Chapter Eight

"I’ll have a French toast combo with sausage patties”, Jake told the pretty young waitress who was taking their order. “I’d also like a couple of scrambled eggs on the side and a small bowl of oatmeal with brown sugar. And I’d like a large orange juice to go with that.” Jake wasn’t usually a breakfast eater, so this was a big order for him. Usually his breakfast consisted of a couple of drive-thru fast breakfast sandwiches, if he ate anything at all. The local McDonald’s was familiar with his “usual” choice of a sausage and egg biscuit meal.

“Would you like milk or water to go with that”, she said without any trace of that sweet slow drawl that would tell him they were getting near Boone Hollow.

Jake gave her nametag a once over and said “Yes, Annie, I’ll have a glass of ice water to go with that. But I don’t drink milk anymore, so the juice will be fine.”

Annie gave him a surprised look. “You don’t drink milk anymore? I’ve never heard of anyone giving up milk!”

“It’s a long story, Annie. And I don’t really have time to tell here. Just the juice if that’s all right”, Jake said as he gave her his polished smile he used on customers. He was polite, but he was already looking past her and thinking about other things.

“And you, sir” Annie asked Sam.

“Young lady”, started Sam. “Don’t mind my kid brother here. He’s a little preoccupied with solving important wordly matters. Me, I just want to start with a cup of coffee while I look over this fine menu you have here. Do you have a pot of decaf brewing?”

“Coffee it is” said Annie. She could tell that Sam would be a pleasant customer in the midst of the breakfast rush. She could use one or two of those every so often. “You just look over the menu and I’ll tell you what the specials are when I come back.”

“Thank you kindly, maam” said Sam.

“I’ve got the check today” Jake said in Annie’s general direction, “since you’re doing all of the driving. Order whatever you want.” As usual, Jake was being a little too casual with his money. He couldn’t really afford to pick up many checks on this trip and he had promised Linda that he would hold down his costs. But Jake usually talked first and then thought about the consequences later. He hadn’t completely broken that habit yet. He winced to himself as he thought of Jeannie from PCCS second guessing that decision, like a little angel sitting on his shoulder. Or was it a devil? Jake was sliding out of the booth and excusing himself. “I’m going outside for a minute to check in with Linda.”

Jake found a pay phone and used his calling card to call home. He reached Linda on her cell phone on the second ring. Of course she was already up and going. Her morning started early every week day. She already had the boys up and dressed and off to school. She put Anthony on the school bus at 7:30 and dropped Isaac off at his kindergarten class at 8:00 am. Ideally that would mean she had a few hours to herself to catch some rest or indulge in a hobby. That was rarely the case. As with most days she had piles of never ending laundry to do. And somehow she would have to face the housework and make some semblence of order out of the destructive chaos that two high strung little boys could bring to even the best of houses. Somehow she did it each day and even managed to stay cheerful about her role, even on the days that she fell into bed exhausted at night with the kids finally in bed. Jake was, frankly, oblivious to all that Linda had to face each day in raising the kids. He tried to make it to the important events, but he still missed a lot of the everyday parent teacher meetings and doctor’s appointments and school field trips. Linda did all of that and more and Jake was happy to leave it to her. He appreciated that she had a tough job on her hand, but after all it was the life that they chosen together. He was just glad that he got to leave the house each day and go face the office workplace with it’s challenges and variety. He tried to make it up to Linda by sending her out to a motel once a month for a getaway night.

“How is it going so far, Jake?” Linda asked with concern.

“It’s fine, I guess. We’re making good time getting down the road and Sam is doing a good job driving. I got a little sleep in so I’m going to be okay for the day.”

“Are you two getting along all right?”

“Well, we’re keeping it civil is about the best I can say. This work thing is getting to both of us and, of course, it’s come up already. I was hoping to stay busy with my laptop, but the battery died on me. So I’m basically screwed there. Plus, I really needed to be at the project meeting today.”

“Can’t they reschedule it?” Linda asked.

“I’m not that important, babe. They’ll go on without me. My team can handle it for one day, I guess.” He sounded like he was trying to convince himself of that one.

“Well, all right. They’ll have to do without you because you need to be where you’re going. Just get back as soon as you can. And keep your cell phone on in case I need to get in touch with you.”
“Yes, dear” Jake answered. He knew she needed that security, but he always chafed a little bit at that. Man, what did they do before we all had cell phones and were on a leash 24 hours a day?

Linda was glad he called and was just getting started with her questions. “My car is starting to smell like gasoline when I park it in the garage. Have you noticed that?”

“No, dear. I haven’t” Jake said a little abruptly. Linda was always bringing up something about her car. It bugged him more than a little because it was always something small compared to the daily disasters that he faced driving the beater work car that he did every day. There was no way Jake would even let Linda drive his car in the condition it was in. The tires were too bald to start with and he couldn’t count on having traction. The heater may or may not work and he was heading into the cold season. But all that was minor compared to the way the engine overheated every day when he drove to work. The car was burning oil like crazy and he knew it wasn’t going to make it much more. He was replacing all of the oil about once a week now and was starting to see a lot of antifreeze on the driveway where he parked it. His car was a rolling breakdown waiting to happen. He knew the drill. When it broke down completely he would just have it towed to the junkyard and he would buy his next beater to drive into the ground. He could probably drive a better car if he got creative with the financing, but why? Cars were just for going from point A to point B for Jake. He’d much rather spend money on his motorcycle that he used for weekend getaways into the country. Now that was worth spending money on.

“Do you think it’s got a gas leak?” Linda pressed. “Maybe a broken hose or something.”

“I don’t know” said Jake, resigned. He knew he wasn’t done yet.

“Do you think it could be a problem with the fuel pump?” Linda continued.

“I still don’t know”, said Jake pointedly. Why did she always make him say it three times. Why couldn’t she just accept the first “I don’t know” and be done with it?

“Well, you don’t have to snap at me. I’m worried about it, okay”. Linda was obviously hurt by Jake’s tone.

“I’m sorry. Just take it in to the garage and get it looked at.” Jake knew it was his job to provide solid and dependable transportation for Linda, and he was aggravated that he was out of position to do so today. He wasn’t able to “rescue” her like he wanted to as the family provider. Normally, he would take it in to the garage for her. He thought it could wait this time until he got home, but she sounded worried about it. “Just spend the minimum that you can on it, okay. Anything else?”

“Yeah, a couple of more things. Susan called from church and asked if you could help out with the kids in second service again. She thinks you’re pretty good at helping her and she could use willing bodies in there. What should I tell her?”

“Tell her I’ll be there.” Jake answered. He had filled in for Linda in kid’s church one week when she was sick and he kind of liked it, so he kept coming back. There weren’t many men who worked with the elementary age kids, but he had kids in that group and he knew he could handle it. It wasn’t much pressure and no one expected very much from him. It was hard to fail there if he just showed up. He was mostly there to be a male presence for crowd control. You had to symbolically thump the misbehavors every now and then to keep it from spinning out of control. Not physically, of course. You had to win them over and be respected by them to get them to do what you needed them to do to get through the lesson. Besides, he liked it when all of the kids called him “Mr. Jake”.

“All right, I’ll tell Susan you’ll be there. Don’t let her down, please. And Jake, I’d like it if you came with me to first service as well. You know I like it when you’re there with me.”

“I’ll do my best”, Jake said. He knew it sounded empty to both of them as soon as he said it. He heard the hurt in her voice when she asked him to be in church with her. He know she was sincere when she asked it, but he resented it each time she said it to him. It always seemed like a backhanded criticism to Jake. Why was that?

Going to worship service had for a long time been something that he shared with Linda as both a desire and as a family responsibility. Jake had even been in the leadership of their church early in their marriage and was always on the platform doing something during the service. Sometimes it was singing in the choir. Sometimes it was making announcements about activities that he was in charge of. Sometimes it was conducting official business as a respected member of the church board. Everyone at the church knew Jake.

But that was then and now was a completely different story. Jake was barely a presence at church now at all. He hadn’t intentionally turned his back on his church or his church family. It was a gradual decline. First there were important work projects that seemed to eat all of his time and started to require that he work on the weekends. He didn’t have time to go to practice for the choir anymore, so he stopped going up into the choir loft. Then it was business trips that took him away and drained him of all his energy. He stayed home some Sundays just to “catch up” on his sleep. Eventually, Jake was able to rationalize going out by himself on weekend trips on his motorcycle with just his camera to “recharge his batteries” by shooting landscapes. It didn’t even bother him that much when he gave up his leadership role in with the youth group because he couldn’t count on being there on Wednesday nights. And Jake couldn’t remember the last time anyone had nominated him to be on the church board. It just didn’t happen. He had become the invisible member who occasionally haunted the back row. It had ceased to surprise him when he passed old friends in the halls of the church and they shook his hand and said “Hey it’s good to see you. I wasn’t sure you still came to church here.” That was a sad commentary. But it was what it was and Jake had other things to worry about. At least, that’s what he told himself.

Jake was ready to get off of the phone and get back to his breakfast that was probably getting cold on the table without him. Maybe he could get it boxed up to go. At any rate, he knew Linda and he knew that her questions were just picking up speed.

“Jake, I hate to ask you this but I have to so that I can call Mom and help her plan. Are you coming to Thanksgiving this year?”

“What the hell does that mean?” Jake thought angrily. But he didn’t use that kind of language with Linda, so he edited it back down. “Why wouldn’t I be there?”

“Well, you weren’t there last year”, Linda said sadly.

“What are you talking about? Why wouldn’t I have been at Thanksgiving dinner?” Jake was starting to get angry now. What kind of nonsense was this and why was she even….Oh. It came back to him all at once. He must have been blocking it out. Of course, he had worked on Thanksgiving Day last year. One of his projects was at a critical milestone for an installation. He thought he was going to get a break for the holidays and he had sent his team home and wished them happy holidays. But production is production and deadlines are deadlines and factories do not always have the luxury of coming to a full stop for holidays. He had answered the phone call that changed all of his plans. The customer, responding to a record increase in demand for their product, had called him at home to insist that his team come in and finish the project. Jake not only went in to work, but he called his whole team in to work with him and ruined their holidays as well. He still had not heard the end of that story from his team and their families. But, as stressful as it was, the work had to get done. And, if the truth was known, Jake thrived not only on the stress but on succeeding on the project in the face of those grim circumstances. And he had blocked out all of the details and forgotten about them and moved on. But Linda had not.

“Linda, as far as I know I’ll be there. You know that things change constantly on my job from day to day. And we did just win this new contract bid. We’ll know from today’s meeting how the startup timeline will look. But I can’t imagine that that our group will work over the holidays.” Jake wasn’t really all that sure what his schedule would be, given the new work. The production schedule wasn’t likely to affect his upgrade timeline. On the other hand, everyone would be excited by the win and would be eager to get started. He’d just have to say no if it came up, Jake thought.

“Jake, just promise me that you’ll take Thanksgiving day off. My family wants to see you and it’s important for the kids for you to be there. Do I really have to beg you to be there?”

“Linda, I’ll do my best”, Jake said. He realized that he had been saying that phrase a lot lately.

“Jake, honey, stop saying that if you don’t mean it. I deserve better and your family has to come first.”

“Linda, stop asking me questions like that if you don’t want to hear that answer. I’m giving you the best answer I have. Honestly. Now, I have to go back and eat my breakfast. Can I call you later?” Jake knew he wasn’t going to get to say goodbye on the first try. He never did for some reason. He always had to say goodbye at least three times.

“Jake, I don’t mean to nag, but I saw some of your pill bottles in the cabinet this morning. Did you remember to take your diabetes medicine with you?” Linda asked.

Jake dropped his head in frustration. Why did he hate questions that started out with “I don’t mean to nag, but….?” How many times had he ever started a question to Linda out with that phrase? None, that he could remember. Obviously, it sure felt like nagging to Jake.

“Yes, dear. I took one day’s worth with me in a baggie.” Jake answered. He hadn’t actually, but his answer was easier than confessing the truth and getting the accompanying concerned speech. He had just heard that speech from his doctor last week.

The truth was that Jake was in full blown denial about his diabetic condition. He’d gone through the same arc with the medicine that he had gone through with his church work. Jake had, in the vernacular, recently fallen off the wagon when it came to taking his medicine.

Diabetes, unfortuately, was a family heirloom that ran deep through his mother’s family. It was a resident of Boone Hollow, just like the Ford’s. At one time or another in all of their lives, his aunts and uncles had all gone on insulin. That included Uncle Bob, who they were going to pay last respects to today, and the diabetes played a significant role in his failing health in his last years. But that hadn’t registered with Jake because diabetes was the ubiquitous condition that pervaded his families consciousness. As long as Jake could remember, everyone on his mother’s side of the family just took insulin. It was as prevalent as the cases of soda in the pantry or the sugar filled Chess pies cooling on the counters.

Sam had not shown any signs of diabetes yet. But then again, he had a much better diet than Jake. Jake had, for all intents and purposes, grown up on fast food and had the worst diet imaginable. He was a burgers and fries man and he rarely ate a home cooked meal. It wasn’t unusual at all for Jake to eat all three meals a day through the drive-through of the town’s fast food establishments. There was a breakfast combo choked down with an orange soda to start the day. Lunch was a sit down affair with the chicken fingers value meal, no salad – no thank you, and a burger chaser. Supersize the beverage, of course. And dinners were often beef burritos with no onions and potato wedges with mild taco sauce on them. That meal was hard to eat in a moving car, but Jake had perfected it and then some. He hardly even noticed the taste of food anymore. It was just fuel to get him through his long work day. Fortunately, Linda cooked meals at home for her and the boys and she was teaching them to eat better than Jake ever did.

When Jake turned forty he started thinking about the history of diabetes in his family and he decided to get checked for it. Linda had encouraged him to look into it and had offered to set up an appointment with her doctor. But Jake had his own doctor that he had gone to for years and he went there instead. After a cursory exam, Doctor Campbell told Jake that he had nothing to worry about and sent him home.

“Did he do a blood test?”, Linda asked him when he got home. “No, not really”, Jake confessed. “He just asked me some questions and sent me home with a clean bill of health.” Jake realized that this wasn’t a very thorough exam, but he was glad to get the answer that he got. He would cling to that reassurance.

“Jake, you need to change doctors and get a real diagnosis. I can help you get in with my doctor if you want.” But Jake turned her down and pressed on.

Inevitably Jake started feeling the effects of his condition and couldn’t ignore it anymore. He recognized the symptoms: frequent restroom trips, constant fatigue, etc. They were all adding up. On an impulse one day, Jake signed up for the company health fair which included a diabetes screening with the predictable results. His triglyceride numbers were high. Way high. Way in excess of 1000 when they were supposed to be under 160. “You need to go see your doctor.”

Jake gave in and had Linda get an appointment for him with her doctor. He came home that day and told Linda “Wow, that what a real physical is like? I could have phoned mine in to my doctor. This one was three hours long and I’ve been poked and prodded everywhere!”. The next week Jake went back for his lab test results and his official diagnosis of diabetes. The first thing he did was call his doctor and fire him on the spot. Then he sat down for the counseling session to start him on a new path of managing his disease. He was going to get to try to manage the diabetes with pills, diet, and exercise to hold off of insulin for a while. “Jake, you’re not obese but you are overweight enough to have triggered the diabetes”, Dr. Tyler told him. “If you had eaten right and stayed in shape you may or may not have triggered it with your family history. But you didn’t and now you have it. So you now you have to decide if you want to live or to die.”

Jake, of course, opted for living and he set off with a convert’s passion for changing his habits. He treated it like a project and he started by reading everything he could get his hands on about diabetes. He bought a treadmill to start excercising. He bought a glucometer to start testing his blood sugar daily. Jake really hated the fingersticks and he felt like a baby for drawing his hand back and yelling “Ow!” each time, but he kept it up. He got regular blood tests and he worked his numbers down to a manageable range. And he resolved to fix the single most significant factor – his diet. No more fast food. No more french fries, certainly. It would be hard for him, of course. Very, very hard. But he knew what he must do and he owed it to himself and to his family to do it. He needed to eat more home cooked meals and follow the nutritional guidelines to stay healthy.

Jake was highly motivated from the start, and he decided to memorialize this state of motivation with a symbol to always remind him of what he needed to day to stay healthy. But what would work? What would remind him that his condition was lifelong and permanent? If nothing else, Jake was an out-of-the-box thinker and he quickly figured it out – a tattoo! It’s also lifelong and permanent and he would see it everday as he got dressed. Linda thought he was crazy, but Jake persisted. He spent several hours at the tattoo shop looking through the example books and the flash samples until he found just what he was looking for. It was a large cross in blue in black with some vines and leaves surrounding it. And at forty years old Jake got his very first tattoo. He was very proud of it and liked to check it out every day. The whole design inadvertently formed an indistinct triangle and when Jake caught it out of the corner of his eye in the morning it often remined him of his blue sergeant stripes from his Air Force days. That was an unexpected and added bonus.

The tattoo lasted longer than Jake’s willpower and after a year or so of good behavior he reverted to his old ways. It started slowly, as usual. A burger here with the team on the road. A combo meal out for lunch to get back to his desk quickly. And so on. Now Jake was back to the full fast food ritual, three meals a day, and paying the ungodly cost in dollars to eat out every meal. He was paying in health, too, and was back to the constant fatigue. To top it off, a year ago Jake had stopped taking his medication entirely. Cold turkey. He was not a pill taker and he could not sustain the daily habit of taking 5 pills.

A week ago Jake had bottomed out. He couldn’t keep up the pace of his job as tired as he felt all of the time. So he went back to Dr. Tyler and threw himself on the mercy of the court. “What’s up with you”, she asked with sincere concern. “Do you not understand that you’re going to die if you continue this way? Are you in complete denial of your condition?” Yes, clearly he was. But Jake wanted to try again and he refilled all of his prescriptions. Although they wouldn’t do him much good at home in his cabinet today.

“Jake, we have to talk about your medicines again”, Linda broke in. “I’m concerned about your health and I want to help you with that.”

“Linda, enough already. You are killing me with detail here. The car, the church, my medicines, Thanksgiving. It’s just too much. I’m doing the best that I can”, Jake barked angrily.

“I know you are, honey. I’m just worried about you and you are shutting me out lately. I have to talk to you when I get a chance”

“Whatever”, Jake said. “Linda, I need to let you go and get back to Sam so we can get on the road.”

“I’m sorry. Just call me when you get there, okay?”

“Bye, Linda.

Jake rushed back to the table and slid into the booth to find his breakfast boxed up to go and the bill already paid. Sam finishing a friendly conversation with Annie, the waitress. “Thank you, young lady, for the terrific service and I hope things get better with your daughter.”

“What’s wrong with her daughter?” Jake asked, not really caring. Sam could see that Jake was upset from his phone call.

“Was that Linda”, Sam asked.

“Yeah. She’s all over my back this morning nagging me.”

“I find that hard to believe, Jake” Sam said. “You forget that I know Linda and I’ll guess that the real story is that she’s worried about you and is looking out for you. I am too, by the way – worried about you that is. You need to throttle back some. It’s not my place to say, but you are a little high strung lately.”

“Whatever, already. Let’s just hit the road.” Jake sighed. And he was out the door and waiting by the car for Sam.