“Have you had breakfast?” Bernice fussed.
He’d knocked on VORLand’s End’s door to let them know he’d be ‘going away’ for a few days and not to worry, and ask if he could borrow Jenny’s kayak. Bernice’s eyes widened. “Are you alright?” she clucked, summoning him in and making him take a seat at their kitchen table. “You look tired and, if you don’t mind me saying, a little bit off.”
“I’m okay,” he assured. “Not sleeping very well, is all.”
She clattered a skillet onto the stove. “Scrambled eggs, would that suit you?”
“Honestly, Bernice, I’m not hungry.”
If she’d heard him, she didn’t let on. She needs to keep herself busy, to feel she’s doing something good, he thought. What a screw-up I’ve turned out to be! He’d have to force himself to eat her fry-up as a form of penance.
“What’s troubling you, Buddy?
“Something is,” she probed when he didn’t answer.
He shrugged. She turned back to her breakfast prep, cracking a couple of eggs into a bowl and whisking milk into them fiercely. Pouring the mixture into the cast iron pan…
“I admire you and Harry,” he said.
“Oh? Why’s that?” She scraped the eggs off the bottom of the skillet as they congealed, popped a couple of pieces of bread into the toaster, and turned the sizzling bacon. “Because we’ve managed to keep breathing for almost a century?”
“No,” he shook his head. “Because you’re still living after almost a century—not just existing, but living, the two of you. I’ve seen teenagers who don’t have as much spunk as you and old folks who’ve been walking around like zombies for more than half their lives. But you and Harry? You’ve both got what I guess I’d call ‘gumption’.
She laughed. “When you get to be our age, you’ll know just how much ‘gumption’ it takes to lug your unwilling carcass around from place to place, and how weary you look in the mirror, and how your whole life has become a sort of exercise in not dying… not because you’re afraid, but because you want to understand what it means to die before you do.
“Sounds stupid, doesn’t it?”
Buddy disagreed, shaking his head.
“The living ghosts, as Harry and I call ’em, have given up. They aren’t obeying Dylan Thomas’s edict…”
She turned her ancient eyes on him—dark, impenetrable, knowing eyes and recited,
"Do not go gentle into that good night, Old age should burn and rave at close of day; Rage, rage against the dying of the light."
Then she turned back to her skillet, shovelled his scrambled eggs onto a plate beside his bacon and buttered toast, and placed the meal in front of him. She bustled over to the counter to fetch a knife and fork, then sat opposite him at the kitchen table.
“Do you know why we have to die, Buddy?” she wondered, watching him intently.
He forked some scrambled egg and bacon, raised the food to his mouth, chewed, and swallowed. Then chomped a piece of toast, chewed and swallowed again. “I know I have to die,” he said. “That’s enough for me, I guess. It would be foolish and selfish for me to want to live forever.”
“And what if I want you to keep on living—forever? Does that make any difference?”
Buddy chewed and swallowed again. Chewed and swallowed again. “Of course it does,” he said. “It would make it harder for me to die, but no easier to live, if you know what I mean.”
“I suppose,” she hesitated. “Can you tell me what it is you have to go away and think about, Buddy?” Before he could answer, Bernice bustled over to the counter again, fetched the pot of coffee, and refilled his cup. “I don’t mean to be nosy, and you don’t have to answer, of course. But I’m worried.”
Buddy stirred some cream and a spoonful of sugar into his cup. “Truth is, Bernice, I’m going to think about what it is I should be thinking about. Everything’s sort of fallen apart for me…
“No,” he corrected, “it’s like that invisible force we call gravity, spiritual gravity, has shifted, and instead of holding me on this earth, it’s saying, ‘Let go.’…
“Does that make any sense?”
She heaved a sigh. Of surrender or commiseration, he couldn’t tell.
“You can borrow Jenny’s kayak,” Bernice said at last. “But you have to promise to bring it back and put it exactly where she’d expect to find it. Otherwise, there’ll be hell to pay.”
“I promise,” he said.
Next: Just for Kiks (Part 1)