All The Acorns On the Forest Floor

First Chapter

Notes for a Eulogy

I like watching Jake when he drives, when he’s focused on a specific task. It’s one of the few times I get to stare—just stare—at his profile, the sharp slant of his nose, the enviable length of his eyelashes. Once, buzzed on champagne at our friend’s wedding, I begged him to let me put mascara on them. He refused.

“What’s he like?” I ask.

We’re an hour into our two-hour drive, and we haven’t said much. In the beginning of us, this would have made me nervous, the silence. It doesn’t anymore. We’re good together. We’ve embraced that, taken solace in that. The rest of life seems to be a crapshoot, but we’re a sure thing. He’s not going anywhere and, more importantly, neither am I. My rolling stone of a heart has come to a rest. I’ve even let him see me pluck the hairs above my lip.

“I don’t know. He’s a charming type,” Jake says. “He’s short like me.”

When we first started dating, this was an unspoken fact—that Jake is shorter than me; he’s not short by average standards, but a few inches beneath my five feet, eleven inches. I used to slouch or stand next to him with one foot out far to the side, leaning down to his height. When he couldn’t reach something on the upper shelf of the pantry, I pretended I couldn’t either. We’re done with that now. I stand tall because I don’t want to be hunched over like my grandma when I’m old. And he asks me to get down the vases from the cabinet above the fridge when he brings home flowers.

“Do you look like him?” I ask.

He’s biting his nails. He does this when he’s nervous. He denies it though. Whenever I witness it and ask what’s bothering him, he says, “Nothing. Why?”

“I look just like him. Just like him.”

He says this like it baffles him, though it shouldn’t. We’re talking about his father. He didn’t grow up calling him “Dad,” but he’s still his father.

The story isn’t original. His parents split up when he was young. I’ve asked how old he was, and he’s never clear—once he said, “I don’t know, around ten;” another time he said, “I think I was twelve.” He talks about it like it doesn’t matter, like the details are meaningless, though they seem like everything to me. My parents are celebrating their thirty-eighth wedding anniversary this year.

After the divorce, Jake didn’t see much of his father. Sometimes he’d swoop in on weekends to take Jake and his sister for ice cream. Then he married a woman named Linda, and Jake stopped hearing from him. Jake was twenty years old, in college, when his father called for the first time in a few years and said he was divorcing Linda. He needed somewhere to stay because she was taking all his money. Jake offered his couch, reluctantly. He thought his father would stay a couple nights, but he stayed a couple months. When he finally moved out, renting a room in a house shared by two college kids, he said he’d never get married again. But then he married Deb.

“What’s Deb like?” I ask.

Jake shrugs. “She’s loud. Whatever you do, don’t try to help her in the kitchen.”

“Got it. So she’s the overbearing type?”

“That’s probably what makes her a good caretaker.”

Jake says his father married Deb because he doesn’t want to die alone. He was diagnosed with ALS a year ago, right around the time Jake first kissed me.

Amyotrophic lateral sclerosis—I’ve learned to rattle off the full medical name easily. Most people call it Lou Gehrig’s disease, after the famous baseball player who died from it. I’d heard of it before meeting Jake, mostly because I know all things baseball. My dad pitched for the Twins in the seventies before he hurt his shoulder, quit, and then met my mom. He coached my softball teams until I stopped playing sometime before high school.

I’d asked Jake, cautiously, what ALS is, what it does, afraid to make him emotional. He wasn’t though. He simply said, “It makes the muscles really weak. It started in my father’s legs. He says his legs are, like, dead, paralyzed. And now his arms are going.” I tried not to look horror-struck but failed when Jake said, “Eventually, you can’t swallow or breathe. You suffocate, in the end.”

“And when’s the end?” I’d asked.

“Probably two years, tops.”

It’s not fair, really. His mom is ill too, four stages into pancreatic cancer. They’re both in their fifties, his parents—not old enough to die. When he first told me about these cards dealt to him, he’d said, “What are the chances?”

Jake’s father invited both Jake and his sister to the cabin, but his sister declined. “I don’t want to be that far from mom,” she’d told Jake. I was surprised when Jake said he would go—not that he wanted to go, but that he would, as a duty. He and his sister agreed not to tell their mom. It would upset her, her son making an effort to visit his father who was never there and his father’s third wife.

“Have you told them much about me?” I ask.

I doubt he has. He hardly ever talks to his father. When he does, he uses the same tone he uses on work calls: blunt, direct, authoritative. Jake does something with investment banking that I don’t even pretend to find interesting. He’s all business on those work calls. Sometimes I wonder what his colleagues and clients would think if they heard how he talks to me, saw how he gives me baby kisses on my cheeks and combs stray hairs out of my eyes.

He looks at me, takes his eyes off the road for a moment.

“I’ve told them you’re my match,” he says.

I suppose I don’t need them to know anything else. He reaches over, puts his hand on my leg. He turns his eyes back to the road and says, “This probably isn’t a good time to tell them we’re pregnant, right?”

I used to hate when men said “We’re pregnant,” as if they were too. But there’s something about the way Jake says it, the way he takes ownership of this human growing inside me, that makes me smile. One life going, another on its way—the math of it all could be a comfort. But maybe there is no sufficient comfort at this time, this time that “isn’t a good time.”

“We’re only a few weeks into it. It’s bad luck to say anything this early,” I say.

I put my hand to my stomach. It doesn’t seem real yet, the pregnancy. The only thing keeping me from complete disbelief is the nausea, the saltines on the nightstand.

When we tell people, I think they’ll assume it wasn’t planned. We’re not married, not even engaged. We will be. It just “isn’t a good time” to be planning a wedding, the biggest party of our lives. That can wait. Some things can’t. We’re halfway through our thirties. Jake told me, when I moved in four months ago, that he wanted a family. “Life is too short,” he’d said. And I’d said, “Let’s have a family.”

“They’re going to put us to work, just to warn you,” Jake says.

Their cabin is near Lake Arrowhead, a weekend getaway from Los Angeles. His father told him he wants his ashes scattered at the cabin, in the backyard under the pine trees. He’s leaving the cabin to Deb when he’s gone. Jake’s worried she’ll sell it and when we take our future child to see Grandpa’s resting place, Jake will have to knock on the door of strangers and explain: “My father used to own this place. Mind if we walk around back?”

“We’ll have to chop some logs, clean up the yard. My father can’t do any of that anymore. Obviously. I don’t know why they don’t hire a gardener.”

“That would be admitting defeat,” I say.

We hear Jake’s mom say this often: “I know I can’t drive, but selling the Camry is admitting defeat” and “Buying those damn nutrition shakes is admitting defeat. I can eat real food.” Though she can’t. She’s ninety pounds.

“I was thinking the other day about how I don’t know a single thing to say for his eulogy,” Jake says.

It’s like him—to plan ahead like this, to already be thinking about his speech at the funeral. Ever since I’ve known him, he’s been calendar obsessed, scheduling weekend camping trips and day hikes months in advance, like he’s desperate for something to look forward to.

“You have time. You’ll think of something,” I say. “Maybe this trip will help.”