by Rhett DeVane
“Okay. I guess.”
“Other than talking to you, of course.” She paused. “I often talk to your Grandpop. Makes me feel better and I do believe, somehow, he hears.”
Jonas tilted his head. “Phone’s ringing.”
“I can’t believe I didn’t bring it out here. Would you run and get it, sweetie?”
He returned shortly and handed her the cordless headset. “It’s Aunt Hell. She’s all fired up about the doctor or something.”
So much for rest and sanity. Hannah grabbed the phone and clutched it to her chest to muffle the mouthpiece. “Don’t call your Aunt Helen such an awful name, Jonas. If she ever heard such, she’d fall to pieces. She’s very sensitive.”
“If you say, Mom. I didn’t come up with it anyway. Jus did. She calls y’all the three H’s—Han, Hal, and Hell.”
The hospital cafeteria teemed with its usual blend of haggard family members and scrub-suited personnel. Hannah and her older sister sat at one of a long line of wooden-laminate café tables.
“Try to eat a little of your salad, Helen. You’re going to end up getting sick too, if you don’t.”
Her sister pushed a hunk of iceberg lettuce aside and speared a cherry tomato. “I know I need to.” She rested the loaded fork on the side of the plate. “My appetite’s shot, what with our mama curled up in that bed upstairs. Three days already. You’d think she’d be turning around by now. That cough still sounds so bad.”
Helen used a thin paper napkin to dab tears from her red-rimmed eyes. “She didn’t even want to watch ‘The Young and the Restless!’ She’ll miss out on ‘The Bold and the Beautiful,’ but she watches Y & R like it was a religion. She’s had a thing for that Victor Newman character for years. Every single time I talk to her on the phone, she rants like those actors are real people. She keeps up with who’s had an affair with whom and which one’s had this or that one’s baby.”
Hannah reached across the table and rested one hand over her sister’s. “We have to keep the faith, Sissy. Ma-Mae’s strong-willed. At least, she’s in here where they can give her IV antibiotics and breathing treatments, and someone’s looking out for her twenty-four hours a day.”
“She was listing folks for me to call this morning . . . like she’s expecting to die.” Helen blew her nose with the crumpled paper napkin.
“She periodically does that. I suppose when you get to be her age, you wonder if every day might be your last, especially when you feel as rotten as she does right now.” Hannah studied her elder sister’s face—so much like her own, but softer and more rounded. The compassionate features of someone you would like to sit by your sickbed and hold your hand for hours.
Both sisters had inherited Mae’s good skin and hair. Other than a few faint smile lines at the corners of their eyes, aging had taken little toll. Helen’s dark brown waves showed a few gray wisps at the temples, though Hannah’s remained unchanged. The older sibling wore a little extra cushion around the mid-section that her height helped to conceal, and Hannah was within eighteen pounds of her weight at high school graduation twenty years back—though the extra padding had positioned on her hips instead of her stomach. Helen had inherited Mae’s blue eyes; Hannah’s were hazel like her father’s. Both women spoke in a gentle Southern drawl with well-modulated speech. Similar gestures punctuated their conversation.
One of Hannah’s back teeth sent a shockwave of pain through her lower jaw and she jumped.
“What’s wrong?”
“I have a tooth that’s trying to act up. Started last night.”
“Better get yourself to the dentist. We have those hard teeth like Daddy’s, but they crack up sometimes. I’ve had two crowns in the last three years for that very reason.”
“I don’t have the time to deal with this right now.”
Helen pushed her plate aside. “Life has a way of raining down over you, like Mama always says. We’ve had a monsoon, here lately. I came out yesterday to a flat tire. Nail in it. Charlie had to put on the spare so I could come over here. Then, my washer started to smell funny like it was burning up. Sears is delivering a new one sometime end of the week. Old one was shot. Had it for going on twenty years. The dryer’s on its last legs. Takes two times to get towels dry. Guess it’ll be next.”
Come try my life for a while. I’d give anything if flat tires and crappy appliances were my only issues. Hannah scolded herself for the mean thoughts as soon as they breezed from her brain. “You could move that set of Ma-Mae’s to your house. ”
Helen’s expression darkened. “I couldn’t do that, Sister. That’d be like I was already picking over her stuff.”
Hannah flicked specks of Styrofoam from her cup. “She would tell you to take them, but suit yourself.”
“Won’t hurt us to buy new machines.”
“Did you ever find out why the doctor ordered the EKG?” Hannah asked after a few minutes.
“He rattled off some long something-or-other. I didn’t understand the half of it.” Helen paused. “He did the strangest thing, though. He was on his way out the door when he turned back to me and asked in a quiet voice, ‘you do realize your mother has signed a Do Not Resuscitate Order?’” Helen’s eyebrows furrowed slightly. “Sounded so ominous. Like he was trying to tell me she was going to die.”
“You know how Ma-Mae feels, Helen. She’s had a Living Will for years. He probably wanted us to know they wouldn’t be doing any heroics if she started downward.”
“Maybe that’s all it was.” Helen raked a curl from her eyes. “I hated to call you. You’ve spent more than your fair share of time up here. I just got so scared.”
“Michael Jack’s signed on to help tomorrow,” Helen said as she pushed the door open to Room 606. “His boss told him to go and do whatever he needed to, for his grandmama.”
Helen’s eldest was Mae’s favorite grandchild, no secret about that. As the firstborn, he had been showered with grandmotherly affection from the start. The two not only shared a bond, but a birthday as well.
“That’s good,” Hannah said. “I can be here by one o’clock to relieve him. I think she does better when some of us are here off and on during the day.”
Helen stopped short when she spied the vacant bed. “Now, where’ve they taken her off to? She couldn’t be up and about by herself, especially with that rolling IV pole tagging along.”
Hannah motioned toward the bathroom. “Shh! Listen.”
Mae’s muffled voice sounded through the slightly ajar door. “Have you washed possible yet?”
“Ma’am?” a voice with a thick Jamaican accent replied.
“You wash up as far as possible and you wash down as far as possible—” Mae’s voice paused dramatically before delivering the final line, “—and then you wash possible.”
They heard the nursing assistant chuckle.
Helen dabbed the corners of her eyes with a tissue. “Isn’t that the sweetest thing? I had forgotten all about that saying.”
“I used to tell Justine and Jonas the same little ditty when they were children.”
“All three of my boys grew up hearing it too.”
Helen walked around the room, straightening and tidying as she talked. This side of the building had a view of the street instead of rows of AC units. “Isn’t it funny? I used to think she and I were so different. There was no way I could ever be like Mae.” Her expression softened. “Now, more and more, I find I’m just like her.”
Hannah forced down the ache of emotion and thumbed through a stack of opened get-well cards. “She’s not such a bad old gal. I can’t think of anyone I’d rather mimic. Most days.”
Chapter Four
“Hold this so you can see your mouth.” Dr. Emery passed Hannah a hand mirror. In the intense glow of the overhead dental lamp, the pores around her nose looked like forty miles of pock-holed back road and the single hair on her neck stuck out a good inch.
Oh, for heaven’s sake, she thought. I came out in public like this!
> Wolf hair: the term she and Suzanne had coined for the erroneous, whisker-like hairs that sprouted seemingly overnight from the oddest places. Not only had she started to cultivate a healthy patch of chin stubble, three wolf hairs had recently picked her cleavage for a new home.
“See this little crack?” He motioned with the tip of a dental instrument. “The x-ray shows no evidence of an abscess yet, but I’d lay even odds that your pain is coming from that first molar. Sad, it doesn’t even have a restoration. A virgin tooth.”
She mumbled around his fingers and instruments, “Didn’t realize I had anything virgin left.”
“Well, this tooth is. You only have two pinpoint fillings in your entire mouth. What are you doing breaking a tooth?”
“Grinding in my sleep or something?” Great. Add that to the list of bad habits I’ve acquired. She winced as a jab of white-hot pain shot through her jaw. “Man! Now I know for sure I’d never have a career as a spy. If they captured me and messed with one of my teeth so it hurt like that, I’d give up the President’s underwear size.”
Dr. Emery laughed then rolled his operatory chair over to a long counter and scribbled into her chart. “Good thing you came in. You’re overdue for your cleaning and check-up too.”
One side of Hannah’s lips lifted. “I’m overdue for everything. Between work, teenaged kids and my mother, I barely have time to brush.”
“Life can be somewhat entertaining at times.” He closed the chart. “I’ll refer you to Dr. Koch’s office for a root canal After that, you’ll need to come back so I can put a crown over that molar. We can make you a bite guard to wear at night, unless you want to help me buy a new car or maybe a set of tires.”
Hannah rested her throbbing jaw in one hand and groaned. “Root canal.”
“When you aren’t terribly infected and swollen, it’s generally routine and painless. Less drilling than a filling.”
“It’s not that. My life has been so . . . challenging here lately with Mom so sick and all.” She offered a weak smile. “Maybe it will be nice having my head numbed up.”
A line of pigeons and sparrows balanced on the telephone wire spanning North Monroe Street. Each day as Hannah traveled between her state job and Tallahassee General Hospital, she noticed the birds. How did they choose the designated perch of the day? Who decided? Was there an alpha male or female, as in a wolf pack?
As she pulled to a halt at one of Tallahassee’s busy intersections, a cluster of young people jogged by, each wearing black shorts and a gray T-shirt with ARMY printed across the front. How many would have their budding lives snipped short by yet another “peace initiative” or “police action”—the popular political synonyms for “war?” Given a few years, her son or daughter might run with such a well-intentioned group of patriotic men and women. Maybe peace and goodwill would prevail before that point.
Hannah huffed. “And maybe drunk pink donkeys will fly loops around Uranus too.”
The epiphany struck her suddenly: she had no control over political edicts or war, no more than she had over birds on a wire.
No control.
Not over which of the jogging youths would die. Nor over when her mother would, as Mae so often quipped, “leave for her reward in the sky.” A higher power dictated the storyline and all she could do was play her role. Stress and struggle would make no difference to the outcome—good or bad.
The ever-present knot nestled deep within her stomach eased slightly. For the first time since her mother’s most recent illness, she inhaled a deep, unrestricted breath. “Nada. Zip. Not one teensy-tinesy little hair of control.”
What would this morning bring? An increase in her mother’s congestion and fever? Mae’s endless inventory of last wishes? When Hannah entered room 606, Mae was propped up in bed picking at the dregs of dry scrambled eggs and congealed grits.
“Hey, baby-doll. I didn’t expect you till later on.”
Hannah deposited her purse on the vinyl padded chair next to the bed. “I’m going in a little late this morning. Thought I’d stop by and see how your night went.”
“I had a pretty good sleep.” Mae pushed the rolling table to one side. “Them breathing treatments make my mouth taste like the south end of a north-bound mule, but I surely have been able to harvest some phlegm. My chest doesn’t feel near as heavy.”
“That’s great!”
“You got to do one thing for me, darlin’.”
“What’s that, Ma-Mae?”
“Run to a Hardee’s and get me a sausage biscuit and a big cup of strong coffee. And soon as I can, I need to have my head washed. I look like who shot Sam! I scared myself when I looked in the mirror.”
For the first time in over a week, Mae cared how she looked. The smallest miracles were the sweetest.
Chapter Five
When she pulled into the circular drive at Enable Healthcare facility the next day, Hannah spied her sister-in-law’s ruby red minivan pulling from a parking slot. She tooted the horn and Suzanne waved before easing back into the space.
“Hey!” Suzanne’s smiling face appeared at the driver’s side window. “I was just slipping out to grab lunch. I’m starved slap to death. Want me to help you carry anything inside before I go?”
“I’m hungry too. Hop in and we’ll ride up to that little Chinese place on the corner.”
Suzanne bounded around to the passenger’s side and crawled in. “Sounds like a ‘wiener’ to me.” She grinned. “It’ll give us a chance to catch up.”
Hannah gunned into the swift current of noon Mahan Drive traffic. “Where’s Hal? I thought he was staying with Ma-Mae this morning.”
“The new sheriff called a meeting first thing. Hal wants to get a feel for how he’s gonna run things. My mama’s doing okay, so I told your brother I’d pinch-hit for him.”
Hannah vulture-circled the strip mall parking lot until she noticed a truck vacating a spot near the Chinese eatery. “I had forgotten how noon is over here. I usually pack a lunch when things are . . . normal.”
“You still car-pool?”
“Generally, yes.” Hannah grabbed her purse from the back seat. “I’ll need to rob a dang bank to cover my gas bill this month. With me trekking to the hospital and the rehab facility, I’ve had to provide my own transportation.”
“Know what you mean. Three of Mama’s doctors are over here. I burn up the pavement most every week for one thing or the other.”
After they placed the orders, they sat at one of six small tables.
“I’ve never been here,” Suzanne said.
“One of my co-workers says it’s the best in town, and he’s Chinese, so I think that’s a pretty good recommendation.”
“Thought you said you were hungry. But you surely didn’t order a whole lot.”
Hannah rolled her head to ease the cramped muscles in her neck. “My stomach’s been a little off. The hot and sour soup is the only thing that sounded good.”
A petite Asian woman delivered two brown paper bags to the table and skittered back toward the small kitchen.
Suzanne slipped back the lid on the Styrofoam container. Tantalizing scented steam rose in a puff. “This is a pile of food. Maybe I’ll split this up and take some back to your mama.”
“Good idea. She’s not too keen on the food at the rehab facility.”
Suzanne popped a forkful of cashew chicken into her mouth. “Gah! This is G-double-O- D, Good!”
“Would I lead you astray?”
“Honey, I wouldn’t have the time or the energy even if you had the notion to lead me there. I get to going so hard sometimes, I feel like I’m wearing the soles clean off my shoes.”
“At least you have plenty of backups,” Hannah said.
Her sister-in-law’s expression grew thoughtful. “Something dawned on me today, about Miz Mae.”
“Hmm?”
“She’s been pretty down since they moved her to rehab.”
Hannah crumbled crispy-fried noodles into the rich,
steaming soup. “She sits and stares into space a good deal of the time. And she doesn’t really talk unless you ask her a direct question. I’m starting to wonder if she might’ve had a minor stroke. Maybe that ER doctor was on target, and she should’ve had a brain scan.”
“I had a different thought. She believes we’ve put her in a nursing home.”
“No.” Hannah paused. “You think?”
“I’ve noticed her crying when she thinks no one’s looking.”
“It’s a beautiful day for late February.” Hannah wheeled Mae onto a small porch at the facility’s main entrance.
The sky was the blue of Paul Newman’s eyes, so intense it almost looked contrived. A few songbirds fooled by the deceptive early warmth sang courtship hymns. Hannah backed her mother’s wheelchair into a wind-protected nook, a spot drenched in sunlight.
“That feels good to my back,” Mae said.
Hannah tucked a lightweight white cotton blanket around Mae’s legs. “I thought we’d sit outside a little today. If the breeze proves to be too cool, we’ll go back in. I don’t want you to get sick again.”
A young man wheeled through the glass entrance doors and rolled to the opposite side of the narrow porch. An FSU baseball cap shaded his face. He slumped in the wheelchair. At first, Hannah thought his snuffles might be the sign of allergies. The first hint of North Florida spring brought a fine dusting of pollen to every horizontal surface, sometimes as early as the end of February. The young man’s body quivered, then shook with muffled sobs. Tears splashed onto his collegiate sweatshirt.
Mae’s vacant stare altered to one of sympathetic interest as she directed her attention to the young man. “It’ll get better, honey. You’ll see. It will get better.” Her mother’s voice held the soothing tone of maternal concern. Tears gathered in Hannah’s eyes. The man’s weeping continued for a few moments, then ceased abruptly. Mae slipped a hand into her robe pocket, flipped through her collection of clean hankies, selected a plain white cloth, and handed it over.