Margaret from Maine (9781101602690) Read Free Page B

morning.”
    â€œI don’t know. That’s a good question.”
    â€œIs he the Indian fellow?”
    â€œYep.”
    â€œI remember talking to him. He’s okay. Always looks above your eyes at your forehead. That’s what I noticed.”
    â€œHe’s been good about Thomas,” she said, then she turned her attention to Gordon. “Come on, buckaroo. Let’s get moving here. Finish up.”
    Margaret wiped down the sink with a cloth. She did it unconsciously. When she remembered what she was doing, she hung the cloth on the neck of the faucet to dry. Then she ducked quickly into the front powder room and checked her hair once more. She looked fine, she decided. Her hair, actually, hung the way she liked. She pushed at it and resettled it above her shoulders. On her way out, she ran her hand over Gordon’s hair. She loved the feel of her little boy’s hair. It was short and soft, like a deer’s, she decided, or what an otter might feel like. Yes, an otter. She often thought of her little boy as an otter, as strange as that sometimes seemed to her. She liked thinking of him as a sleek tuck of muscle, a gamboling, happy boy at large in streams and rivers, gliding and playing all day. Her otter-boy, she sometimes called him.
    She lifted his empty bowl of Cheerios away; he was finished but stayed in place gazing at a maze on the back of the cereal box. Margaret went to the sink, ran water in the cereal bowl.
    â€œOkay, buddy boy,” Margaret said to Gordon, “brush your teeth and we’ll get going. Maybe if you’re very, very good, we’ll stop at Hot Dog Depot.”
    Gordon shot upstairs without any additional urging. He loved Hot Dog Depot. She heard Gordon turn on the water upstairs, then she lost track of him as she walked quickly past the screen door and shut off the television in the den. A pretty morning, she thought. Spring had definitely arrived at last.

Chapter Three
    S he let Gordon carry the lilacs from the car and though it slowed them down, she smiled at the seriousness with which he carried out this small function. He held the flowers out, the broad heads nearly large enough for him to hide behind, the silver handle of tin foil bright in his hand. The parking lot was familiar; she had visited the hospital ten billion times, she felt, and she knew each crack she passed, each patched section. She noticed that the red maple in the center island had become green suddenly. It was a magic trick played each spring. One saw the buds emerge, forgot to look for what felt like a moment, and miraculously the tree adorned itself in fresh, sweet leaves. It made her happy to see it.
    It was visiting hours and she knew the way. She was glad that Gordon had the lilacs. They obscured the inevitable hospital odor, the combination of cleaning products and still water and decay. She could never enter the hospital without recalling her aunt Lucy’s final year in a nursing home, the halls lined with old folks in wheelchairs, their heads like drooping dandelion puffs. But this was a veterans’ hospital, and there remained in the air something fierce and proud and broken. She shook herself to get rid of that train of thinking. She asked Gordon if he needed help, and he said no.
    She could not imagine what it must be like from her boy’s perspective. How did he reconcile in his small world what these men meant? She worried that it frightened him to come here, and she had talked to her pediatrician about it, and they had both concluded that some visits, spaced appropriately, made sense. Without the visits, they risked turning “Daddy” into Santa Claus, a mythical figure that was always good and observing and never arriving. Only this was different, Margaret often wanted to say: no Christmas morning waited, no climax ever came due. No other side to the calendar existed, no before and after.
    When they entered the ward, Margaret noted the silence. It