my husband was afraid to spend the night in our house without me. Depending on the circumstances, I found this phobia either cute or irritating. “How about this?” I said. “I’ll call Jadey, and you and Ella can stay there.”
“Remember how that fucking dog of theirs barked and slobbered in my face all night last time?”
“Charlie, my grandmother is in the intensive-care unit. Your options are to stay at home, go to Arthur and Jadey’s, or you’re welcome to drive out here with Ella and stay at my mom’s. Why don’t I give you a few minutes to make a decision, and I’ll call back?”
He was quiet, and then he said, “No, you’re right, you’re right. I’ll get Ella now, and if you wouldn’t mind calling Jadey, I can cancel with Stuey. How’re your mom and Lars?”
“They’re fine.”
“How are you?”
“I’m fine, too,” I said, though at this moment, being asked, I felt a sadness overtake me.
Then Charlie said, “I know you think I hate spending the night apart because of not wanting to be in the house alone, but it’s also because I miss you, Lindy.”
“Do you and Ella want to come out here?” I realized this was unlikely. On his first visit to my family’s house in Riley, Charlie had managed to conceal what I believe in retrospect was astonishment at how small the place was. In the years since, he’d become significantly less diplomatic. He’d say, “Sharing a bathroom with Lars is cruel and unusual punishment.” Even on the holidays we spent there, we almost never stayed the night, and Charlie regularly lobbied for my mother, grandmother, and Lars to come to his parents’ house for Easter or Christmas; they’d done so a few times early in our marriage, and I don’t think any of them had felt particularly comfortable. I was pretty sure that neither Priscilla nor Harold Blackwell knew Lars had been a postal employee—he had retired in 1980—and while I wouldn’t have denied it, I’d never made a point of telling them. The irony was that marrying Lars had no doubt made my mother far more financially secure. Since the episode with Pete Imhof, she had never mentioned money to me, and she and Lars had even gone on trips together to Myrtle Beach and Albuquerque.
“Honestly, it’d probably be better if we go to Jadey and Arthur’s,” Charlie was saying. “Ella and I would be underfoot at your mom’s. Call me if you need anything, and call either way before you go to bed.”
“Ella is supposed to go to Christine’s house tomorrow, so make sure she’s ready to be picked up by ten. Also, have her take her vitamin after breakfast.”
“You’ll be back in time for dinner at Maj and Dad’s, won’t you?”
I hesitated. “Let’s cross that bridge when we come to it.”
I could tell that Charlie was restraining himself from saying how important my attendance was, which it really wasn’t except for the fact that the Blackwells took particular pride in their all-hands-on-deck dinners.
I said, “Charlie, I’m sure your family will understand.”
AT SIX THAT
evening, the ICU’s last visiting hour, my mother and I were finally buzzed through the double doors to see my grandmother. Because only two people at a time were permitted, Lars remained in the waiting room.
She still was not conscious. She lay beneath a sheet in a white hospital gown with a pattern of small teal and navy snowflakes, and she was hooked up to several monitors, one of them beeping. A tube was taped to the crook of her arm, and two more emerged from her nostrils. “She’s so little,” my mother murmured. I had been thinking exactly the same thing. Against the backdrop of the oversize bed, my grandmother looked heartbreakingly old and heartbreakingly tiny.
I walked toward her, saying in a cheerful voice, “Hi, Granny. It’s Alice and Mom—”
“It’s Dorothy,” my mother cut in. “Granny, boy, are we happy to see you. You gave us quite a scare today.”
“You probably want to rest, so we won’t stay long,” I said. “But the doctor said you’re stable now, which is wonderful news.” It was impossible to know if she could hear us; the overwhelming likelihood was that she couldn’t. “I don’t know if you remember, but you fell this morning, so you’re in the hospital. Now you’re recovering”—this was my own wishful diagnosis, not the doctor’s; he had used no word more encouraging than
“and the doctors and nurses are taking very good care of you.” This also was optimistic inference; I didn’t have much idea of what had transpired behind the closed double doors. Dr. Furnish, who was the attending physician, had explained a few minutes before to Lars, my mother, and me that my grandmother had had what was called a lobar intracerebral hemorrhage and they’d given her several blood transfusions so far but were hesitant to perform surgery, given her age and general frailness; he also warned that she might have brain damage. Dr. Furnish was not particularly warm, but he did seem competent. As he spoke, I took notes on the back of a receipt I’d found in my purse.
“Granny, I don’t think the waiting room here would be much to your liking,” my mother said. “The chairs are covered in an orange fabric you’d find very tacky.”
“And Lars bought stale-looking cookies, which Mom and I were smart enough not to eat, but everyone else gobbled them up.” I tried to sound jaunty and humorous.
“Emilie, you have to get better and come home in time for the season finale of
” my mother said.
I added, “But if you get me out of dinner at Priscilla and Harold Blackwell’s tomorrow night, I’ll be in your debt.”
“Alice!” my mother said.
“I’m teasing,” I said. “Granny knows that.”
We continued in this fashion, half talking to my grandmother and half talking to each other for the allotted thirty
