Carter Clay Read Free Page B

meeting with Jesus and Lorne and his other loved ones in heaven, rest your mind on that, Marybelle , even then, M.B. felt herself falling, and Pastor Bitner’s sentences were no comfort, they were branches, and as M.B. fell, the branches broke against her, snap and snap, snap.
    Oh! A terrible mewing rises from the girl’s barred bed. The noise sends M.B. hurtling from her chair and straight toward the door. Her heart gallops in her chest. Her ears ring. And then she forces herself to begin the journey back to the nightmare bedside.
    Doesn’t it seem a sacrilege that her shoes bark like seals when she walks on the hospital linoleum?
    â€œIt’s all right, kid.” M.B.’s whisper is hoarse. “It’s all right.” Gingerly, she tugs at the bed’s top sheet, eliminating the shadow caught in a wrinkle there. Anyone seeing the patient would imagine: not bad. A few tubes in, a few tubes out, a nasty scrape on the cheek, a broken hand. M.B., however, has been told: bad.
    â€œKid,” she says, “sorry, kid.” Because the last conversation she had with the patient was an angry one.
    Jersey.
    Really, M.B. scarcely knows this Jersey. When Jersey and her parents arrived at M.B.’s condominium, both M.B. and Jersey hesitated, then shook hands. Shook hands! But what else could M.B. do? She had seen the girl four times in her life. Baby, toddler,shy kid at Lorne’s funeral, and, finally, the gangly girl of this summer’s visit.
    As soon as M.B. knew the trio was coming to Florida, she had bought a pot-holder loom for Jersey. As a girl, M.B. had loved making pot holders in the summer. “Oh, thanks,” Jersey said when M.B. brought the loom out to the dinette, “that’s nice,” but Jersey did not leave off her game of chess to make a pot holder, and M.B.’s feelings were hurt and so she asked—her voice scratchy with irritation; she could hear it herself!—“But how can you play chess alone, Jersey?”
    The girl had a disconcerting tendency to look M.B. straight in the eye, then glance away as if she had seen something embarrassing. “I play as well as I can for both sides,” she said. Then she shrugged a shrug that was an exact replica of the lifetime of shrugs that M.B. had received from Kitty, and so maddened M.B. beyond words.
    Now, however, the girl cries MEW! MEW! Her lips work back and forth, and, heart aching, M.B. presses her hand against the girl’s forehead. Is there a fever? Through the mandatory gloves, M.B. cannot tell. Would there be a fever?
    Once, Kitty yelled at M.B., “You never remember anything!” but she was wrong. The cries of Kitty’s daughter remind M.B. of the shrill alarum of the killdeer that roam Palm Gate Village’s golf course. And she first recognized those plump-bodied, spindle-legged birds on the golf course from a memory of the gravel roads of her childhood: handsome, irritating, the killdeer ran ahead of her bicycle, and cried and cried as if they did not even know how to fly; but that was a trick, M.B.’s father had said, a hoax meant to draw your attention away from the killdeer’s nests.
    Really, M.B. remembers many things. When the aide comes to knock on the window again, then indicates with a swivel of her head that she is setting M.B.’s doughnut and juice on the nurses’ station, the carton of juice in the aide’s hand reminds M.B. of the small square house picked up by the twister in The Wizard of Oz and dropped upon the Wicked Witch of the East.
    After a last glance at her granddaughter, M.B. stands and heads for the door. Identity smeared by weariness and fear, sheclaps her palms to her sternum to still the sudden rattle that she assumes comes from inside herself but is in fact a cart passing by the nursing station with a clatter of glass on metal.
    The balding nurse who sits at the station looks up at M.B. His smile reveals a set of silvery orthodontic