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Short Story: The Sad and Lonely Death of Katydid Desrosiers (4), by Michael Fine
by Michael Fine, contributing writer
Week Four
Note to readers: This story is longer than most I’ve written, so we’re going to send out one section a week over the next six weeks – and we’ve included a brief summary of what’s been sent so far to catch you up in case you missed prior weeks. I’d suggest starting it on your cell, and if you like what you see, consider downloading it and printing it out — it’s a little long to read cramped over a tiny little screen. It’s available for printout on https://www.michaelfinemd.com/short-stories.
The influence of Leo Tolstoy’s The Death of Ivan Illich will be apparent to many readers, and is gratefully, and humbly, acknowledged.
Copyright © 2023 Michael Fine
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events, locales, and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.
In Week Two we learned that Katy had a boyfriend in high school, a bassist named James, and that she went with James to Memphis and Nashville to get a start in the music business as a singer. We learn that Katy’s singing career never took off, and that James started dealing drugs and was on his way to tuning into a pimp, so Katy left him. We meet a name named Jack, who owns a junkyard in Pawtucket Katy parks her car near, once every few nights, and that Jake, although he doesn’t need the money, understands what Katy’s car might be worth as scarp.
In Week Three we learn how Katy picked herself off, dusted herself off, came home and took herself to nursing school, and a little about her life then, when lots of people she knew were coupling up for the night or even a few hours, but she kept her focus. We meet a woman named Tina who runs a hairdressing studio on Mineral Spring Avenue, and who sees Katy as she walks by, headed to the Pawtucket Library, and who thinks about Katy, just for a moment.
Todd was in the Navy. He came from Lodi, a tough town where people learned not to take prisoners, and looking backward, that was the best thing she could say about him, that he was tough and uncompromising.
. But the heart is undisciplined, unlikely, unruly, unpredictable, and unceasing. It does not quit until it is too late and it doesn’t quit even then. Todd was a scruffy motorhead and Katy should never have thought twice about him when they met, when he broke his ankle and had to get it pinned. He stayed in the hospital for a day after his surgery on an IV drip, refusing pain meds. If she thought about him once she shouldn’t have thought about him a second time.
. “It’s bone pain.” she said. “Nothing worse besides childbirth and kidney stones.” “Bullshit,” he said, sweating from the pain but refusing to give in.
. She fell for him. Fell hard for that stubborn intransience, right then and there. But she didn’t let on, or so she thought. This one is trouble, she said to herself.
. And so he was. Three days out of the hospital, on crutches, before he had a walking cast, there he was at the door to the parking lot, waiting for her, asking for her phone number. He was a patient. It wasn’t ethical, appropriate, or safe to date patients, she thought and knew. She knew that it would be a mistake. Todd is a patient, she told herself again. She kept that in her mind, to focus.
. She wondered whether she should call security as he walked her to her car, as he told her why she should go out with him, because he was suave and good-looking, he said, smiling meekly. Right, she said and walked past him. She rebuffed him just like she told herself she would.
. But Todd refused to stay rebuffed. He turned up every day at the same time to walk her to her car, until she finally agreed to have coffee with him because she didn’t want to make a scene. It’s the only way I can make him go away, she told herself. And acknowledged to herself her self-deceit.
. The heart is unruly. It latches on. The world narrows to this one person. One person’s wants and needs inject themselves into your own wishes and hopes and overtake them, like an infection, or like a cancer that spreads unseen. That person’s reality becomes your reality, whether you want it to or not. The self is plastic, like playdough or clay that is molded in the hands of the potter.
That lady looks rough, Jaime thought. He had a truck and he never stopped, not for one second. He had a woman who had two kids, and another woman who had his kids, so he had lots of mouths to feed. There was nothing he couldn’t do. The truck lived at night in a yard off Chestnut Street in Central Falls and he kept it running himself. You got to hustle if you want to make out. He did the brakes and he changed the oil and he rebuilt the carburetor. Once when the damn thing blew a cylinder head he pulled out the engine and replaced it. Redrilled the block. Bear of a job. Took him two weeks of nights in the summer. Would have been smarter to just buy a new engine but they wanted 6K for that and he didn’t have the cash. Spent two weeks of days working for his buddy, José, throwing furniture and appliances around. Nights on his back on the floor of that old garage. You live and you learn and you do what you need to do.
. He was unloading refrigerators and stoves for the appliance guy after a run to Millis, Mass, to the distributor’s warehouse there, when he saw her. She looked rough. Dirty green down coat. Brown hat. Gray-white hair sticking out from under the hat. What bugged him was how slow she walked, one foot in front of the next, one little step at a time, like she was walking on ice. And there wasn’t no ice, not right there.
. Maybe she needed a ride someplace. To sit down for a cup of coffee. He’d be done in unloading in about twenty minutes. Maybe he could give her a ride, if he could get her up into the cab of the truck.
. “Hey lady!” he called.
. But that woman, she just kept walking. Maybe she didn’t hear him.
. Then George, the appliance guy, called him from inside the store.
. “Yo,” George said. “You go to sleep on me? The door is open. We gonna freeze.”
. So Jaime turned around.
Ricky was fifteen when Katy left Todd, but Todd had left her in a different way years before, left her to drinking, to disappointment, and to cruelty. They had moved up to Rhode Island by then. Were moved by the Navy, first to Quonset, then to North Kingstown, into a little house that used to be a summer cottage near the sea, a quirky little place that Katy tried to make a home out of.
. Todd never saw himself as an admiral, but he also never expected his life to turn out the way it did. He was a working class kid from Lodi, New Jersey, tough as nails, a linebacker in high school, strong enough to make a tackle but never quick enough to get there in time. A man with a strong back and forearms like steel cables, a man who was born with a crewcut and who didn’t ever take “no” for an answer. Not from anyone. But that first fall, into the bowels of a ship when a hatch gave way as he jumped from ship to ship, broke his courage along with his ankle: his ankle never healed right and had to be fused; and then five years later he hurt the strong back he was so proud of by lifting a barrel of machine oil that was too heavy for two men.
. The surgery that followed, another fusion, and the pain that came next left Todd a drinking man. The disappointment ate at him, when he couldn’t go to sea anymore and was left behind by the Navy in Newport, keeping up two decommissioned destroyers — a janitor, not a sailor, now. That disappointment grew into anger, and that anger reduced him to a man in an easy chair with a bottle in front of a TV set, a man who swung at Katy with the back of his hand from time to time, when he was drunk enough to forget that she could and would give as good as she got. When he forgot who she was, as if he ever knew her or listened to who she was in the first place.
.
Katy walked slowly, one foot in front of the next, humming to herself. Midnight Train to Georgia. Baby It’s Cold Outside. You’ve Changed. Crazy. Crazy. She sat down to rest every time there was a bench or a low wall. It wasn’t exactly shortness of breath, but it wasn’t easy breathing either. No chest pain. So her heart was fine, she told herself. Had to be fine. This wasn’t a heart attack. Women don’t get heart attacks, right?
. But she tired quickly now. And her breath felt inadequate. The old nurse in her noticed that. But the rest of her refused it. The rest of her, who always made the best out of what she had. Who always made the abnormal adequate. Who accepted, saw the beauty in the moment, and went on. Carried on. Always just carry on. Time straightens out all difficulties, and life is a gift. Time heals all wounds and wounds all heels. This moment is different than any before it. It’s now.
. She was grateful when she came through the automatic doors at the Pawtucket Library at last. The woman behind the desk and the library looked up and smiled. These are my people, Katy thought. They were always good to her.
.
Ricky was who Katy loved and lived for, and if she hadn’t needed to work all those years, first eleven to seven so she’d be home when Ricky was a young child, and then day shift when Ricky was in school so she’d be there as he got off the bus, perhaps none of what followed would have happened.
. Ricky took after Katy and her side of the family. Slight and wiry, not tall and broad. Quick on his feet and thinking, not lumberous and overbearing. Her child. He liked to be hugged and held. He never swatted her away. But he was also bold and inquisitive, a child who wanted to explore the world. A soccer player, not a football player like his father. Chess and scrabble, in those years, not checkers or poker. Ricky learned early how to avoid his father’s backhand by staying six feet away, always out of reach, just far enough away from that easy chair.
. When Todd wasn’t looking, Katy remade their old house, as Todd sat in the den watching TV and drinking beer. She scraped and painted. Exposed old oak floors. Put in walnut wainscoting and stripped the bannister on the staircase. Painted the trim. Stenciled designs just below the trim. Found antique wooden furniture with character. Hung beautiful old mirrors. Exposed the brick of the fireplace, all so their little house looked like an elegant house that was far older than it was, elegant and comfortable at once. So their house was a place Ricky could bring his friends to, so their mothers would ooh and ah.
. Ricky prospered then, in that safe moment. Grew and prospered. Katy was the den mother and the cheerleader, the car-pooler and the chaperone, watching her son make friends and lead them, explore the world, do science experiments and play sports like there was no limit to his world, as if nothing would ever hold him back and he was on a highway to the sky. Invincible. Unstoppable. Even immortal, or that’s how it felt. Katy felt that Ricky would grow up, prosper and live forever. Which made Katy’s life seem livable, even with its disappointments and limitations.
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Read Part One here: https://rinewstoday.com/the-sad-and-lonely-death-of-katydid-desrosiers-part-one-michael-fine/
Read Part Two here: https://rinewstoday.com/the-sad-and-lonely-death-of-katydid-desrosiers-part-two-michael-fine/
Read Part Three here: https://rinewstoday.com/the-sad-and-lonely-death-of-katydid-desrosiers-part-three-michael-fine/
Part Five appears next Sunday
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Michael Fine, MD is currently Health Policy Advisor in Central Falls, Rhode Island and Senior Population Health and Clinical Services Officer at Blackstone Valley Health Care, Inc. He is facilitating a partnership between the City and Blackstone to create the Central Falls Neighborhood Health Station, the US first attempt to build a population based primary care and public health collaboration that serves the entire population of a place.
He has also recently been named Health Liaison to the City of Pawtucket. Dr. Fine served in the Cabinet of Governor Lincoln Chafee as Director of the Rhode Island Department of Health from February of 2011 until March of 2015, overseeing a broad range of public health programs and services, overseeing 450 public health professionals and managing a budget of $110 million a year.
Dr. Fine’s career as both a family physician and manager in the field of healthcare has been devoted to healthcare reform and the care of under-served populations. Before his confirmation as Director of Health, Dr. Fine was the Medical Program Director at the Rhode Island Department of Corrections, overseeing a healthcare unit servicing nearly 20,000 people a year, with a staff of over 85 physicians, psychiatrists, mental health workers, nurses, and other health professionals.
He was a founder and Managing Director of HealthAccessRI, the nation’s first statewide organization making prepaid, reduced fee-for-service primary care available to people without employer-provided health insurance. Dr. Fine practiced for 16 years in urban Pawtucket, Rhode Island and rural Scituate, Rhode Island. He is the former Physician Operating Officer of Hillside Avenue Family and Community Medicine, the largest family practice in Rhode Island, and the former Physician-in-Chief of the Rhode Island and Miriam Hospitals’ Departments of Family and Community Medicine. He was co-chair of the Allied Advocacy Group for Integrated Primary Care.
He convened and facilitated the Primary Care Leadership Council, a statewide organization that represented 75 percent of Rhode Island’s primary care physicians and practices. He currently serves on the Boards of Crossroads Rhode Island, the state’s largest service organization for the homeless, the Lown Institute, the George Wiley Center, and RICARES. Dr. Fine founded the Scituate Health Alliance, a community-based, population-focused non-profit organization, which made Scituate the first community in the United States to provide primary medical and dental care to all town residents.
Dr. Fine is a past President of the Rhode Island Academy of Family Physicians and was an Open Society Institute/George Soros Fellow in Medicine as a Profession from 2000 to2002. He has served on a number of legislative committees for the Rhode Island General Assembly, has chaired the Primary Care Advisory Committee for the Rhode Island Department of Health, and sat on both the Urban Family Medicine Task Force of the American Academy of Family Physicians and the National Advisory Council to the National Health Services Corps.