Part 2: The Starlite Inn
I need to tell you about Greg.
Because none of this makes sense without Greg.
I met Greg Rhodes in 2005. At a bar in Lexington. I was twenty-three. He was twenty-six.
He’d just returned from his second tour in Iraq. Hundred and First Airborne. He had a buzz cut and a crooked smile and he laughed louder than anybody in the room.
He asked me to dance. I said no. He asked again. I said no again.
The third time, he dropped to one knee in the middle of the bar and sang the chorus of “Friends in Low Places” at the top of his lungs, completely off-key, while everybody stared.
I danced with him.
We married a year later. Nathan was born in 2010.
For a while, it was good. Really good. Greg got a job as a mechanic at a garage on Winchester Road. He could fix anything with an engine. He bought a beat-up old Ford Bronco and spent every weekend restoring it in our driveway. He built Nathan’s crib with his own hands. He sang to him every night. Badly.
But something had come home with him from Iraq. Something he never talked about.
He started drinking. A beer after work. Then three. Then a six-pack. Then whiskey.
He had nightmares. He’d wake up screaming. Sometimes he’d be on the floor beside the bed before he was even awake, crouched, as if taking cover.
He hurt his back at the garage in 2013. The doctor prescribed pills. Oxycodone.
The pills were worse than the whiskey.
I tried for three years.
I took him to the VA. I took him to meetings. I poured bottles down the sink. I hid the car keys. I flushed pills down the toilet. I called his sergeant from Iraq, a man named Hollis, who drove all the way from Tennessee to sit with him for a weekend.
Nothing worked.
The last night was in April of 2016.
Nathan was six. Greg was supposed to pick him up from school. He didn’t. The school called me at work. I left in the middle of a meeting and drove there and found my six-year-old sitting alone on the curb in front of the school with his backpack. The last kid left. The teacher standing over him, checking her watch.
I took him home.
Greg’s Bronco sat in the driveway. Crooked. Half on the lawn. The driver’s door open. The engine still running.
He was in the kitchen. Passed out on the floor. In that olive green jacket.
A bottle of pills stood on the counter. And a bottle of Jim Beam. Both almost empty.
Nathan stood in the doorway and looked at his father on the floor.
“Is Daddy dead?” he asked.
Greg wasn’t dead.
I called 911. They took him to the hospital. They pumped his stomach. He lived.
That night I packed his things. In black garbage bags. Everything. His clothes. His tools. His records. That olive green jacket.
I set the bags on the front porch. I called a locksmith at midnight. I paid him two hundred dollars to change every lock in the house.
I filed for divorce the next morning. And for a protective order.
The judge gave me full custody. Greg didn’t fight it. He didn’t even come to court.
He called a few times in the first year. Drunk. Crying. Begging to see Nathan.
I didn’t answer.
Then the calls stopped.
Over the years, I heard things.
That he’d lost the job at the garage. That he’d sold the Bronco. That he was living in his car. That he’d been arrested for public intoxication. That somebody had seen him outside a liquor store on Limestone, panhandling.
Then nothing.
For years. Nothing.
I didn’t look for him.
I told myself it was for Nathan. To protect him. To give him a stable life. A safe one. Without a father who passed out on the kitchen floor.
And it was.
But it was also for me.
Nathan never asked about him.
Not when he was little. Not when he got older. Not once.
When his friends talked about their dads, he changed the subject. When there was a father-son event at school, he said he had a headache. When he turned thirteen, Denise’s husband, Cole’s dad, offered to take both boys fishing. Nathan said no thanks.
I thought it meant he didn’t care.
I thought he’d moved on.
I was wrong about so many things.
“It’s Dad,” Nathan said.
He stood in my front hallway at 4:37 in the morning. In a bloody T-shirt and his father’s army jacket. Shaking.
“He’s at UK Hospital,” he said. “In the ICU. They took him in an ambulance. At midnight. He was throwing up blood. So much blood, Mom. It was everywhere. Cole and I tried to stop it. We didn’t know what to do. We called 911.”
I couldn’t speak.
“They wouldn’t let us stay,” Nathan said. “In the ICU. They said we’re minors. They said they needed an adult. A legal guardian. Somebody who could sign papers.” He wiped his face with the sleeve of the jacket. “And Dad doesn’t have anybody. He doesn’t have anybody but me. So the social worker said I had to go get you.”
He looked up at me.
“My phone died,” he said. “At the hospital. Around ten. I didn’t have a charger. I didn’t see your texts. I’m sorry. I’m so sorry.”
“Where’s Cole?” Denise said from behind me. Her voice was shaking. “Nathan, where’s Cole?”
Nathan turned and looked at her. As if he’d only just noticed she was there.
“On the porch,” he said. “Outside. He’s scared to come in. He thinks you’re going to kill him.”
Denise pushed past me. She yanked open the front door.
Cole sat on the porch steps. Hunched over with his elbows on his knees and his face in his hands. In the cold. In the dark. Blood on him too. On his jeans. On his hands.
He looked up at his mother.
“Mom,” he said. “I’m sorry. I’m so sorry. I’m sorry I lied.”
Denise didn’t yell.
She sat down on the cold porch steps in her pajama pants and her Wildcats sweatshirt and pulled her son into her arms. Blood and all.
She held him. She rocked him back and forth.
Cole started sobbing.
I turned back to Nathan.
He stood in the hallway with his arms wrapped around himself. Inside his father’s jacket.
“How long?” I said. “How long have you known where he was?”
“Since August,” Nathan said. “August twenty-fourth.”
“How did you find him?”
He took a shaky breath.
“I didn’t find him,” he said. “He found me. Sort of.”
He told me in the car.
I didn’t think. I just grabbed my keys and my purse and pulled a coat on over my bathrobe. I didn’t even put on real shoes. I drove to UK Hospital in my slippers.
Denise followed with Cole in her car.
Nathan sat in the passenger seat. He gripped his seatbelt with both hands.
And he told me.
August twenty-fourth. A Saturday. Nathan and Cole had driven to a gas station on New Circle Road to get Slurpees. Cole had just gotten his license. They were celebrating.
Nathan went inside to pay. When he came out, a man was sitting on the curb by the ice machine.
Thin. Very thin. Gray beard. Yellow skin. Not tan. Yellow. Like old newspaper. His stomach bulged beneath his shirt as if he were pregnant, though the rest of him was all bones.
He wore an olive green army jacket. In August. In ninety-degree heat.
Nathan walked past him.
Then he stopped.
He turned around.
He looked at the jacket. At the screaming eagle on the shoulder.
At the name tape.
RHODES.
“I knew it was him,” Nathan said. “I knew right away. I didn’t even have to see his face. I remember that jacket. I remember him wearing it when he carried me on his shoulders. I remember the patch. I used to trace the eagle with my finger.”
I gripped the steering wheel.
“I stood there,” Nathan said. “In the parking lot. With two Slurpees. And I couldn’t move. And he looked up. And he saw me.”
He swallowed.
“And he said, ‘Nate?’”
“Cole was in the car,” Nathan said. “He saw the whole thing. He got out. He came over. He said, ‘Dude, who is that?’ And I said, ‘That’s my dad.’”
Nathan laughed. A broken laugh.
“Cole just stood there,” he said. “Then he said, ‘Okay. What do you want to do?’”
“What did you do?”
“I gave him my Slurpee,” Nathan said. “Blue raspberry. I didn’t know what else to do. I just held it out.”
Tears ran down his face.
“And he took it,” he said. “And his hands were shaking so bad he could barely hold it. And he started crying. My dad. Sitting on the curb outside a Speedway. Crying into a blue raspberry Slurpee.”
Greg was sober.
That was the first thing Nathan told me. Before anything else. As if it were the most important thing.
“He’s sober, Mom,” he said. “He’s been sober for three years. Three years and four months. He has a chip. He showed me. He keeps it in the pocket of the jacket.”
Greg had gotten sober in 2022. At the VA. After he collapsed outside a homeless shelter and woke up in a hospital bed with tubes in his arms and a doctor telling him his liver was failing.
He went to rehab. He went to meetings. Every day. He got a room in a VA housing program. He got a part-time job at an auto parts store.
He was doing everything right.
And then, in May, he got a diagnosis.
Liver cancer. Advanced. From the hepatitis he’d picked up in the bad years, and the drinking before that.
The doctors gave him six months. Maybe less.
“He lost his housing in July,” Nathan said. “Because he couldn’t work anymore. He was too sick. The VA was trying to get him into a hospice. But there was a waiting list. And he didn’t want to go to a hospice anyway. He said he spent too many years in places where people die. He didn’t want to die in another one.”
“So where did he go?”
“The Starlite Inn,” Nathan said. “On Versailles Road. It’s a motel. Thirty-nine dollars a night. He was paying for it with his disability check. But it wasn’t enough for every night. So some nights he slept in the bus station.”
I closed my eyes. Just for a second. Then I opened them again. I was driving.
“He was dying alone, Mom,” Nathan said. “In a motel room. With nobody. Some days he couldn’t even get up to go to the bathroom by himself. He couldn’t cook. He couldn’t clean. He couldn’t change his own bandages.”
He looked at me.
“He’s my dad,” he said.
So the boys took care of him.
Every weekend. Friday afternoon to Sunday night. For eight weekends.
Every Friday Nathan told me he was going to Cole’s. Every Friday Cole told Denise he was coming to our house. And then they drove to the Starlite Inn on Versailles Road.
They slept on the floor of room 14. On a pile of blankets Cole took from his basement.
They cleaned the room. They did Greg’s laundry at a laundromat down the street. They bought groceries with money from their part-time jobs. Nathan bags groceries at Kroger on Saturdays. Cole works at a car wash. They spent every dollar on their weekends at the Starlite.
They made him soup. Cole learned how from Denise. Chicken soup from scratch. Because Greg couldn’t eat much else.
They helped him to the bathroom. They helped him shower. They changed his bandages where the doctors had drained fluid from his stomach.
They learned how to give him his medications. They wrote it all down in a notebook. What pills, what time, how many.
They paid for extra nights at the motel when his disability check ran out. So he wouldn’t have to sleep in the bus station.
“Why didn’t you tell me?” I said. “Nathan. Why? Why didn’t you just tell me?”
Nathan was quiet for a long time.
“He made me promise,” he said finally.
“What?”
“The first day,” Nathan said. “At the gas station. I said, ‘I’m going to call Mom.’ And he grabbed my arm. Really hard. And he said, ‘No. Please. Don’t tell her.’”
“Why?”
“He said you’d earned your peace,” Nathan said. “He said he took ten years of your life and turned it into a nightmare. He said he’d put you through enough. He said, ‘I’m not going to make her watch me die. She already watched me die once. On the kitchen floor.’”
My hands shook on the steering wheel.
“He said if I told you, he’d leave,” Nathan said. “He’d disappear. He’d go somewhere I couldn’t find him. And I’d never see him again.” His voice broke. “And I just found him, Mom. I just found him. After ten years. I couldn’t lose him again. Not yet. Not until I had to.”
“And Cole?” I asked. “Why did Cole go along with this?”
Nathan looked out the window. At the dark streets of Lexington sliding by. At the streetlights.
“Because Cole’s dad left too,” he said quietly. “Remember? When we were thirteen? After the fishing trip I didn’t go on?”
I remembered. Mike Carter. Denise’s husband. He moved to Nashville with a woman from his office. Cole hasn’t seen him since.
“Cole said, ‘At least your dad wants to see you,’” Nathan said. “He said, ‘Mine doesn’t even call on my birthday. Yours is dying and he’s still trying to protect your mom. That’s a dad, man. Even if he messed up. That’s a dad.’”
Nathan wiped his face.
“And Dad taught him stuff,” he said. “Taught both of us. How to change oil. How to fix a carburetor. How to play poker. How to play guitar. He had a guitar at the motel. A cheap one from a pawn shop. He taught me chords. He said I used to sit on his lap when I was four and strum it while he did the chords.”
I remembered. Greg on the couch. Nathan in his lap. A tiny hand on the strings. Greg’s big hand on the neck.
Friends in Low Places.
“Cole calls him Mr. Greg,” Nathan said. “He made Cole a little wooden car. With a pocketknife. Out of a piece of a pallet he found behind the motel. It took him three weeks because his hands shook so bad.”
We pulled into the parking garage at UK Hospital at five-twelve a.m.
Denise pulled in behind us.
We walked to the elevator together. Me in my bathrobe and coat and slippers. Denise in her pajama pants. Two sixteen-year-old boys covered in blood.
Nobody spoke in the elevator.
The doors opened on the ICU floor.
The social worker was waiting at the nurse’s station.
Her name was Marguerite. She was about fifty. Short gray hair. Glasses on a beaded chain. Purple scrubs. She’d been on shift since seven the night before. She looked as tired as I felt.
She saw Nathan and her face softened.
“You came back,” she said.
“I brought my mom,” Nathan said.
Marguerite looked at me. At my bathrobe. At my slippers.
“Mrs. Rhodes?”
“I’m not Mrs. Rhodes anymore,” I said. “We’ve been divorced for ten years.”
“I understand,” Marguerite said gently. “But your son is Mr. Rhodes’s only family. And he’s a minor. We need a parent or guardian to help us make some decisions.”
“What decisions?”
Marguerite looked at Nathan. Then at me.
“Can we talk privately for a moment?”
She told me in a little room with a box of tissues on the table.
Greg had suffered a variceal bleed. Blood vessels in his esophagus, swollen from liver failure, had burst. He’d lost a lot of blood. The doctors had stopped the bleeding. For now. But his liver was shutting down. His kidneys were starting to fail.
“He’s stable at the moment,” Marguerite said. “But Mrs…. Laura. He doesn’t have long. Days. Maybe a week. Maybe less.”
I didn’t say anything.
“He has an advance directive,” she said. “He did it at the VA in May. When he got his diagnosis. No resuscitation. No machines. Comfort care only. He wants to be kept comfortable. He wants to be awake as much as possible.”
“Okay.”
“And he listed an emergency contact,” Marguerite said. She slid a piece of paper across the table. “On the directive. In May.”
I looked at it.
Emergency contact: Nathan Rhodes. Son. Phone: (unknown).
Do not contact Laura Rhodes under any circumstances unless Nathan requests it.
She has earned her peace.
I put my hand over my mouth.
