If You Only Knew Read Online Free PDF Page B

blackout.
    â€œCome on, baby . . . come on . . . ,” Don mumbled.
    â€œDon . . . Don . . . what are you doing ?” Vonlee screamed, waking up.
    Don continued, “Come on . . . Vonlee . . . come on.”
    â€œNo, no, no, Don,” Vonlee said. “Stop that!” She jumped out of bed.
    Vonlee decided to go downstairs and sleep on the couch. She told Don to stay put and don’t follow her (not that he could manage, anyway). Nothing was going to happen between them. Not tonight, not ever. There was no way Vonlee was sleeping with her aunt’s husband, who, by lineage, was her uncle! Vonlee loved Billie Jean. She understood from what Billie Jean had told her that she and Don had more of a partnership than a marriage and had not touched each other in years, but still.
    Vonlee woke the next morning and thought, What the hell. She couldn’t believe what had happened. As mad as she was at Don, however, she wasn’t going to say anything to Don or Billie Jean about it. Don was blasted. He probably wouldn’t even recall the incident, anyway. Why make a bad night worse?
    â€œI’ve been drunk before,” Vonlee recalled, “and done some stupid things. It was no big deal.”
    Vonlee walked upstairs into her bedroom. Don was awake. His arms, she could not help but to notice, were all bloody. There was blood everywhere, in fact: from the bathroom, down the white carpeting in the hallway, into Don’s room and her room.
    â€œDon, what the heck?”
    â€œI fell,” he said.
    â€œFell?”
    There was way too much blood to believe it was from a fall.
    â€œLook, Vonlee, you have to help me clean up all this blood. If Billie comes home and sees it, she’s going to go crazy.”
    Vonlee went down the hall and into the bathroom and saw that Don had ripped the door off the hinges. He must have cut himself, she deduced, in the process of doing that. But also, when she looked in his bedroom, there was blood all over his bed. Don had been bleeding from his rectum again.
    The other problem Vonlee now had was that if one followed the blood trail, it went from Don’s room into her room and into her bed. Although the bleeding had started after she went downstairs to sleep on the couch, her aunt still might think they shacked up together, if she followed the bloody trail.
    So Vonlee got a bucket, some bleach, got on her knees and went to work.
    â€œI didn’t want to tell her,” Vonlee explained. “Nothing happened. But I liked Don and I didn’t want to see them have a conflict. He was nice guy, at least to me. He treated me good.”
    The one thing Vonlee mentioned as the morning went on was all of the bleeding. Vonlee cautioned Don that he had to do something about the rectal bleeding—it was a sign of a much larger medial issue that could potentially kill him. Did he have colon cancer? Rectal cancer? Ulcers? There had to be an answer.
    â€œI won’t go to a doctor,” Don said. “Won’t do it.”
    He was one of those If-I-don’t-know-it-can’t-hurt-me guys.
    Don had to realize he was dying a slow death from the drinking and the bleeding. Perhaps he didn’t want to face a doctor telling him he had to give up the one thing he lived for.
    Vonlee could not get the blood out of the carpet. There was way too much.
    Billie Jean called.
    Vonlee hesitated, but then explained what happened.
    â€œBut she was so distraught about her son and the accident that she didn’t really care about it all,” Vonlee later said.
    At least not then. It would come up again, though.
    Vonlee hung up with her aunt. Then she spoke to Don.
    â€œI’ll let her get all new carpets and have the upstairs remodeled and she’ll be all right,” Don said. Then he began talking about his life with his wife, which kind of shocked Vonlee. If what Don said was true, Vonlee didn’t really know her aunt.
    â€œHe talked about lending [a