so I could work around that in emergencies. I imagined the commissions I was missing out on but put it out of my mind. Allison had turned four in May, and I had her in a KinderCare preschool day care five days a week. She spent weekends with her father, which helped. But when she wasn’t with him or at school, she was right there alongside me at the hospitals. She often ate her meals there and already had her preferences. Allison thought the food at St. Joe’s was the best, especially the pancakes. But the people at AMI were nicer.

Every single nurse and doctor thought they were the first person to tell me it was wrong to have a little kid there, but I didn’t know what I was supposed to do. I asked a nurse, who wouldn’t even go in the room, “If we go home, will you take better care of this man?” She nodded her head at me but walked away. Helping these men changed how I interacted with my daughter—I was constantly checking her for fever.

When I had to go to a hospital at night, I would wait until she was asleep and then put her on a pallet in the back seat and drive her to Bonnie’s. Bonnie was the only person who knew what I was doing. I’d bring in Allison, still sleeping like a little sack of potatoes, and lay her on Bonnie’s couch with her blankie until morning.

The hospitals were already mad they had to let them die there, so they needed the bodies out immediately. They’d heard I’d done it once, so they decided that was my job. I’d ask if there was insurance or next of kin, and they’d laugh. I learned that I had to have the person declared indigent by the county judge. Indigent burial or cremations are paid for by the county, as the funeral home has a responsibility to society to bury the person for only the actual cost. Hot Springs had long been a place where people had come to be healed by the waters, and so many indigent people had come here and died—whether of TB or whatever—that the county had set up a fund to pay for these burials long ago.

I started spending a lot of time at the courthouse, clicking my heels on the black-and-white tiles the size of nickels. I’d climb the stairs to the county judge’s office, wearing something flowy in case I needed to distract someone. The goal was to get in and get out. Judges would all be excited when they saw me show up in a dress, and then their faces would fall when I explained what I needed. They weren’t going to be making any time with me.

“They’re indigent, and there’s nothing we can do, and we’ve got to get them buried,” I’d say. The judge is supposed to make sure there’s been a diligent search for a family member with the means to pay or a church that would be willing to help with the costs. All I had to say was that this person had died of AIDS—there was no wasting time thinking that there might be someone to help.

I’d get the judges to sign off, then head back downstairs, slower now. An unfinished portrait of George Washington hung over a water fountain at the end of the hall, and we’d eye each other as I walked toward him and then turned right to leave.

Nobody once asked what I was going to do with the ashes.

Allison trailed behind me in Files Cemetery, still dressed for church. Her little white shoes crunched hard on the brown pine needles.

“We’re just tending to the graves, sweetie,” I said. Allison brought her little kids’ sand shovel, and if we weren’t dressed so nicely it might have looked like we were heading to the beach.

I was holding a tote that had two cookie jars in it. There had been two deaths that week. I’d been back to my friend Kimbo at Dryden Pottery a few times, but I never bought more than I needed. Superstition, I guess. I lied and told him I’d taken to giving the cookie jars as birthday gifts.

What’s funny is that everyone’s ashes are a different color. You might think the ash is powder, but it’s tougher stuff. You see the fragments of bone, proof that this was a real person.

Today would be my grandmother’s turn to take in two souls. “You’ll like her,” I said, taking the jars out of the bag and setting them on the ground next to her grave site. “She’ll take good care of you.”

I always brought a little plant with us in case somebody came along and wondered what we were up to. Even though nothing grew here, no matter how hard I tried to pretty it up with rosebushes.

“Ruth?” I said under my breath. “She’s just planting flowers. Why in the world would you think she’s burying AIDS patients? That would be crazy.”

Allison knelt beside me, and I smoothed her reddish curls. “You are just the most beautiful angel,” I said. “Now, help Mama dig a little.”

I dug the two holes as deep as I could, piling the red dirt in a neat mound. Allison lost interest and started trying to do somersaults.

“Not in the cemetery, honey,” I said, placing the jars of ashes gently into the ground. “And not in that dress. Keep that dress nice.”

I smoothed the tote on the ground, and she knelt on it. I took her little hands and clasped them in front of her face so she knew that this was a prayer.

“Close your eyes and think about love,” I said. “And we’ll send it right here so the grass and flowers grow, okay?”

“Okay.”

“God, I don’t know these men but You do,” I said. “Whatever their religion, we ask that You take them into Your care. Bless anyone who cared for them on this earth, and to anyone who has been kind to them who is now in Heaven, please greet them with love and mercy.”

I opened my eyes and saw Allison’s big green eyes looking at me. “Well, I think these plants are safe and sound and ready to grow,” I said.

She looked down at the grave. “Good job, plants!” she said. “I love you.” And she was off, skipping through the gravestones.

By the end of summer, I’d buried eight men from all the hospitals. It seemed like so many then. I had no idea.

They were always right at death’s door, so there really wasn’t a lot I could do. Except offer comfort. I had to make that clear as soon as I walked in, because I knew they could still hear me. Yes, I was another stranger coming in, but I wasn’t going to be mean to them like everybody else had been. I just couldn’t imagine being that sick and vulnerable and having people be nasty to you. I would sit with them, hold their hands, tell them they were okay now. Some would die quickly, but some would die over hours. I would tell stories to comfort them and me.

Sitting with them, I saw a river. I felt like I was taking these young men in my arms and carrying them across the river to the other side. And there were all the friends and family, people who wouldn’t judge them, waiting to take them. I took them over that river and handed them safely to those who would love them.

And then I turned around and I was back on land, standing alone at the water’s edge. I would get up, close their eyes and close their mouths, brush their hair, and straighten them up in the bed. Give them dignity.

A young man at St. Joe’s changed everything. Howard.

He had pneumonia and what looked like bad thrush in his mouth when I got to him. I knew his doctor could see it, even if he was just standing in the doorway. The doctor was all done up in his space suit standing there, and he scolded me for not wearing a mask. He was a cancer doctor. They were sticking the patients with cancer doctors, because they still thought it was gay cancer. The doctors sure resented it, and they always let me know it, like it was my fault. Here, they’d just gotten into this moneymaking field, and now AIDS was gonna ruin their practice, and no straight people were gonna come anymore. I heard all that.

I went down to the cafeteria and got some buttermilk. Yuck, but I knew it would kill the thrush. I got this from my grandmother on my father’s side. She and my grandfather helped settle the Florida Keys. They ran a fish camp down there, but she was the go-to person for medical stuff and could cure anything. She could diagnose things. I don’t know if it was magic or voodoo or what she had. Maybe just plain common sense. But whatever it was, I’ve got it too—a lot of it.

My daddy would take me down there in the winters before he died. He taught me all that stuff, like how to make a poultice and put it on to draw out the infection. “Well, go pick this from that tree and pick that from this plant.” There weren’t doctors around them, and our family didn’t have money to go to doctors anyway. So this is what you did.

I visited Howard three days straight, missing out on work while Allison was at her preschool. The buttermilk worked on him, and I tried to spoon-feed him yogurt, but he couldn’t eat. He was in and out of it, but we could have snatches of conversation here and there. He had made it all the way to New York, right out of high school.

“If you have fifty cents and you’re gay, you get on a bus out of Arkansas,” he said. “Pick a coast and head for it.” He got work assisting a bookkeeper. “It was off-the-books,” he whispered, “which I always found funny.”

“My rule is that I will take any job as long as it’s legal and vertical,” I said.

“Smart rule.”

“I’m no dummy,” I said. “I may be blond, but my roots are dark.”

He started to laugh, and I felt so guilty because it started a coughing fit.

“Did you have someone in New York?”

“Ken,” he said. “The most handsome man. That is what it would be like to be with him—you would walk around and see people react like, ‘That is the most handsome man.’ He got sick. I kept missing work, so my boss fired me. I think he knew. They hate us. Everybody hates us.”

“I know, honey,” I said. “I’m so sorry.”

“He died at St. Vincent’s. July 11. There were crosses on the wall, just like here.”

We both looked at Jesus, as if he might join the conversation.

“Is it better there in New York?”

“Not really,” he said. “Nobody knows what to do.”

“Are people doing anything?” I asked. They had to be doing something about this in New York.

“No.”

“Why did you come back here?” I asked.

“I started to get sick, and I thought my parents—” He stopped and swallowed. “I didn’t have anyone. I had friends, but they started to disappear when Ken got sick. People are afraid to breathe the same air as me, so . . . We had a dog. A King Charles spaniel—our baby, Clementine. Clem. I snuck him in a bag the whole way down here. Mama said Clem could stay. She said, ‘I pity this poor dog.’ Dad stayed in his shed. Wouldn’t come out.” He took a long pause, then gave up on whatever he was going to say.

“Well, you were right to come here after all. There is nothing more beautiful than Hot Springs in the fall, right?”

“I loved the lakes in fall,” he said dreamily. “They cool off, and the people are all gone.”

“You can go out lake fishing and never see another person,” I said.

“My daddy would take me and my brother out on the weekends,” he said. “I just wanted to see the leaves change again.”

I started to cry too and looked around. There wasn’t even a box of tissues in here. He started to fade again. “Well, if we are going to act like this, we need tissues,” I said. “I will be right back, I swear.”

He looked scared. “I promise,” I said. I got up to go outside, and after I closed the door, I stepped on one of the trays of food they left by the door. I looked down at this pitiful baloney sandwich lying in spilled apple juice. Some dam in me broke.

I marched halfway to the nurses’ station. Two nurses stood there staring, and here came another one.

“These trays on the floor?” I said, trying so hard to remain as ladylike as I possibly could, when I just wanted to scream. “He’s not a dog. He’s not gonna come out and eat off that tray. Stop it. I don’t wanna see that again.”

“He doesn’t eat,” said one.

“How can he? If you don’t want to go in there, put a tray table outside that door and you put that there food on that table. Would you eat something off the floor? I wouldn’t, and I am not gonna have you disrespect a human being like that. It’s not right.”

Sister Angela emerged, like some sort of devil. “You need to calm down,” she said.

“I am calm,” I said. Then I lowered my voice. “Look, here’s the deal,” I said, looking back at the nurses. “You might not like him. You may not want to go in there. But one of you, I know, will.”

I turned to the sister. “One of you has God’s love in your heart.” Back to the nurses. “Why don’t you trade off if you don’t want to go in there, but don’t be a jerk about it. One of you has the strength. Find it. Do what you do and help him.”

“The patient . . .” Sister began to say.

“Howard. He went to New York. He had a whole life . . .” Sister Angela stared at me so I met her eye. “I could just go home,” I said. “I could go home and not come back. This is the deal.”

She curled her lip ever so slightly so I could see her disdain for me. She shot a look at the nurses and walked away.

“Now, may I please have a box of tissues?” I asked.

As they stared at me, I started to take off my space suit, removing the balloon-cloth pants and the huge top. A nurse handed me a box of tissues.

“Thank you,” I said, throwing back my hair. I clicked my heels hard on the floor on the way back to his room, stopping to throw the space suit in the garbage.

I never wore one at any hospital again.

Howard became less lucid with each day until he died a few days later. It was like he was drowning in bed, he had so much fluid in his lungs. He never saw the leaves change again. His mother told me she didn’t want him, so I asked to speak to Howard’s father.

“He can’t come to the phone,” she said. I heard a dog bark, and she hissed, “Lucky, heel.” I wondered if she had even changed his dog’s name.

I buried him near Jimmy in Files. I told no one but Bonnie about the hospital visits. She was my sounding board, and we talked just about every night. Bonnie was adapting to her new life with a feeding tube and had managed to regain something like a voice. To be honest, she sounded a lot like Daffy Duck. And the thing is that Bonnie was so smart that she always used the big words. Maybe from all her years doing the typesetting at the newspaper. When I took her to her doctor, and he asked how she was, she might joke, “Resplendent.” That would take about five minutes of decoding.

Her oncologist was Bruce Leipzig, a rabbi from New York. So, you know, he stuck out in Arkansas. He taught me how to care for Bonnie, help her with her medicines and her feeding tube. This wasn’t new to me. I didn’t have any medical training, but I had cared for my father when I was a little girl. His lungs would fill with fluid, and my mother would hear him gurgling in the night. She’d wake me up to suction him. She had married him for his military pension, and he had married her because she was a nurse, so it was a trade-off they both were aware of. She was sick, very sick, and sometimes she couldn’t get out of bed, so I was her caretaker too. Daddy had a hole from a tracheotomy, and he would help me put the tube down his trachea and into his lungs. We would do one lung and then the other, usually filling half a jar with fluid. Which was about all I could carry at that age anyway. Then I would have to take the jar and empty it. I would gag, but you do what you have to do.

Bonnie was hardheaded too, and she wanted to live. When Dr. Leipzig told her she had only a three percent chance of living through the chemotherapy, she said, “I’m gonna die anyway, try it on me.” He shrugged and smiled. “We’ll try it then.”

On one of the visits, I told him I’d heard about AIDS “on TV” and I wondered what he thought.

“You know, we doctors thought for a while that we had all the answers,” he said. “Cut out the tumor, use this antibiotic.”

“Done,” I said.

“Right,” he said. “I can tell Bonnie, ‘Hey, let’s try this.’ I can tell another patient, ‘This will prolong your life.’ These people, what can you do? There’s no answer. I can’t imagine looking at a patient and saying, ‘I have absolutely nothing to give you.’ I mean, can you imagine?”

“No,” I said, lying. Bonnie looked at me, knowing exactly what I was up to. “What do they think is causing it?”

“I guess they’re saying it’s a virus, and when you get it at first you have the worst flu of your life, and then it passes. But it starts to destroy their immune system. They’re sitting ducks for anything that comes along. You have these young guys getting old man diseases.”

“Like a monster movie,” I said.

“I mean, as a doctor, it’s fascinating,” he said. “But it’s people. I guess the only thing you can do is prevent it. There’s talk about quarantining them, but how do you go about doing that?”

One day I was at St. Joe’s looking for a doctor.

“Oh, I think he’s looking up something in the library,” said a nurse.

“The library?” I said. “You all have a library here?”

“Yeah, it’s by the doctors’ lounge,” she said. “The medical library. They sometimes hide in there doing ‘research.’”

I just smiled, but as soon as the coast was clear around evening time, I marched myself back there. The lights were off, and I turned them on to see shelf after shelf of not just books but also the New England Journal of Medicine, the Journal of the American Medical Association, the Lancet . . . I let out a breath, and then I started, taking the most recent copies of each and turning pages until I found any mention of AIDS. The articles confirmed what I knew: HIV was a virus spread through sexual contact, blood transfusions, sharing needles, or mother to child. It was not like the cold or the flu, and they had ruled out what they called insect vectors, which I realized meant mosquitoes. There were long articles about statistics and projections about AIDS, and letters about the ethics of mass testing and the importance of prevention in the absence of a vaccine or therapy. Even the words “epidemic” and “vaccine” gave me hope someone was trying to create a cure.

Then I discovered the larger library at the Med Center in Little Rock. Every week I had to take Bonnie to a social worker there who did touch therapy. She was an older woman named Tweed—“like the fabric,” she’d say. She clearly cared about people, and we got to talking about what I was doing, and I told her I was on the lookout for any kind of information I could use. Tweed got me into the Med Center library, which was even better than the one at St. Joe’s because this was a teaching hospital. It was larger and more formal, and there was always a librarian stationed at the front.

“I’m going in to do research, and she’s helping me,” Tweed told the librarian.

“Okay,” was the answer. “How’s your day going?”

“Oh, it’s good, thank you,” I said. And I was in. We went back several times, doing this routine where Tweed would leave to check on a patient and then simply not come back. After a few visits, I was able to go in without her, smiling at the librarian and maybe paying a compliment as an entrance fee.

Interns and students in their final years of med school, all male, used the library for studying and dozing off. I sat among them reading, and soon they were used to me too. The library had a microfiche reader, and I scanned through articles on-screen, taking notes. It brought back memories of using one in the school library when I was a kid. I didn’t learn like other kids, and nobody—including me—figured out that I had a form of dyslexia. I just thought I had to work harder than everyone else. So I had spent hours in the school library alone, trying to catch up, reading the same sentence twice, three times if I had to, anything that would help. This was no different.

Bonnie had me help take her feeding tube in and out for when she left the house, but it hurt her so much that she just started leaving it in. She would unplug it and kind of tuck the tube behind her ear. People watched us as I took her around the grocery store. She was a sight. No hair, radiation burns all on her face and throat, quacking at me, with her feeding tube up in that jaunty tuck. “Here we come,” I used to say to her whenever we walked in anywhere.

Bonnie didn’t have two pennies to rub together and was living in a shotgun shack out in the woods. She was what my mother would call “froggy.” Anyone poor and white, she said they lived out with the frogs in the woods. All Bonnie had for heat was a pot-belly stove to burn wood in. That first December after the surgery, the temperature went down to the twenties. I went over to check on her, and the house was freezing.

“Bonnie, you gotta put more wood on,” I said. “You can’t live like this.”

“I’m fine,” she said.

I went over to the stove and saw a box full of twigs. She had been gathering her own firewood herself, though she couldn’t carry anything. Twigs was it, because they were light.

“Okay, that’s enough of that,” I said.

“It’s okay,” she said.

“No, it’s not,” I said. I had been doing so much to care for her, and she was living like this. “It is not okay. It is not right.”

The truth is that Bonnie had lived that way even before she was sick. Making do. Her dad was a hit-and-run who probably didn’t stick around long enough to even call it a full one-night stand, and that was back when having a single mom made them outliers. Her mother worked as a switchboard operator, so they never had any money. Bonnie was just used to running on fumes.

I called the housing assistance office for her, right there. Looked it up in the phone book and called before she could yell at me. They were giving me the runaround, so we just went down there. This was how I learned to solve all of Bonnie’s problems. Just walk in with our little traveling show. If she needed a new form at the social security office or a hospital administrator wanted to charge for something, I’d wait until they got exasperated with me, and I’d say, “Well, here, Bonnie, you tell him.” She’d pause, then start in with that Daffy Duck voice, and that would do it. Any place we went, they wanted us out so bad they would be like, “Well, here, take this chair with you. These flowers? Anything else you want. Just get out.”

We found her a place on Music Mountain Road, another dilapidated shotgun shack so she’d feel at home. The rent was two hundred dollars a month, and housing assistance cleared that no problem. I couldn’t get anyone to pay for her water though. But that’s what got her out of the house and kept her social. She’d gotten to a point where she could drive again without me, so she’d go over to the cold-water fountain at Happy Hollow with her little bottles in her hoopty Toyota pickup. It’s down the mountain from where there’s a hickory tree with a nozzle in it, and that same water comes out of the fountain with the four faucets down below. People brought their milk jugs, their bleach bottles, whatever they had, and it was a social thing. You waited to see what people brought and started talking. Then she’d get a big jug of hot water from another fountain to bathe and wash her hair, which was slowly growing back salt-and-pepper. Bonnie could always spark conversations when she wanted to, even with that voice, so she developed a whole jungle-dazzle of friends there, a bunch of lost souls. She was like Hot Springs—she either drew you to her, or she sent you away.

As open as I was with Bonnie about helping people as they died, it was the opposite with my friend Sandy. I knew she hated gay people. “Why ruin a good dick?” she loved to say. “It’s unnatural and against God.” She wasn’t a religious person, but you know how there are people who find religion when it’s handy. And she really resented the ones that got the straight tourists looking for a bit of strange when they were in for a convention. “They have no reason to live except to take men way from me.”

But at least Sandy kept everything very surface, and that was what I needed. She didn’t want anything from me except an ear for her stories. We’d crash the hot tub at the Arlington Hotel, and on the milder days in December we kept up our winter tradition of canoeing down the Ouachita River. We’d rent the canoe from these hillbilly country people. Little kids and grown men staring at us in our bikini tops like we were aliens. We’d wear shorts or pants, because it did get cooler as the sun began to set.

“Did I tell you I had to kick this guy out last night?” Sandy said one day as we drifted on the water. “Dick like a cigarette.”

“Sandy, one of these men is gonna beat the hell out of you someday.”

“Oh, no, this was false advertising,” she said. “Don’t sell me Marlboro Man and then give me Virginia Slim.”

“We should get jobs out at the Dairyette,” I joked. That was where the country girls who weren’t big on working would meet the guys with the company cars—work trucks from the water and sewer companies.

“Exactly, Ruthie,” she said, playing along. “Get the sweet eye from one of the guys, and you give it back.”

“Then he comes in later by himself. ‘Where’s the rest of the guys?’ I’ll say. ‘I like that tooth you got.’”

“And you say you can’t meet men,” she said.

“Who needs them?” I asked. I turned my head as I heard a low roar in the distance. “Oh, here they come.”

A jet was coming in low over the river. When we were out the flyboys from the military base in Jacksonville always flew as close to the ground as they could.

“Hello, boys,” I yelled as the jet soared over us, so loud I could barely hear myself.

Chapter Four

I kept tidying up, walking quickly from room to room, like guests were going to stop by. But it was just Allison’s daddy, and he wouldn’t even get out of the car. Not that I wanted him to. When he brought her back from his place in Little Rock on Sunday mornings, I could swear that he drove slow just so I would get anxious about being at church on time. First United Methodist had two Sunday services: an 8:30 one that only the oldest and littlest of the little old ladies attended, then a 10:50 service that ended promptly at noon. We had to beat the Baptists out, or we’d never get lunch. Between the services, there was an hourlong Sunday school. I wanted Allison to be raised in the Bible, and I also wanted to be there for the Bible study for adults. It’s where everybody talked, and if you weren’t at the table you were on the agenda.

I went to First United because no matter what, God was always there. Every Sunday. I just felt His presence and love. I’d been raised Southern Baptist, but I wanted Allison raised in a softer religion. Her paternal grandparents were strict about church, and her daddy hadn’t wanted anything to do with religion. He didn’t care where I took her. What’s good about the Methodists is they don’t have enough religion to offend anyone. But from the first time I went into First United, it was sacred to me. Being in the building made me feel safe, and it felt like that’s where God lived in Hot Springs. His vacation home.

A lot of people chose it because it was the social church—First United was where all the doctors and bankers went. Stone gray and built in a Gothic Revival style, it sat on Central Avenue and made Central Baptist across the street look like a poor relation. When I put my address in the church directory, I made sure to use a P.O. box, so nobody would judge where we lived. It was bad enough to be listed with the title of Ms. with no Mr.

When I finally divorced that man in October 1983, I moved him out to Little Rock. I went to his daddy and told him I needed his truck and why. I needed a truck that had a hitch on it for a U-Haul trailer. When my husband came home from whomever he was sleeping with, I had all his stuff packed up for him and told him he was moving to Little Rock. He didn’t want to leave Hot Springs.

“Yes, you are,” I said. I wasn’t sharing my town.

By the time Allison was born I was already out the door mentally, but it took some time for my body to catch up. He was sleeping around, which you would think would make him demand less sex from me, but what did I know. Before I met him, he’d been married and had a son with a woman named Linda, and his parents still acted like she was their true daughter-in-law. Linda was invited to every holiday, and I soon learned that meant I wouldn’t be. He didn’t even have the nerve to tell me that first Thanksgiving. He let me get all dressed up, and I was confused when he took the turn to head toward Files Cemetery.

“I thought you’d like to be with your family,” he said.

I got out of the car. He didn’t.

“Linda’s gonna be there,” he said. “I’ll come back and get you when it’s done.” He looked at me expectantly, and I realized he was waiting for me to close the door so he could leave. I did, and he drove off with the pies I’d made to impress his mother. Now they were Linda’s to eat.

“Well, shoot,” I said aloud. If I’d known I just had to impress the dead I wouldn’t have spent so much time on my hair. So I sat with Daddy under the pines. He’d died on Thanksgiving, so I just kidded myself and decided it was God putting me where I should be.

Their son was about eight when Allison was born, and that boy hung, decorated, and lit the moon as far as his family was concerned. I liked him plenty too when I saw him, but I think Allison’s grandparents had done such a terrible job raising her daddy that they thought that child was their second chance at proving they were good people. They showered him with love and gifts, and didn’t even pretend to do that for me and Allison. Linda had all the power, and they worried that if they didn’t pay her house off, or whatever the new thing she needed was, she’d take their grandson out to Jessieville, out north of town. Raise him out there as a country hick. She was no dummy, I’ll give her that.

I was his third wife, though he told me I was just the second when he married me. Now he was onto his fourth, but that was her problem, not mine. His Aunt Gina was the one that set me straight on being door number three. We were all at his parents’ house, some birthday party that wasn’t important, so they could invite me. Ninety-eight years old, Aunt Gina always held court in the kitchen, with glasses so Coke-bottle thick you wondered how she even saw to put her red lipstick on. As I walked by the kitchen, I heard Aunt Gina refer to my husband before adding, “But that was the first wife.”

“Are you talking about Linda?” I asked at the door.

She looked caught for a second, then narrowed her eyes behind those glasses. “No. I am not talking about Linda, you little tart, I’m talking about his first wife,” she said, moving the heft of her body in my direction. “Linda was the second wife. You’re the third wife.”

I swiveled on one foot and yelled out to the living room. “You want to come in here and talk about this?” I chewed him out in front of everyone, all “You mean to tell me” and “What the hell?” As he sputtered an explanation, his mother looked like she was deciding if she was too embarrassed to enjoy my embarrassment. He said it was in college, and she was the dean’s daughter. They thought she was pregnant so they made them get married, and it wasn’t anything.

“It was something enough that she got the family silver,” said Aunt Gina, looking at me with a silent Not you. She got the silver, and I was stuck with the husband.

When I got divorced, people assumed he hit me, because for a twenty-three-year-old woman to choose the social death of divorce in Arkansas, she must have been picking between that and getting beat to hell. But I wouldn’t let a man hit me. No. No, no, no. Though I had to let him get right up to it once, just so he could see in my eye what would happen if he did.

That was Easter 1983, when we went to his parents’ church for services. It was okay that Allison and I came to Easter services—that was for appearances and had the added bonus of saving her soul. He’d been picking at me all day. He got like that before seeing his parents. They’d been tough on him with the belt. His parents went to a brimstone church, the hard kind that would raffle a hunting rifle to raise money for the youth group summer trip or whatever. We were out of the car and walking alongside the church, him behind me. I had Allison in my arms when I said something about “getting this over with.”

It was the match that lit him up, I guess. He got me cornered, and I almost dropped Allison as he pushed me against the wall. He reared back like he was going to hit me. Maybe because I thought he was going to accidentally hurt Allison, I just looked at him with some kind of fury. He could get one in, but a man has to sleep.

He had to do something with all that mad, so he took his fist and scraped his knuckles against the brick of the church. A bloodletting.

“Damnit,” he said, to me or himself. “Damnit.” I shook my head and walked in to sit next to my in-laws, who greeted me with their usual unspoken wish that Allison and I did not exist. He tried to hide the rash of his bleeding hand, wiping the blood on the dark of his socks until his mother, Imogene, finally leaned over and asked what happened. When he shrugged, she looked at me like I had let something happen to him.

He wasn’t my problem anymore, except he barely paid child support. Still, he was a good father to Allison. He took her every weekend, and they had a relationship that was separate from ours. Though I had a strong suspicion he was only such a good dad to make me look like a bad mother, I wasn’t going to take that away from Allison. Even though he made it clear he’d take her from me in half a heartbeat, just so I’d have nothing.

“She’s burying homosexuals, Your Honor,” I said aloud, looking out the window for his car. “Dragging my daughter into all this sick.”

And now here he was, pulling into the driveway that used to be his. I fixed a smile when he drove up to the house, pleasant but flat, the way you do when seeing someone who thinks you owe them something. But I gave a real smile when I saw Allison jump out of the car.

“Mama!” she yelled.

He stayed in the car but called out the window to her. Some inside thing, real or invented for the moment. He always did this, and the charitable part of my heart thought he did this because it was hard for him to leave her. The harder part knew it was to break the spell of my reunion with her. Get her to look back and maybe make me really look at him. I didn’t.

When he cut it close like this, I became a scold. It was the last Sunday before Christmas, so I had to get Allison into her pretty green dress before church. It had taken me weeks to hand-smock it myself. It was important to me that we always look presentable. I relaxed once we were in the car, holding her face for one last inspection. I reflexively put my hand to her forehead to check for fever. It had become a ritual. I went some place, set adrift for a second, until Allison pulled away.

On the drive over to First United, she got bored, or maybe sleepy because of how late her daddy let her stay up to prove he was the fun parent. I did my usual trick of pretending the cars in front of us were driven by monkeys.

“They’re throwing banana peels. Duck!” I yelled. “Duck, Allison!” She squealed as I moved my hands on the wheel as if to swerve, bracing for some imaginary impact.

Sunday school was in the breezeway, and I helped lead the class while Allison was over in the nursery. I did it mainly because I wanted to be of use, and the women of the choir had made it pretty clear they didn’t want a dyed-blond divorcée singing “Abide with Me” next to their husbands. Sunday school was always a nice little morning upper to go with the Bloody Marys people had had that morning. There were different themes to different classes, and this one was service—a lot of talk about feeding the sick and taking care of your neighbor.

I caught the Johnson brothers staring at me. They were my age and had been whip smart as teenagers. Now they were still as horny. When the class was over, they lingered at the door to watch me walk out.

I turned slightly, putting my hand to the back of my collar. “Is my zipper all the way up in the back?”

They both looked confused.

“Because you undressed me all during Sunday school,” I said, “so I wanted to make sure you had me dressed back before I went out in public.”

I stayed just long enough to see their faces go beet red, then went over to the nursery to pick up Allison. She was sitting apart from all the other kids, who were playing family and fighting over who was the mother.

We sat each Sunday in the eighth row, center pew, right on the aisle. Regulars at church picked a spot and kept it. It’s why they got so bent out of shape at Easter and Christmas when the heathen hordes came in and took all their seats.

“Grace and peace to you in the name of our Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ,” our pastor, Dr. John Hays, said as a greeting to us all. He could give a good sermon, and I always marveled at how Allison actually listened and took what he preached to heart. He was older, his white hair still cut for when he took over the church in 1954, his look complete with dark heavy-framed glasses. His sermons challenged us to live as Jesus did, which was okay with the congregation, because that challenge ended as soon as he closed with “Amen.”

When a lay leader got up to make some endless announcement, I kept my hand on Allison’s shoulder to quietly hold her in place. As they droned on, my eyes went where they always did, to the stained-glass window high above the altar. It was Mary and the angel at the tomb, gorgeous, but you could barely see it because of the organ pipes in the way. It was just silly to block such beauty, but the organ was a hand-me-down from a theater they tore down.

I had big plans for after church, so I got right up when it was over. You could stand in line for an hour to shake Dr. Hays’s hand as you exited the church, so I was both mortified and relieved when Allison hustled halfway through the crowd to get in line sooner. I made a small show of sweetly reprimanding her and looked back apologetically. The people behind us gave flatline smiles and looked away.

Dr. Hays kept glancing at me in line, and I looked down at my dress to make sure I didn’t have anything on it. When I got to him, his voice was urgent.

“Ruth,” said Dr. Hays. “I have been meaning to call you.”

“Oh, really?” I said, my eyebrows shooting up. I instinctively picked up Allison and braced myself. I wondered if he had seen me at a hospital. Or the cemetery.

“I’d like to put you on the church’s finance committee,” he said.

“Me?” The finance committee was the most important group in the church, approving fund requests and handling all the pledges. It was all these important men in the town, and there had never been a woman on it.

“Dr. Hays, that would be such an honor,” I said.

He put a gentle hand on Allison’s head. “I think you’ll bring a lot to the committee, Ruth.”

“Thank you, Dr. Hays,” I said. “I will do my best.” I looked back quickly at the people behind me, and saw the flatlines of their smiles had curled just slightly into sneers. I smiled.

“Enjoy your Sunday,” I told them.

I had to hurry to get on with the day.

While I was at a hospital in Little Rock that week, a doctor told me he had heard the darnedest thing. “There’s a bunch of AIDS patients living together,” he said. “Like three of ’em.” A psychologist had given them a house. “In Hillcrest,” he said. “Can you imagine an AIDS house in that neighborhood? Around all that money?”

I had to meet them. “Please, just give me a name,” I said. “I won’t say where I heard it.”

I called the psychologist and was direct, putting on my doctor voice. “I have been, uh, seeing a lot of these patients,” I said. “I would like the opportunity to meet with these men.”

He got real funny, understandably. I’m a realtor at heart; I knew he’d never be able to sell that place. “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” he said.

“I keep meeting people when it’s too late,” I said. “If someone—I don’t know, eats some fruit or vegetable regularly or takes a different type of vitamin—and then doesn’t get as sick, we can use that information.”

“No,” he said.

I thought how I would feel if someone called offering to help. I’d take it. I’d be so grateful. But maybe he had reason not to trust people.

“Listen, I just want to bring them Christmas,” I said. “I can come by this weekend. I won’t bug them or do anything else. I just want to meet them.”

He paused, said the address quickly, and raced to hang up on me.

Now, in the church parking lot, I watched as everyone got in their cars to go for fancy lunches. They were all in their second-best red and green, saving their best outfits for the Christmas Day service. I got out two peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwiches I’d made that morning. I handed one to Allison.

“Allison, we’re gonna get Bonnie and drive out to Little Rock to see some people who need Christmas, okay?” When I asked Bonnie if I could borrow her pickup to bring a Christmas tree to a bunch of AIDS patients who were living together, she immediately said she was coming too. She wasn’t gonna miss the show.

Allison took a mouthful of sandwich and nodded, cross-legged in the passenger seat. She was four, the in-between of a toddler and a big kid. Depending on the light or her mood, she changed back and forth, from my baby to my girl, right before my eyes.

Dr. Hays had scared me. If people knew what I was doing, I could so easily lose her. Just the thought of it made me wrap up my sandwich and start the car. Sometimes if you’re doing, you don’t have to think.

Bonnie was waiting outside, probably to stop me from going in and checking on how she was living. I had a habit of surveying her medicines and food supply to make sure she was doing okay.

“So, I thought we’d try to get a tree first,” I said, as I climbed into her pickup, getting it to a wheezing start. You always get what you think is going to be the hardest first. After that, the rest is easy. I didn’t have money to spend, so I would have to talk people into donating. “Then I was thinking about Christmas cards, so they could write to their families.”

“Are you going to say who it’s for?” Bonnie asked.

“I think I have to,” I said, pulling on to Highway 70. “I don’t want to make up a story and be a liar.” It would be a risk, but I would just keep track of who I told.

We pulled in to the Christmas tree lot and got out. The one guy there walked up, and I caught him doing a double take on Bonnie, then looking down at my legs, bashful, then up again.

“I’m hoping you can help us,” I said. “And I think you’re the guy.” People want to help, I told myself. You just have to give them small ways to do it.

I took a breath. “You know, there’s a house in Little Rock that has some AIDS patients, and they’re not gonna live much longer,” I said. “And I just think it would be nice if they could have a Christmas tree on their last Christmas.”

It was a lot for him to take in. He paused. He could say yes or he could say no, and it would be done with.

“Sure,” he said.

“Sure?” I said, catching myself before I gave him a chance to stop. “Well, that is great. I mean it, I am so grateful.”

I thought he’d give us some shrub of a tree, but he picked out a nice one and loaded it into the pickup for us as Allison danced around. “I’ll give you a stand, too,” he said. I acted like he’d handed me a lottery ticket.

“Thank you,” I said. “You have done such a wonderful thing, and I do appreciate it.”

“It’s nothing,” he said.

“It’s something,” I said.

As we drove off, Bonnie finally spoke. “That went better than I anticipated.”

“You’re telling me,” I said. “Okay, now, let’s get the Christmas cards.” I was a big shopper at Hallmark back then, so I figured that would be the place to go. Maybe I was a little cocky from how well it had gone at the tree lot. The woman who ran it was out on the floor, fixing up the displays of picked-over holiday cards.

“Good afternoon,” I said.

She smiled wide at me. She had a tiny bit of lettuce stuck to the edge of her front tooth.

“I’m bringing Christmas to some people living with AIDS over in Little Rock,” I said. She stopped smiling. “I wondered if you might be willing to donate a box of Christmas cards.”

She kind of ducked and looked around to make sure no one else had heard that. Then she looked at me, just stumped.

I continued. “I thought they could send notes to their families or whoever—”

“Who would want to hear from them?” she asked.

“Well, I don’t know.”

“I don’t agree with their lifestyle,” she said loudly. Proudly.

“Well, they don’t have long to live it,” I said. “So, you don’t have to worry.”

She looked at me a long time, like I was somewhere between revolting and stupid. I smiled. I was a good customer. Finally, she yanked a box of cards off the shelf. “Well, here. I guess they’re gonna die anyway,” she said, handing me the box. “What’s the harm?”

“What’s the harm?” I repeated quietly. “These are lovely. I will be sure to tell them about your kindness.”

“Don’t bother,” she said, puffing up her body to will us out of the store. Allison was already out the door, with Bonnie behind her.

I turned as I left. “And you have something in your teeth,” I said. The air went out of her. “I just thought you should know.”

We had one more stop, because I needed stamps for the cards. My best bet was a realty company that I knew was flush. A woman ran it with her son, Peter, after her husband died. He knew my dad, and I thought some of the goodwill would be passed on. Peter smiled at me, older than me and just a real sweetheart. I brought in the cards as a sort of proof of need. I told them about the house and that I had twelve cards and just needed twelve stamps.

“I cannot help with that,” she said.

“I understand,” I said. I wasn’t going to argue with her about a dozen twenty-two-cent stamps. “Come on, Allison. Thank you for your time.” Just move on, I told myself. I could buy them when the post office opened Monday. Maybe bring them another time. I wasn’t sure how long I had, though.

I started the pickup, and the rumble-wheeze was just kicking in when Peter came running out. I opened the window, and he handed me a strip of a dozen stamps bearing a profile of the Statue of Liberty.

“Peter,” I said. “Thank you.”

“Okay,” he said. There was a finality to it. I nodded, but I was happy to have the stamps. I turned on the radio and turned it up when I realized it was the Ronettes singing “Frosty the Snowman.” We all sang, Allison knowing barely any of the words, and Bonnie quacking but singing nonetheless.

We pulled up right in front of the house. It was nice, a two-story Craftsman-type, with pale cream vinyl siding and a front porch bracketed by white-brick columns. I had built these men up in my mind so much that I had to remind myself I was a stranger to them.

“Allison,” I said quickly, in the quiet of the truck. “I need you to be really, really nice today, okay?”

She knit her brow. “I am nice,” she said.

“I know you are, baby,” I said, unfastening her seat belt. I pulled the tree out of the truck bed myself and dragged it to the door and knocked. A man answered, tall and lanky, but looking like he was lanky even before he was sick. Which he clearly was.

“I’m a friend,” I said, and named the psychologist. “He said you wouldn’t mind if we brought you some Christmas.”

He looked at me with the same confusion that the lady at Hallmark did, but then he softened. “That’s so lovely,” he said, his voice lighter than I expected. “Come in, come in.”

The house was spare, like one of the staged apartments at the resort. A blond man sat on the couch with a blanket over him. “Don’t get up for us,” I said, not even sure if he could. A man with hair as short as Bonnie’s came from upstairs, hurrying at the commotion. He had an artist’s brush in his hand. They were all in their twenties.

“I’m Ruth Coker Burks,” I said, shaking everyone’s hand. “This is my friend Bonnie and my daughter Allison. I’ve been helping people with AIDS at the hospitals here in Little Rock and in Hot Springs. And I just wanted to come and meet you all.”

It hung in the air for a moment. “I won’t tell anyone why I was here,” I said. “I mean that.”

We got to setting up the tree, and the lanky one brought a radio from the kitchen to play Christmas music. They watched Allison twirl, and Bonnie laughed. She was so at ease with these men, explaining to them that she had cancer, talking more about her treatments and surgeries than I’d ever see her do with other people. They got each other.

The artist said we needed ornaments and had an idea. “Come,” he said to me and Allison, “we can make some.” Bonnie stayed downstairs with the other two men. Upstairs, the man had turned his bedroom, a sunlit room with just a mattress on the floor, into an artist’s studio, with a beat-up, paint-stained table the only focus. Everywhere you looked, he had Scotch-taped paintings, dreamy suggestions of people and landscapes.

“Would you like to paint something?” he asked Allison. She nodded yes, her hands clasped behind her back. “These are watercolors. I love them,” he said, dipping a one-inch flat brush in water and squeezing it out. “It’s just paint and water and light. Here.” He handed her the brush. “Any color you want, just dip it.”

She chose purple, her favorite color. “Go ahead, he said, and she made a stripe across the white paper. “Gorgeous,” he said, guiding her hand to dip the brush in the water. “Now, see what you can just do with water. Use the brush like a bird splashing.” She dabbed at the purple, bleeding it out in stripes of a lighter pink.

“You’re a natural,” he said, and she beamed. “Now do that with a bunch of colors and see what you get.”

She did three sheets, and we brought them downstairs. He taped them to the windows to dry, and they hung like stained glass. Then he cut them into shapes Allison called out. Circles and icicles, candy canes and stars. We undid paper clips to make little hangers, all of us smiling at such an unexpected gathering.

And then it happened. It was such a small moment, but there was so much in it. The lanky one went into the kitchen and came out with a glass of Coke for Allison. He asked her if she wanted some, and she instinctively looked to me for permission. Then they all did.

The question was plain: Could I let my daughter drink out of a glass that someone with AIDS had drunk from, even if it was washed? I had spent so much time telling nurses and doctors that the virus couldn’t be spread by touching someone with AIDS or drinking from a glass. I could do it, and did so to prove a point. But my baby?

She had the glass in her hands, waiting for me to say yes or no. It was, as we say in Arkansas, when things get down to nut cuttin’.

I nodded yes, and she drank from the glass. I turned to the guys.

“I’m sorry that took me a moment,” I said. “I’m used to it just being me.” I didn’t lie or dismiss it. I had fear, and I had to face it. But a barrier had fallen. We talked about fear and feeling isolated. People not wanting to breathe the same air as you.

One knew the psychologist, and I didn’t ask how. He put them in the nicest house they’d ever lived in and came once a week to talk to them.

“Like a support group,” I said. They had each had friends and lovers die, and now only had each other. I shared what I knew, symptoms I had seen, and what hospitals to avoid. They didn’t ask what their deaths would look like. They already knew.

I remembered the Christmas cards and asked if they wanted to write to people. They started to write, and the room got quiet except for Allison’s humming along to the Christmas music. The artist went upstairs and came down with something he’d painted. It was a self-portrait, though he looked older now. I watched him fold it into a small rectangle, then slip it into the envelope. “For my brother,” he said.

They were afraid to put the house as the return address. “Use mine,” I said. “I have a P.O. box, so it’ll be nothing to them.” I still had hope that they would get a response. “I’ll bring them to you when they write back.”

As they wrote, the room got darker and darker, and it was Allison who had to tell us to turn on the lights. We hadn’t noticed. I felt at home, yet still at a distance from what these men were going through. When we left, Allison gave them all hugs, and we got back in the truck to drive home. The lanky one waved at the door and then quickly closed it.

He died after New Year’s. The blond on the couch passed a week later, dementia setting in so fast he didn’t know who I was when I happened upon him at the Med Center.

I closed the eyes of the artist in February. I never got any responses to their cards.

Allison asked when we were going back. I called the psychologist to see if he was still helping people with the house. No, he said, he couldn’t go through that again.

Chapter Five

The calls would come either late night or early morning. I’d grown used to hospitals calling me, but these men were on their own. I don’t know how they got my number, but they were told I was someone who might help.

The phone would often ring at first light, like they’d tossed and turned waiting for the sun and couldn’t take it anymore. The calls came so regularly, I had to put a phone by the bed so I wouldn’t wake Allison.

Most of them knew what was coming but didn’t know what to do. They’d been living with a boyfriend who died or just taking care of a friend. Sometimes I would say hello, and all they could do was sob.

“I’m here,” I’d say. And I’d listen to them cry for an hour, because they couldn’t get it out or they didn’t know how. “It’s okay, just go ahead and cry. And if you can talk then you can talk. And if you can’t, well, you know, you let me know when you want to hang up because I won’t.”

There was no medicine, so all I could offer was information. They were usually planning to return to Arkansas from someplace else, and I had to teach myself to stop immediately saying, “Don’t.” But most of them couldn’t get a doctor to see them even where they were. They were literally thrown out of clinics because they were gay. Some didn’t know the most basic information about what was happening to them. They were sleeping on somebody’s couch, maybe somebody they were taking care of. And they went from sofa to sofa until they ran out of friends who were well enough to take care of them. I would meet them at the bus station in Malvern, a thirty-minute ride to Hot Springs. They carried their lives in a ratty suitcase or box. Often they were so sick they needed to go to the hospital right away, and I’d take them the forty-five minutes straight to Little Rock. I would take people to a Hot Springs hospital only if it was an emergency, and even then, I would tell myself that I could make up the fifteen-minute difference from Malvern if I floored it.

So many arrived thinking Mama would take them back. Sometimes I would go to their homes with them, mostly just to save me a trip of driving back out there when she wouldn’t. The mothers were the hardest on them, the fathers off to the side. Most of these young men were raised Pentecostal, and Pentecostals just hated gay people. The churches were so powerful and set where the family stood in life. The women had probably seen an example made of someone else, about some smaller defiance. Men can sometimes do the deciding about who is exiled, but it’s women who do the day-to-day work of shunning. They knew they’d lose everything if they showed mercy to their sons.

I went to a home one night with a young man from Mount Ida. Douglas was so terrified of telling his parents that he asked me to come inside with him. He was slight, and his nerves came in these little seizures of all-body shivers. At the door, I saw why. His mother was as short as him, but puffed out. Her whole presence was angry and red like a thumb that got hit by a hammer.

She eyed me up and down. Douglas told her he had something important to tell them and shook so violently I grabbed his arm and moved closer to him.

“Can we come in and sit down?” I asked.

“Of course,” his mother said, turning to move fast, like she wanted to make the place look more presentable. She moved a newspaper off a couch, and as we sat she cleared glasses from side tables and brought them into the kitchen. A toilet flushed, and his dad came out from the hall. She told him their son had something to tell them.

Douglas said nothing, so I did. “You have a lovely home,” I lied. “I see why he wanted to see you.” I didn’t see, but that wasn’t for me to see anyway.

He told them. Blurted it out with a spasm that scared me. I put my hand on Douglas’s shoulder to keep him on the earth. They looked like they’d been whiplashed.

“I thought—” she stopped. She looked at my hand on her son’s shoulder. I had raised her hopes. I was supposed to be the problem. Pregnant. Or just some hussy in her twenties getting her dumb son in trouble. But at least that would have proved he wasn’t gay.

“Why did you do this to us?” she hissed. She stood, and his whole body flinched next to mine. How many times had the gay been beaten out of him? He stood, his shoulders hunched down in self-protection.

“Your soul is rot,” she said. She motioned to her husband, who was shaking his head, his lower lip pulled back to bare his teeth. A coward trying to look tough.

“I always knew it,” she said. “But to come back and—”

“Okay,” I said, walking to the door. “You’ve made yourself clear. Thank you. He wanted you to know.” Douglas didn’t say anything else; he was fading.

In the car, Douglas still said nothing. “I’m sorry,” I said, which was about all I could say. He nodded. I told him he could stay the night at my house. It was Friday, and Allison was at her daddy’s. In the morning we’d go to one of the tourist courts in Hot Springs. Tourist courts were like motor lodges, and there were lots of one-room apartments along Ouachita and Park because so many people came to town to take the baths.

I kept turning that phrase she said over in my mind: “Your soul is rot.”

I put out extra sheets for him to make the couch more comfortable. I got up in the night to check on him. The sheets were still in the pile, folded, and he slept in the clothes he was wearing. Even sleeping, he seemed to be keeping his body as small as possible, not taking up any space.

More men called me before they came back, and when they arrived, I brought them to the tourist courts for a cheap place to live as long as they needed it. From working with Bonnie, I knew my way around the housing assistance program. They began to let people with AIDS get disability benefits from social security, so then I started getting them on that too. These were men who’d had jobs where they had lived, entire lives. They had invested in the system that spurned them. The only thing I had to do was get a signed note from a doctor. I mean, a note. It could have been on the back of a matchbox, and all it had to say was, “I’m his doctor, and I think he has AIDS.”

There were two gay men in town who I thought would help me, but they didn’t. They had jobs in social services, and the first few times, I tried to get in their lines, but I made them nervous. They were afraid people would find out they were gay. They were hiding in plain sight. It just went unmentioned because they were fun at galas and the Fine Arts Ball. I went to those parties too, with my best friend Sandy, and whatever guy and his friend she dragged in. Some guy would buy me a three-dollar drink and think he could cop a feel in return. So, with all the time I spent ignoring Sandy’s guys, I had plenty of time to watch these two men as they socialized, perfectly acceptable because they played along. I didn’t expect them to give some secret signal that I could use to get better treatment, but I was surprised at how much they wanted nothing to do with me or the guys I brought in. When I saw them, they started to look past me.

But we kept going. I would coach my guys for each line and each pencil pusher like it was a performance. A game we had to play in order to get things done. We were a team, and I treated them like stars. “Okay, we’re going to the food-stamp office now,” I would say. “The only answers you give them are Yes, No, I don’t know. And if they get funny, I’ll fill in for you.” We’d walk out, reviewing the performance, and I would tell them how proud I was of them.

When I met them sick in the hospital, it was too late. But out there in the world, I seized on every bit of joy I could scrape out of the pan. These men had lived on the margins so long that coming into the light to ask for help scared them to death. I had to walk them through the steps, keeping things fun.

I realized this included death certificates. I had often been asked to fill out information for death certificates in hospitals, when I didn’t know the most basic information about the men. I wanted them to have a death certificate so people would know that they had lived and they had died—they were here. Because they at least deserved that. They couldn’t be “nobody’s nothing” after what they had been through. At one point in early 1987 I had a few guys from all over, and I brought them together. I ordered pizza, and as we ate and laughed, I fired out questions like a game-show host. “What’s your mother’s maiden name?” “Where were you born, anyway?” I was always helping people with forms, so this wasn’t that unusual, and I just said it was for the hospital, “just to have.”

I wanted them to be counted, to have their lives matter, and I wanted them to have control over their destinies, no matter how limited they might seem to others. If I felt they were strong enough, I brought them to Files Cemetery and asked them to tell me where they’d like to be buried. I’d put so many on top of my family’s graves, but those were the hospital patients I barely had a chance to know. And now there were people like Douglas, who were coming to an uneasy acceptance that it would happen someday, even though I knew we both realized it was soon.

John, Danny, Neil. I walked them around and told them who the people were and some history about them. “Or maybe you want to be closer to the road so you know what’s going on.” The storytellers liked that one, and the quiet ones often chose to be under the oak. But after I gave them the lay of the land, I went quiet. “You go out and wherever it feels right, you stand there, and that’s where you’ll be.”

I’d write it down in my journal and honor their wishes. Douglas chose the oak.

Allison and I were at the church potluck, and the unspoken competition was in full swing. Everybody wanted to be the one that just wowed ’em all with a sweet potato casserole. I felt exempt, because I already knew I made the best fried chicken anyone had ever thrown a lip over. It would bring a tear to your mama’s eye, it was so good. I put the flour and the salt and pepper and all of that in a paper bag, and I rolled the chicken in it. And then I dipped the chicken in egg and put it back in, to make that double crust. My mother was a terrible cook but made sure I knew how to cook, because she wanted me to get married to that tire-retread guy. I had to be able to feed him.

Marie was hosting, so she had to put on chi-chi fa-fa airs, having just had her kitchen remodeled. The women all had to take turns oohing and aahing at it, but I got that out of the way quick. The men sat around, all full bellies and small talk about Rotary business.

Near the end of the evening, I was in the living room with Allison when I heard a god-awful noise in the kitchen. I went in to find Marie standing at the sink shoveling food down the drain.

“It just gets rid of everything for you,” she said, trying to scream pretty over the noise. It was a garbage disposal. People acted like they’d never seen such a wonder.

“Well, that’s not garbage,” I said. The women turned to look at me, half-smiles cocked so I’d have a chance to clarify my position in a more pleasing manner. I tried. “I mean, we can plate that up . . . not waste it.”

Marie paused and turned off the disposal. “Of course, Ruth,” she said, her show interrupted. She looked at Allison. “If you all didn’t get enough to eat—”

“No, we did,” I said. “Everything was just lovely. And you have to give me the recipe for those Swedish meatballs, because Allison just loved them.”

“I did not,” Allison said, insulted. “I said they were—”

“Oh yes, you did. And, Mabel, this good coffee cake. I just mean we can share all this.”

I’d done this before for Bonnie and some of the elders in the town after big parties. Like Miss Ann and old Miss McKissek. And Melba, of course, who always seemed so prim, just a sweet little old Lutheran lady, until you learned she’d learned all those manners running a St. Louis brothel in the 1950s.

Like after the Fine Arts Ball, I’d go in the kitchen and chat up whoever catered it, box things up, and take it around so people stuck at home could be part of the big night. I’d tell them where I’d been and who I saw. “Here’s the food, and try this, it’s really good.” Melba and I would sit in her kitchen, and she’d read my fortune with regular playing cards, laying out my future on the tiny yellow checks of her plastic tablecloth.

I knew how much sharing that food meant to people, so why not do it here too? I started packing things up before she could say no. “Marie, you have all these paper plates,” I said. “The good kind, of course, nice and sturdy. I would expect nothing less! Doris, will you pass me that foil?” I got them all enlisted in helping me, whether they wanted to or not.

Then I saw my fried chicken. Practically untouched. “I guess nobody liked the chicken,” I said. I’d only had a little so that there would be plenty for everyone. I knew it was good.

“There was just so much food,” Marie said quickly.

“Well, I’ll find a home for it,” I said, just as quick, putting the foil top right back over the big pan. Allison and I started a relay team to my car, and the men began helping because anything that was going to get them home quicker was fine with them. Soon my back seat was full, and we drove off.

“Hold on,” I said to Allison. I stopped by the post office and reached over to the glove compartment. I’d started keeping thank-you notes in there with stamps and a blue pen after getting those donations at Christmas. I’d even sent one to that awful woman at Hallmark.

“A Southern lady knows the power of a thank-you note,” I said to Allison. “Whoever Marie gets in the mail first gets invited back.” If you did it right, you also had a detail that would make them think of you every time they saw it. “From the minute I stepped on your beautiful lawn, I was just stunned by the home you keep,” I said aloud, writing against the steering wheel. Marie needed to be better than all her neighbors, so that would be good.

I went to lick the stamp and Allison stopped me. “No, me,” she said.

“Okay,” I said. “But put it on the envelope. It’s not a sticker for you, okay?”

“Ta dah,” she said, proud of her work.

“Good job,” I said. “Now run it to the mailbox so we can go bring this food to people.”

We spent an hour driving around, stopping in on my guys who were living at the tourist courts and also at the homes of old Miss Ann and Melba. Lonely people tend to be night owls, so I knew they’d be up. We were like reverse trick-or-treaters, ringing the bell to give them something good. “You don’t even have to heat up the chicken,” I told everyone. “Those meatballs need all the help they can get, but that cake will forgive any sin.”

I’d watched all these men just waste away, and I thought that if I could keep weight on them, they’d have a head start and maybe stay ahead of it. I was tired of waiting for them to die. I was actually trying to help them live instead.

I started cooking for them, and on a day off I would make enough meals for the next week. It wasn’t easy on my budget, but I could cook anything, and I was inventive. My next-door neighbor had a huge backyard garden, as much as his front yard with the house on it. In the summertime, he was always looking for takers for his extra vegetables. I would cook them on their own or use them to stretch meatloaf as far as your eye could see. In winter, he had plenty of collard greens and turnips to spare. I wasn’t fond of turnips myself, but a lot of the guys I looked after were from the country, so that was a taste of home. I also didn’t mind stopping if I saw a tree that was heavy with peaches and grabbing a bunch to make a peach cobbler for everybody. I can’t even guess how many blackberries I picked, or apples, which were everywhere from August until the edge of winter.

Or I’d go up the country to Collier Springs, because the old-timers swore by the nutrition in the watercress that grew wild in shallow streams. You needed to find it growing within a few feet of a fresh spring, so you’d know it wasn’t contaminated, and you had to watch out for snakes. They loved to make a home curled up in the watercress, so the trick was to bring a rake and lift the plants out of the water first. Give the snake a chance to move out and find a new home before you stuck your hand right in.

My cousin out on Amity Road had cattle, and he’d call me when he sold a cow. “Come out, girl,” he’d say. “I got something for you.” After breaking it down for his customer, he’d have all kinds of hamburger left over, and the cuts of meat nobody else wanted. I could also do that at McClard’s—the most famous barbecue restaurant in Hot Springs—asking politely if they had any ham bones or scrap meat to make a big pot of greens or, even better, beans. White beans cooked with a big old ham bone from McClard’s just needed a bay leaf thrown in to be magic for my guys. Sometimes they gave me enough scrap meat that I could make people pork sandwiches, delivering them the same barbecue that people paid the big bucks to eat. “Here it is,” I’d say. “You don’t even have to wait in line for a table. It’s delivered right to you with a pot of beans.”

In the fall and winter of deer season, people were excited to show off their kill, and I’d be there with a hand out. “Could I just have a little bit of what you’re not going to use?” I would take the neck bones of anything, because there was always a lot of meat there. But the gold was the marrow that I could draw out to make the bone broth for the ones that were too sick to eat. I’d take a hammer to break up the bones, add one capful of vinegar to really draw out the good stuff, then put it on simmer and let it go all day and night. They could just have that in a mug, and when they weren’t strong enough to hold up a mug, I’d hold it for them. And when even that became too hard, I’d feed them by spoon.

But there were still groceries and things I needed to buy for them. Bonnie and I were at Kroger getting groceries, and she asked me what army I was feeding.

“I’m bringing food ’round to my guys,” I said. “It’s really making a difference. I can just tell.”

“Well, let me help,” she said.

“Bonnie, you are many things, but you are not a cook.”

“I mean my food stamps,” she said. A woman looked over when she heard that and primly nodded, like Bonnie deserved food stamps on account of how she looked.

“Really?” I said.

“Eating’s an aberration for me anyway,” she said; we blended her food for the feeding tube. Bonnie started giving me half her food stamps, and we’d get groceries together.

But they still kept dying. I learned that if hospital patients needed something, I could advocate best during the graveyard shift and weekends. The night shift didn’t care if you hung around or what you did, just don’t get them in trouble: “Burn the place down but have it back together by shift change in the morning.”

Unless it was an emergency, I’d drive my guys to Little Rock. AMI was our backup in Hot Springs. “If AMI burns to the ground, go to Little Rock if I’m not here,” I’d tell them. “Do not go to St. Joe’s.” I had more fights at St. Joe’s than at any other hospital. These doctors, men who I respected from town, would shove a finger in my chest and tell me that I was going to die. That was bad enough, but they told me I was bringing in people who put everyone’s life at risk. Dr. Porter, a cancer doctor who was furious to be stuck with AIDS patients on his oncology floor, thought I was disgusting because I went in the room while he stood at the door. He became enraged with me once because I took a chart into a patient’s isolation room. He was screaming at me so much he was spitting.

“Doctor, there are sick people here,” I said, trying to calm him down.

“Don’t tell me there’s sick people here!” he yelled. I think he truly believed the chart was infected. I know Dr. Porter is why the nurses thought it was okay to leave the trays outside patients’ doors again. It was so upsetting, because now I knew these dying men. I’d fed them, from chicken sandwiches to broth in a mug. And now they were trapped in these places that did the very least for them. I thought I could shame Dr. Porter into doing more.

“Have you heard about the pizza and pancake diet for AIDS patients?” I asked him.

“What are you talking about?”

“Pizza and pancakes—you just slide ’em under the door,” I said. “It’s more than your staff is doing.”

“Well, I don’t want ’em in the hospital.”

“They don’t want to be here.”

“Well, if I get an infection from one of them—”

“Wear a condom when you go in.”

He stalked off. I had these small moments of release, because otherwise the anger was too painful. There were people in the hospital I could do that with, but mostly I tried to act as professional as possible. I called it my doctor costume. “If I have to get the doctor involved . . .” I’d say to nurses.

“Oh, no, you don’t need to get the doctor involved.” Anything but a doctor on their ass. Even an imaginary doctor. And I felt like I was becoming that doctor. I read everything I could, and I was so proud that I was getting the glossary: the cytomegalovirus retinitis that would make some of them blind if they lived long enough; the pneumocystis pneumonia that would fill their lungs and always get them. I kept notes on everything in my planner, noting that the only people I ever saw with Kaposi’s sarcoma lesions had been on the coasts. Those were the purple and red blotches that the national news showed people having, in the rare times they talked about AIDS.

I wrote all this down, thinking knowing the names would help them, or at least I would have information when the cavalry or the federal government showed up to take over. It was a way to tame the chaos. To at least feel the power that comes with naming something. But saying “this is pneumocystis” did not help when a guy was shaking so hard because it was impossible to keep him warm, no matter how many blankets you grabbed from other rooms. The only thing you could do sometimes was wrap yourself inside with him just to give him some heat.

Saying “this is cytomegalovirus retinitis” didn’t help the men whose vision had started to go, first in a light fog they could deny and then in a closing curtain that left them blind. To block out the beeps and the chatter of the nurses, I closed the door and read to them. At first, it was the Danielle Steel and Nora Roberts books that gave me comfort and distraction. On my own, I would read three at a time and flip between them like TV channels. But they seemed too superficial, and it seemed cruel to read a cliffhanger to people next to a cliff. I understood why people read the Bible to people who are dying. There’s a sureness to it, a sense that this journey had been done before. But I never wanted to bring the Bible in, because these guys had been hit in the head with it enough.

I started carrying an old tour book for the Florida Keys in my bag with me at all times. I’d had it since I was a kid, and after my daddy died, I read it to escape back to memories of him taking me there. As I read it to my guys, we’d leave whatever hospital we were in, and go somewhere beautiful, away from trouble and worry. They’d all come home to Arkansas, a place that had birthed them but wouldn’t claim them. So we left.

The first stop was always Key Largo. I would read the description and tell them about the times when I was a kid visiting with my dad. Then I’d take them on down to Islamorada, where we swam with dolphins and dived down into the water, which changed from a clear turquoise to cooler blue as we swam through angelfish, darting around us in streaks of electric yellow, purple, and blue, seeming to be lit from within. We’d put our hands on the coral reefs that had grown over shipwrecks, riots of green and purple covering the skeletons of abandoned cargo ships and freighters. We’d dry ourselves on the beaches, which are made from coquina, disintegrated shells that turn to stone after eons and eons.

At the end of the guidebook, we’d made it to Key West. I would skip sections to get there sometimes, if we needed to, pressing the gas on the Seven Mile Bridge on the Overseas Highway to make better time. For us, Key West was a gay mecca we lined with as many gorgeous men as there were lavender and pink flowers. By the time we got there, we had an understanding that there was no judgment. We’d smile or just sigh, and they might point out a guy in short shorts riding by on a bike or a swimmer who looked just like the first guy they ever kissed.

We went someplace else, where they were safe and warm. Where there was nothing to be hidden and nothing wrong with admiring the way the sun shone down on the beauty of men. As if it existed for that very reason—to be admired and loved.

Chapter Six

It was a Friday morning in April 1987, and one minute I very much cared that Allison asked for two Eggos and then didn’t even eat half of one—and then I didn’t.

I caught the first words from a morning news show on in the living room. Princess Diana had visited a newly opened AIDS ward in London the day before. I stood in front of the television, then kneeled to get closer. “The Princess of Wales showed not the slightest apprehension about her visit to Middlesex Hospital and its new AIDS ward,” said the British correspondent, the same one they always had on to talk about how Diana and Prince Charles were in a royal soap opera. “All the speculation had centered on whether she would wear gloves when shaking hands with the staff and nine patients of the new ward.”

“She didn’t wear gloves,” I whispered, watching her walk, so tall and beautiful in a knee-length blue dress with long sleeves. She shook hands with all nine patients in the ward. A whole ward devoted to AIDS, I thought. She stayed more than an hour but was not filmed with any of the patients. “They were worried about public exposure,” said the correspondent. They were worried, not her. Someone they interviewed from the hospital said the princess sat on the beds of patients when they couldn’t stand.

They flashed to a picture of her, seated and smiling, facing someone we could see only from behind. “Only this patient agreed to a still photograph with the princess, and then only with his back to the camera.” The slender neck, the dark, thinning hair. He looked like one of my guys. I wondered how long he had. Diana’s smile was broad, just on the edge of looking forced, so I could tell she knew he didn’t have long. She could feel his frailty in her hand.

Then the news moved on, but I stood there. Maybe things were changing. Allison yelled from the kitchen. “I’m not hungry.”

“It’s fine,” I said, walking, taking sure strides like Diana’s. “Let’s get ready.”

I picked out a blue dress for work and double-checked Allison’s backpack. Her daddy would be getting her at school, and I always sent her best clothes along. I crammed them into her little school bag so she didn’t look like a little ragamuffin every Friday.

Work was busy, but lately everyone had been showing around more sightseers than buyers. I got only one couple, in their fifties and sweating, even though it was just seventy-eight degrees. During the tour I could tell they each wanted to say yes, but neither wanted to be responsible if it was a mistake. I needed this sale, and I thought I had them on the way back to the sales office to sign the papers. But when I motioned for them to sit, she started to and he didn’t.

“I need time to pray about it,” he said. I saw her face fall, and she leaned on the chair like she never had any intention of sitting. This girl Roxanne who I couldn’t stand was next to me. I didn’t have to look to know she was smirking.

“I would think so,” I said, matter-of-fact, like it was a necessary formality. “Are you Christian?”

“Of course,” he said.

“Well, so am I,” I said. “Would you pray with me now?”

“Right here?” she asked.

I took their hands and I knelt, right there in the sales office in front of all the other time-share staffers. The couple had no choice but to join me.

“Well, Lord, here it is. You brought these fine people here, and we ask that you guide Harry as he makes this important decision. In Jesus’s name we pray.”

“Amen,” they said, moving slightly, as if to get up. I remained silent and rooted to the ground, so they did too.

After a long beat, I whispered, “Did you hear that?”

“What’s that?” he asked.

“That’s God’s voice.”

“Really?”

“Yeah,” I said. “That’s God telling you, ‘You better take a break and take a vacation.’ Because the only other way He tells you is when you have a heart attack.”

They laughed and bought. Hallelujah, they bought. How could they argue with the Word of God? Roxanne shot me daggers until Sandy came over.

“Roxanne,” she said, all smiles. “That dress you’re wearing, it’s so—comfortable. And Ruthie, your dress.”

“Thank you,” I said. Roxanne huffed off to judge someone else.

“Let’s take it out,” she said. “Don’t waste such a nice look on work.”

“I can maybe meet you out later,” I said. “I need to run some errands. Where will you be?”

“The Arlington, but hopefully not for long,” she said. She looked down at my contract. “But if you do catch me out there, drinks are on you.”

“Praise the Lord,” I said.

My errands were actually just one, and it was stopping by a house out on Highway 70 West.

Bonnerdale was about twenty miles west of Hot Springs, and when I drove up to the address I had, I was surprised to find it was a fairly nice house. It was probably one of the nicer ones spared back in 1935 when they tore down neighborhoods to build the highway.

A tall, sinewy man was leaning on a weathered pickup out front with the hood up, his jean shorts cut as close as Daisy Duke’s. He was wearing black work boots, and a cigarette dangled from his lip. He took a long drag on it as he turned to watch me get out.

“Tim?”

“Who’s asking?” He had light hair and dark eyes. His sandy blond hair was sheared off, and he had a tiny little mustache. He was wearing a cologne that was so loud, I could smell it as I was coming up the driveway.

“I’m Ruth,” I said, going to shake his hand. “We spoke on the phone.”

“Oh,” he said, relaxing and taking another drag off his cigarette. “Yeah, I’m Tim Gentry. You’re prettier than I thought you’d be.”

“I could say the same for you,” I said, pointing to his shorts. He let out a laugh, did the smallest dip, almost a curtsy. A hillbilly dandy.

“Nice truck,” I said.

“Not mine,” he said. “We were just working on it. The drive belt is loose. Well, he is fixing it.” He turned to the house. “Jimmy,” he yelled to the house. “We got company.”

He was at the screen door almost immediately, shorter but tougher looking than Tim. A Budweiser in his hand like it could be a weapon. He had a mop of thick, curly dark hair, with just a little salt in it. He had grease on his shirt.

“Jimmy, this is the lady,” Tim said.

He softened, only a little. “You wanna come in?”

“That would be nice,” I said, moving to shake his hand. “I’m Ruth Coker Burks.”

“Jim Kelly,” he said, still formal, like I was from the government.

They were living with Tim’s parents, who were watching a game show in the living room. Tim’s dad was almost in his eighties, and he made no effort to hide that he was staring a hole through my dress, and it didn’t matter much, because his wife was sitting on the couch suddenly trying hard to not look drunk. I shook their hands, Princess Ruth greeting everyone. When you went into somebody else’s world, you had to enjoy how their life was, not bring your world into theirs.

“I don’t want to interrupt,” I said. “I know you’re working on the truck.”

“Right,” said Jim. He gestured to Tim, cocking his head, meaning we should follow him outside. I wasn’t sure if that was the end of the visit, but Tim grabbed a plaid vinyl lawn chair and brought it over to face the hood. He opened the door of the truck and sat in the driver’s seat, leaning back like he was in a lounge chair.

“Do they know?” I asked.

“Oh, sure,” Tim said.

“I’m glad you could tell them,” I said. I went into intake mode, getting all the vitals. Tim and Jim were doing odd jobs to get by, fixing cars for people who couldn’t afford a real mechanic, working at convenience stores. The kind of jobs you could come and go through.

They’d been together a few years, meeting in Gainesville and then moving up here to live with Tim’s parents. Tim had started a heavy-duty love affair with heroin down in Florida, but had quit when he moved back home. Tim told me he got a real bad flu, which I assumed was pneumonia, but I let him talk. He went to AMI for it and tested positive. Then Jim tested positive too.

“Timmy said you help people,” Jim said, starting to relax as he tipped back his beer and then went to work on the truck.

“I do.”

“What can you do?”

“Well, for one, I can get you social security,” I said. “Get you some income.” They nodded, so I got out my little planner to get their information. “I am also trying to figure out why some people get this,” I said. “How, I mean.”

“You know, I don’t know how I got it,” Tim said, seeming genuinely mystified. “Because I always slept with nice-looking men who wore suits.”

“A suit will do it, right?” I said.

“Always,” Jim agreed. There was a sudden drawl to his voice.

“The South just jumped out in your voice,” I said. “Where are you from, Jim?”

“Perryville,” he said, like he hated to admit it. Perryville was about fifty miles north of Hot Springs in the middle of nowhere. It’s five square miles of not many people living as far from each other as possible.

“How’d you get to Florida?” I asked. It’s hard enough to get to Perryville, and it’s even harder to get out.

“Navy.”

“That’ll do it.”

“Babe,” Jim said, then threw Tim the keys. By now I was invested. The truck hummed, not great, but not bad either.

“No more squeak,” Jim said. He closed the hood and did a slight bow as I clapped. Tim moved to sit on the hood, crossing his long legs. We stayed out talking until the sun set purple and pink across the sky. These were like the good old bad boys I grew up with, not hurting anybody but always up to something. When I left, I promised to be back with forms to get them services.

I drove over to the Arlington Hotel feeling like I’d made new friends and excited to see my old friend Sandy. I never got over how grand the Arlington was; everything about it was big. The lobby was more like a palace court, and it looked the same as when it opened, on New Year’s Eve in 1924. Sure, it was haunted, but so was a lot of Hot Springs.

I found Sandy at the lobby bar and stood back a minute to watch her in the wild. She sat with her back arched in an impossibly unnatural pose, scanning the bar. Sandy’s floral dress blended with the huge mural of flowers over the bar. It was like a nature documentary with the female of the species being the aggressor.

“Is this seat taken?” I said in a low voice, sidling up to her.

“I’m waiting on somebody,” Sandy said. “He’s taller than you and very rich.” She laughed. “Wait, I forgot you’re buying. You’ll do.” She turned to find the bartender, who was already waiting. She feigned surprise at her luck. “Oh! We’re all here, how perfect. She’s buying me a vodka soda.”

“And a club soda with lime.”

“What time do you have to be back at the convent?”

“I’m easing into the night,” I said.

“Well, Sister, maybe we can find you someone to sneak in.”

Our bartender brought us our drinks and asked if I wanted to open a tab.

“Yes, she does,” said Sandy. “And don’t be a stranger.”

We clinked glasses. “To friendship,” I said. “Thank you for putting Roxanne in her place for me today.”

“Oh, I’d do that even if I didn’t love you, Ruthie. She’s a bitch.”

We caught up on office gossip. Sandy wasn’t selling enough, but now I felt like it wasn’t her fault for not putting more effort in. There were just fewer people buying. “There’s no chickens left on the side of the road,” I said.

“What are you talking about chickens?”

“You can tell how good or bad the economy is by how many dead chickens you see on the side of the road. They jump off the trucks, and you see ’em if things are good. If it’s bad, there aren’t any because people have stopped to take ’em home and eat ’em.”

“I haven’t been seeing chickens,” she said.

“See?”

“Well, when I die, that’s when the credit card will be paid off,” Sandy said. She took a long draw on her drink and scanned the room. “I’m going to need someone to drive me home.”

“I can.”

“Um, no.”

The next round, I ordered a vodka soda too. “I can’t let you drink alone,” I said. We clinked glasses, and as we drank, I loosened up a little. I thought how much I wanted to tell her about the work I was doing. I still felt I couldn’t. So, when Sandy started in again on me needing to find a man, I felt the need to at least say that truth.

“You think I don’t want someone? Not just for Allison but for me? All I want sometimes is to be a wife and be in the Junior League.”

“You’ve got the haircut for it.”

“Doesn’t work, though.”

We sighed. I still had hope.

When I finished my drink, Sandy knew I was heading out. She didn’t try to stop me, because I think she was ready to focus on finding Mr. Tonight. We went to the ladies’ room, and since it was empty but for us, I took my chance.

“Sandy, I want you to start protecting yourself,” I said as she primped in the mirror, reapplying lipstick. “I am not going to harp on this, but AIDS is real, and you need to be careful because you could get this disease.”

Sandy rolled her eyes, but I continued. “You need to use a condom every time. It’s not just gay men, no matter what they’re saying.” She looked mortified.

“Shush,” she said. “Dear Buzzkill Magazine, have I got a story for you—”

“I’m serious,” I said, opening my purse. “I am giving you these.” I had a stash of condoms I’d bought for my guys to have.

“Oh Lord.”

I wasn’t going to harp on it, because nobody wants a friend to do that. But I had to.

“Why do you have condoms?” she asked.

“Let’s say hope,” I said, with a laugh. “You never know what’s gonna happen.”

We walked out, and she pretended not to notice a table of men looking at her, not realizing they were the prey.

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