His eyes were red and I knew he’d been crying again.
When he went into the bathroom to brush his teeth, Dwight uncapped his coffee and drank deeply. “I needed that.”
“Is everything okay?”
“He wanted to know exactly how Jonna died and I told him. Not about the note or how she must have known what was going to happen, just that she couldn’t have felt any pain or—”
He broke off as Cal stuck his head out of the bathroom. “Is it okay if I take a shower? I feel dirty.”
“Sure,” Dwight told him. “But you can’t get dressed till after the doctor’s seen you, okay?”
“Okay.”
I unwrapped a biscuit and handed it to him. It was still warm and fragrant, the sausage nicely flavored with sage.
As he took a bite, I said, “What’s on the agenda today?”
“Cal wants to see her. What do you think?”
I shook my head. “That’s a tough call. Has he ever seen a death?”
“Just dogs or cats.” He took another bite. “No, I take that back. One of his classmates was in a bad car wreck right after school started. The whole class went to the funeral, but I don’t know if the casket was open.”
“If he really wants to see her, then I think you ought to take him. But go this afternoon or tomorrow morning when the two of you can be there alone.”
“What if he wants to touch her?”
I remembered standing in front of Mother’s coffin. In-tellectually, I knew she was dead, but it wasn’t till I touched the hands lying neatly folded that the permanence of her death sank in. From my earliest memories, her hands had danced across the piano keys when Daddy played his fiddle. They had shelled peas and butter beans, patted out biscuit dough, scrubbed bathtubs, plucked chickens, spanked disobedient sons and a willful daugh- ter, cupped a flame to her cigarette, dealt out poker hands, and helped me hold the hymnal on Sunday morning so that I could follow the words. And always, always those hands had flashed in the air before her as she talked, enhancing her conversation and vividly depicting her emotions.
Daddy used to say, “Cut off your mama’s hands and she couldn’t talk,” and to tease her, he’d catch her hands in his and hold them motionless till she laughed and pulled away.
But there in that casket, those hands had been cold and forever stilled.
“Deb’rah?” Dwight looked at me worriedly. “Shug?”
“Sorry.” I shook my head and blinked away the tears.
“I was thinking about Mother. You have to let Cal do what he wants, Dwight. Just give him enough time to do it. Don’t hurry him.”
We finished eating and Cal came out of the bathroom with a towel wrapped around him. His brown hair was damp and tousled and drops of water clung to his shoulder blades. At eight, his sense of modesty was in its most rudimentary stage of development, and when his towel slipped as he crawled back onto the bed, he didn’t seem to notice or care.
The doctor, Cal’s regular pediatrician, came in soon after, looked at his chart, and gave it as his opinion that Cal had not been seriously harmed by the cough syrup. “He had taken three or four doses by the time Mrs. Bryant called to report his sensitivity to the codeine. There couldn’t have been all that much left in the bottle.”
“So can I go home now?” asked Cal.
“Well, if it was me, cold as it is, I believe I’d put on a 30 coat and some shoes first,” the doctor said and Cal laughed.
I handed Dwight the tote bag and followed the doctor out to the nurses’ station to get his address and phone number so that we could send for Cal’s records once we’d found a pediatrician down in Raleigh.
“Nice kid,” said the doctor as he scribbled his e-mail address on a prescription pad.
“Any advice for his new stepmom?” I asked.
“Treat him kindly and respect what he’s going through,” he said promptly, “but don’t let him use it to con you. Set the rules and hold him to them. Eight-year-olds are resilient and Cal’s absolutely normal, so he’s going to laugh and you’ll think he’s over it, then he’s going to cry and you’ll know he’s not. Just relax and enjoy him. One good thing—you’ve got a couple or three years before he hits puberty. I suggest you make the most of them. Once the hormones kick in, all bets are off till he hits twenty.”
“Yeah, I know,” I said dryly.
“That’s right. I heard you were a judge.”
“I’m also the aunt of several teenagers,” I told him.
He laughed. “Even better.”
As we said good-bye, the elevator pinged and Paul Radcliff stepped off, carrying a Thermos of coffee that Sandy had sent over.
“We’ve both had the hospital’s coffee,” he said, following me into Cal’s room. “Thought y’all might could use something stronger to get a jump-start on the day.”
A second cup was welcome to both of us.
“Hey, Cal,” he said. “How’s it going?”
“Okay,” the boy said. He was fully dressed now except for tying his sneakers.
