CHARLIE'S ANGEL MADE END HAPPY.

Byline: CAROL BIDWELL

I had not talked to my brother Charlie since just before our mother died in late 2000. As far as his twin brother, Will, and I knew, he was living in Las Vegas, where he had suffered a disabling stroke and had had to quit his lumber yard job.

I had tried to find him via phone and the Internet many times, with no luck. Over the years, at Christmas and around our birthdays, one of us would wonder aloud how he was doing.

"Maybe he's dead," Will would say.

"No," I would always answer. "I know too many people in the Ventura County Coroner's Office. If he died anywhere, somebody there would contact me."

At 7:30 one recent Wednesday morning, the phone woke me. "Carol Bidwell?" a man's voice asked. "This is the coroner's office ..."

I spent the next few days dealing with the coroner, the funeral home, his landlady, his friends and his bartender, whom he had listed as next-of-kin in a handwritten will. Will and I agreed that Charlie should be cremated, as he had specified in his will, and the ashes scattered at sea. We would split the bill.

I was prepared for Charlie's death, for the call I knew one day would come, even though he was only 52. He had lived the kind of life -- shooting up drugs, stealing my mother's Social Security checks, lying, cheating, boozing, drunk driving, trying to stay a step ahead of whatever police department had a warrant for him -- that I knew a coroner would surely be involved when he died.

What I wasn't prepared for was to learn that he had returned to Santa Paula, the small town where my parents had lived, in February 2005. And he had never bothered to call either his brother or me. He never knew our youngest brother, Jim, had died in 2003.

His landlady, an unbelievably kindhearted woman named Diane, was another surprise. The middle-aged woman with a sunny smile had heard "an old guy" was living down by the railroad tracks in the cold and the rain, and went out one day to find him. Her husband had died a few years earlier in a car crash, and I guess she needed company. Or maybe she was just one of those people who does what needs doing. So she brought my brother home with her, without asking whether he was an ax-murderer or whatever.

Over the years, he came to love and trust her and she made him part of her family, moving him into a tiny guesthouse at the rear of her own home. Next door lived her own daughter and son-in-law with their two small children.

Diane got Charlie hooked up with Social Security benefits, took him to doctors and the dentist, got him treatment for his heart problems, got his teeth pulled and dentures made. She took him to the library, leaning on his cane, once a week. They went to garage sales looking for mismatched dishes and towels and the Betty Boop trinkets he always loved. They "shopped" the sidewalks, picking up a discarded sofa and a leather recliner. He bought a small used TV and she gave him a boombox; he bought CDs and DVDs for a dollar or two at garage sales. When neither of them could sleep, they played cards until dawn.

But there were rules -- he could have only two beers a day, he couldn't start drinking till 5 p.m., and she wouldn't take him to buy cigarettes, giving him instead rolling papers and loose tobacco and telling him he could smoke however many he could roll. With the effects from his strokes, that meant he wasn't smoking much.

"He used to tell me this was the best time in his life," she told me when I came to collect his meager possessions and look around his tiny home. "He'd sit and watch TV and play with my grandkids, who would come over every day to see him. We'd bring him dinner every day, my daughter and I. And he'd always say, 'I don't know why you're doing this, why you're so good to me.' I would say, 'because you're our family."'

Two days before his death, on a Sunday, he complained of shortness of breath. He tried to walk to the liquor store but couldn't make it. By Monday night, he could barely breathe but refused to go to the hospital. Diane dialed 911 and the paramedics arrived with an ambulance. She stayed with him until about 1:30 a.m. Tuesday in the intensive care unit, telling him she'd see him later that day. His heart gave out at 10:27 a.m.

It was just a fluke that I was notified, that he wasn't put in a pauper's grave by the county. That night at the hospital, the shifts changed just as Diane was leaving. "My name is Carol," his new night nurse told him. "That's easy to remember," he replied. "That's my sister's name."

"When I talked to the coroner, I remembered that," Diane told me. "Until then, I didn't know he had any family. He didn't talk about it, just said that his parents were both dead."

Charlie's gone, but I'm glad to know that he had a good last couple of years. If he could come back somehow, my magical wish is that he would be able to start all over as that little dark-haired, round-faced boy with the high grades and the inquisitive mind. And I hope he would make different choices the second time around.