“Good,” I said.
He extended one leg so his sock-encased foot was balanced on my knee. “I sure do love you, Lindy, even if you’re a narrow-minded liberal who thinks I’m a conniving Republican.”
I set my hand on top of his foot. “Sweetheart, if I were narrow-minded, I wouldn’t love you back.”
WHEN THE PHONE
rang on Friday afternoon, it was one o’clock, and I was scrubbing the tiles in our master-bathroom shower (I had never hired a maid or housekeeper, which I knew Priscilla and my sisters-in-law considered odd, but I actually found it soothing to clean). I pulled the yellow rubber glove off my right hand as I walked into our bedroom, and after I’d lifted the receiver, I heard Lars Enderstraisse say, “Alice, I’m awful sorry to be the one calling you—”
Immediately, my heart stopped, it hung there unmoving inside my chest, and then, squeaking out the words, I said, “My mother?” and he said, “No, no, not Dorothy. It’s Emilie. I’m afraid she took a spill, and there’s been some internal bleeding, some bleeding in the brain, so we’re over at Lutheran Hospital.” This was the same hospital where I’d been born, the hospital where both Andrew Imhof and I had been taken that horrible night in September 1963.
“But she’s not—” I paused. “She’s alive?”
“She isn’t conscious, but I know the doctors are working hard. Your mother’s talking to one of them. Me and her are here outside the ICU, and we’re hoping they’ll let us see—”
“Granny’s in the ICU?”
“Being that she’s up there in years, they’re taking every precaution.”
“I’ll get there as soon as I can,” I said.
IT HAD HAPPENED
late that morning, and not for any obvious reason—she had been walking from the dining room into the living room and had somehow landed on the floor, unconscious—and what the doctors were trying to figure out was whether the bleeding in my grandmother’s brain had caused the fall or the fall had caused the bleeding. My mother had heard a thud, but not even a loud one, “like the mail dropping,” she said, and she’d hurried out and seen my grandmother lying there. My mother tried unsuccessfully to revive her, and then she called an ambulance.
At the hospital, my mother kept apologizing, as if it were her fault, saying, “I’m just so sorry you had to come rushing out here.”
“Mom, of course I came.”
At some point late in the afternoon, Lars walked across the street to a convenience store and bought boxed cookies, which neither my mother nor I ate; he then offered them to the other people in the waiting room. A television sat in one corner, playing soap operas and then talk shows, and though no one seemed to be watching it, it appeared that everyone was too diffident to turn it off. The commercials, with their relentlessly zippy announcers and upbeat jingles, felt like a particular affront.
On the waitingroom pay phone, I had called Charlie, then I’d called Jadey to see if she could pick up Ella after school, and a few hours later, I’d called Jadey’s house to talk to Ella, to explain what was happening. I’d hoped that hearing my voice would let her know I was fine and so was she, but instead, it was her voice that upset
I so wanted to be beside Ella, holding her, that I had to blink back tears. In her serious, girlish voice, she said, “Is Granny going to die?” Granny was what Ella called my grandmother, just as I did; she called my mother Grandma, and she referred to Lars (he and my mother had quietly married in 1981) as Papa Lars.
I said, “I hope not, ladybug.”
Around five, I called Charlie again at the office. “I’m still here, and there’s no real news,” I said. “Can you go get Ella?”
“You think Jadey would mind watching her a little while longer? I’m scheduled for a five-thirty squash match with Stuey Patrickson.”
From the pay phone in the corner, I surveyed the room: a young husband sitting with one hand over his eyes, either resting or weeping; a small child running a truck along the carpet; my mother reading a months-old
while Lars Enderstraisse sat beside her eating another cookie. (
was never how I thought of Lars. Not that I disliked him, I actually had developed a great deal of affection for him, and to my surprise, so had my grandmother; she had taught him to play Scrabble, and he’d become particularly knowledgeable about the tricky two-letter words, which meant he was a considerably more challenging opponent to my grandmother than my mother was. But still, I did not think of Lars as a father figure; he was simply my mother’s husband, her companion.)
“Alice?” Charlie said, and I said, “I’d prefer for you to pick up Ella now. I don’t want her to feel unsettled.”
“Is she upset?”
“Well, I’m leaning toward staying at my mom’s tonight. We haven’t been allowed to see Granny, and I’m reluctant to come back to Milwaukee when everything is up in the air.”
“You don’t even have a toothbrush, do you?” he said.
“I can buy one.”
“If you come home, you can jump in the car if you need to get back to Riley. It’s, what, thirty-five minutes?”
The way Charlie drove, perhaps, but not the way I did. Besides, I knew that Charlie’s eagerness to have me return to Milwaukee stemmed less from a particular wish to see me than from—it persisted—his fear of the dark;
