F o rt u n at e
S o n
E A S Y R A W L I N S B O O K S
F I C T I O N
N O N F I C T I O N
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L I T T L E , B ROW N A N D C O M PA N Y
Copyright © 2006 by Walter Mosley
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote brief passages in a review.
Little, Brown and Company
Time Warner Book Group
1271 Avenue of the Americas, New York, NY 10020
Visit our Web site at www.twbookmark.com First eBook Edition: April 2006
The characters and events in this book are fictitious. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is coincidental and not intended by the author.
ISBN: 0-7595-1547-6
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1
Thomas Beerman was born with a hole in his lung.
Because of this birth defect, he spent the first six months of his life in the intensive care unit at Helmutt-Briggs, a hospital in West Los Angeles. The doctors told his mother, Branwyn, that most likely he would not survive.
“Newborns with this kind of disorder, removed from the physical love of their mothers, often wither,” kind-eyed Dr.
Mason Settler told her.
So she came to the hospital every day after work and watched over her son from six to eleven. She couldn’t touch him because he was kept in a glass-enclosed, germ-free envi-ronment. But they stared into each other’s eyes for hours every day.
Branwyn would read to the little boy and talk to him through the night after her shift at Ethel’s Florist Shop.
