“Well, praise the Lord you weren’t hurt, my sweetheart,” cried Olivia.
Pablito asked, “Why are you crying Mom? Dad’s okay.”
“Thank you, Jesus, for saving my husband,” She looked at Pablito. “I’m still scared for Daddy, that’s why I’m crying. It’s not that easy to hear that someone was shooting where he works.”
“But mom, Dad didn’t say that he was being shot at, only that he found this guy outside the church where he works.”
“It’s not a church, Pablito,” corrected his mother. “After all of the years your dad has worked there, you should know by now that it’s called a synagogue. It’s like our church except its where Jewish people go to pray. So, I thank Jesus for protecting Daddy.”
Seven
Jack suffered excruciating pain after the anesthesia wore off. He was given Demerol, Oxycodone and sometime during the night, when it was at its worst, a Morphine drip. Because the surgeon had to go through the kidney to reach the renal artery, Green’s healing process after surgery forced him to do the only thing he could do at this juncture, groan loudly with intractable pain. Even when he was asleep, the pain still reached his thalamus which sent it to the cerebral cortex, the part of the brain that interpreted the messages. And shit, did he get messages all day and night for two weeks before the pain began to subside. He was even beginning to miss those annoying robo calls he often got at home.
Nurse James Hall, who preferred being called Jimmy, wheeled Jack from the surgery on a gurney, which eventually became his bed. He placed him in an antiseptically clean room, painted a dull olive green with two overhead fluorescent lights and a rather large window facing the parking lot, which he shared with another patient. Green was not high enough in the hierarchy of the town to merit a private room, though he did get the window bed.
Jack’s wife, Brenda, and sixteen-year-old identical twin girls, Julie and Andie, didn’t leave the waiting room until a doctor told them of their dad’s condition. It had three two-seater sofas and three single easy chairs. On the top right corner was a TV set tuned to CNN, but no remote control was available to keep waiting room relatives and visitors from arguing about which channel to turn to or to increase or decrease the volume. Brenda sat on one chair while the girls sat on one of the sofas. There were other people sitting there waiting to hear from their family member’s doctor.
Jack’s surgeon, Dr. Shapiro, came into the waiting room with a broad smile and the three ladies stood up. The doctor grabbed Brenda by her shoulders because she was shaking so hard, looked down at her and told her the surgery went extremely well, and that her husband would be fine. Brenda and the twins were partially calmed by the doctor’s words, but not until they got to see Jack for themselves would they be satisfied.
They were finally called into the consultation room by a volunteer surgery department attendant at a desk near where the relatives were waiting for word. Seeing him alive was all they needed to have their lives returned to them as before. Naturally, he would need weeks to heal and afterwards more time at home, but he would heal if someone didn’t try and shoot him again. Andie, the older of the twins by two minutes, cried intensely as she ran to her mom; Brenda didn’t even care that her young teenager’s eye makeup was running down her cheeks and onto her blouse. Mom grabbed both Andie and Julie tightly and asked the volunteer, “When will we be able to see Jack?”
“Give him about two hours to come out of the anesthesia and you’ll be called in when he knows where and who he is,” he replied.
Two and three-quarter hours later, they got the call from the same volunteer. “Mr. Green is awake now and you may go in and see him.”
Brenda found his room and ran over to his bed and hugged him through her crying, “Oh Jack, I was so scared. I didn’t know what I would do without you. If that shot had taken your life, I don’t think I could have gone on living without you.”
“First, I haven’t gone anywhere, yet. Secondly, you’ve been such a great wife and a super mom that if anything were to ever happen to me, you could easily continue living without me. I’m not saying you would enjoy being a widow, but you can handle anything. Seeing how beautiful you are, you’ll probably have a couple of boyfriends within six months,” he said, winking and smiling at her.
She felt like smacking him for that last part, but she knew he was just teasing her and even the smallest tap as a make-believe smack could hurt him too much. The girls sobbed just seeing him lying there, with all sorts of scary tubes running in and out of his body, and ran to Daddy. They both kissed and hugged him lightly, which caused him to tear up too.
He eased their fear by cracking one of Daddy’s quips. “Careful girls, you keep being this hysterical, it’ll cause permanent marks to your cheeks from your eye make-up and you’ll start looking like fraternal twins rather than identical as you are. If that happens then everyone will be able tell you two apart; not like today when you girls can trick your boyfriends since you look so much alike,” he teased. Brenda and the girls then left, promising to return the next day.
Jack Green, forty-three, graduated college and became a CPA for the McFarland Architectural office. He had been married to Brenda for twenty-two years. His wife, forty-five, was a kindergarten teacher and loved the company of every one of her students except when in school. The children drove her to become unglued since she had thirty-two students in her
