The Proper Words for Sin

You Can Look This Up

140 YOU CAN LOOK THIS UP “This is your Uncle Jack,” the voice on the phone said, and Len Phelps hesitated long enough to hear, “Your father’s brother,” before he managed to answer, “OK.” Uncle Jack kept his own silence then. Paused like a schoolboy getting up the courage to ask for a date. “Your Aunt Harriet said I should call.” Phelps was trying to remember when he’d last spoken to Uncle Jack. His father’s funeral, probably, a thank you for his condolences in a crowded room. Surely not more than two sentences and twentyeight years ago for that. Before then? Not since high school, forty years now. He’d be hard pressed to pick Uncle Jack out of a lineup. He talked to Aunt Harriet once a year. She’d told him about Uncle Jack fainting, how his symptoms seemed identical to Phelps’s father’s two weeks before he died. She’d put the fear in Uncle Jack with that allusion, Phelps thought, but why on earth she’d sent Uncle Jack to him instead of a doctor was a puzzle Uncle Jack needed to solve for him. Uncle Jack had plenty of money. He had a condo on Hilton Head. He belonged to a country club. “I’ve had these fainting spells,” Uncle Jack finally said. “Two times, just like Ed did back then before he passed.” YOU CAN LOOK THIS UP 141 “He needed bypass surgery.” “What do you think I should do?” “See your doctor.” So it was that easy. A sentence of common sense. Uncle Jack went quiet again, and Phelps, when he took the receiver from his ear, heard a roar from his downstairs television, a bad sign, since the Pirates were playing in Cincinnati. “I’m worried ,” Uncle Jack finally said. “I don’t know what to do.” “That’s what the doctor’s for.” “You think it might be serious? I’m seventy-six years old. Ed was what, sixty-two, sixty-three?” “Fifty-nine.” Phelps could hear a commercial begin. A pitching change, he thought. A disaster early in the game. “I feel just fine except for those blackouts.” “Good. Maybe it’s something else.” “That’s what I was thinking. You never can tell.” “Exactly.” Phelps waited, but Uncle Jack didn’t speak. Phelps counted to twenty before he said, “OK, then,” and hung up. * * * It had been so long since his father had died that Phelps had had time to develop heart problems of his own. Uncle Jack could count himself lucky living to seventy-six with nothing but health, until he tumbled to the ground on the fourteenth tee at his country club. Phelps was fifty-seven and thinking every flight of stairs was a bullet. Two years ago he’d had a heart attack in one of his classes at the community college. Business Writing. They were learning the intricacies of the job application letter. They’d finished with the colon after the greeting, how this showed formality and respect 142 YOU CAN LOOK THIS UP and a sense of what the world expected from you if you wanted to work with your brain instead of your hands. Just as he started in on the crucial first paragraph, how it introduced the employer to the applicant’s qualifications and interest, Phelps had felt tightness in his chest and his voice had squeaked shut. There was no surprise when pain ran down his arm. “Oh Christ,” he thought, “not here in front of the computer geeks,” just before he was lost in the inability to do anything but sit and go helpless . He’d done better than his friend George Aikey, who’d had an aneurysm burst in class on the first day of the semester, a room full of strangers hovering over his dead body five minutes after he’d taken roll. A mild attack, Phelps’s doctor had said. A warning. A wake up call. The doctor talked like that, in threes. “How are you? How you doing? Feeling OK?” Phelps wanted to answer, “Enough of that. Stop it. Shut up.” Instead, he kept that triple play to himself like everything else, including his conviction that a mild attack was like a civil defense alarm minutes before the first nuclear missile arced over the horizon. Phelps had a son of his own who needed to listen up about his future...