The Glass Factory Read Free

amusement of tots that Antonia adjusts to another two hours’ worth of waiting a lot better than I do. I’m thinking, three months since I’ve had a decent job and all my pay goes to day care. I might as well be back in Ecuador. I mean, I’ve been thinking about heading back sometime ever since I came here more than a dozen years ago. I’d have a hard time surviving there, too, but at least I’d be with family. Warmth, love: These are good things. Tonia would love it, and besides, I think I’ve been away long enough to put up with the pain of trying to patch up and reorder the mess I left behind nearly half a lifetime ago. It can’t be worse than this.
    By the time someone comes to see me and I see that he’s a first-year intern I’m too deep-fried into submission to ask for someone with more experience. I tell him the whole story: Heavy ex-smoker, ex-beat cop breathing in truck exhaust for five years, but the kicker is the time a man named Morse tried to kill me by locking me in a room with enough methyl isocyanate to take out a city of a hundred thousand.
    He looks at me like that’s only the third weirdest thing he’s heard today. I told you this was a tough neighborhood. He decides to take a peek down my throat, makes me cough, then signs me up for an X-ray. There’s only a three-hour wait. If drama is real life with the dull parts cut out, then this must be where they send all the dull parts they don’t use; so let’s just say it’s almost midnight when the intern comes back and tells me that the lung damage I suffered in an attempt on my life years before has developed into cancer, and that when it spreads to the rest of my body, I will die.
    I know it’s a cliché, but I’m under a lot of pressure here: I ask him how much time I’ve got.
    He says, “Not much. Three to four months.”
    “Whaaaaat?”
    “Maybe six to eight.”
    I guess I go a little nuts. I grab the X-ray. It’s got my name on it, all right. Shit.
    No.
    “No, wait,” I begin to say, and he cuts me off.
    “Look, pictures don’t lie. I got twenty-seven more people waiting.”
    No.

    I feel it. Burning in my chest. Hot, deep in the heart of me, eating its way out.
    Of me …
    DAMMIT! NO! NO! NO!
    “Mommy?”
    NO!
    “Mommy?”
    NO!
    “Mommy! Mommy! Mommy!”
    So that’s it. Sickness. Loneliness. Death. Only good deeds will get you through it, or so they tell me. And then, gaseous expansion and decomposition. I shudder. A cold shudder. Not one of those nice ones like your lover’s caress, partway between a tickle and a shiver. Not like that. A real nasty one.
    “Mommy?”
    “Yes, gorgeous?”
    And yet there is continuing. My child, long and lanky, full of energy, full of life, full of questions, with her dark canela coloring, kinky raven hair and headstrong disposition. I’d better make sure Antonia doesn’t get left with nothing, that there’s something for her … not to follow—I mean, why should she follow me or anyone else’s flawed example? But something … to guide her on … I shake my head. I don’t know.… This isn’t happening.
    I hug her to me.

    I pick up the phone and dial Van Snyder. He’s not at the precinct house but they give me his beeper number without the usual sniggers. Maybe it’s something in my voice.
    I’m really glad when the phone rings. I’d open my soul to a direct mail solicitor right now.
    It’s Van. I tell him I want a warrant issued for Samuel Morse’s arrest.
    “Great! What’s the charge?”
    “Murder One.”
    “That was fast. Who’s he killed?”
    “Me.”
    “Fil, I’m on a short break, here—”
    “I know you’ve got a stack of violations on him that are stickier than the floor of a porno theatre.”
    “Oh, those. It’ll take years to bring charges.”
    “I don’t have years.”
    “Huh?”
    “Well, maybe. I’m getting a second opinion.”
    “Fil … What’s wrong now?”
    I tell him pretty much everything. For some reason I’ve always been that way with