The Mommy Miracle Read Free Page B

hadn’t heard his footsteps on the carpet, but now there was that sense of quiet.
    Sleepy quiet.
    In the kitchen, making coffee and cutting cake, Elin said, in a voice that wasn’t nearly as soft as she thought, “I don’t think she was ready for this many people so soon.”
    â€œIt’s just family,” answered Lisa.
    â€œIt’s a big family,” Maddy pointed out.
    â€œMom wanted a celebration for her coming home.” Lisa again.
    â€œWe should have waited a week or two for that.” Elin.
    â€œBut by then…” Maddy.
    â€œI know. I know.” Elin sighed.
    Jodie shut all of it out, the way she’d learned to shut out the noise and the interruptions in the hospital and rehab unit, and drifted into sleep. When she woke up again, her sisters were still in the kitchen.
    No, she amended to herself, in the kitchen again .
    They were cleaning up this time, and the way they were talking made it clear that most people had gone,including Maddy, Lucy and John. She must have slept for a couple of hours, and the house had grown hotter with windows and deck doors open. Was Dev still here? She could hear the vigorous, metallic sound of Dad cleaning off the barbecue out on the deck, and Elin and Chris’s kids still playing in the yard, but no Dev.
    She felt refreshed but stiff-limbed. Here was the walking frame within reach, just as Dev had promised. She twisted to a sitting position, inched forward on the couch and pulled herself up, automatically comparing her strength to yesterday, and a week ago, and a week before that.
    Better.
    I’m getting better.
    Her therapists had told her it would come with work and so far today she hadn’t done any work, just a few range of motion exercises for her hands and arms this morning.
    Time for a walk.
    She called out to her sisters in the kitchen, to tell them what she was doing, and Elin appeared. “You’re sure?”
    â€œI’m supposed to, now, as much as I feel like. I’ll only go around the block.”
    â€œNeed company?”
    â€œNo!” It came out a little more sharply than she’d intended.
    The Not Ready stuff drove her crazy. It had been driving her crazy for years.
    Not ready to go for a walk on her own, in her own street, at three-thirty in the afternoon on the Fourth of July? Come on!
    She’d once said to her three big sisters, long ago, “I’m littler ’n you now, but watch out ’cause I’m gettingbigger!” and somehow she was still insisting on that message, twenty-something years later, even though, thanks to a serious childhood illness at the age of five that had apparently scared the pants off of the entire family permanently, she never had caught up to them size-wise and was the smallest and shortest at size 4 and five foot three. But she didn’t need the level of protectiveness they and her mother gave her. Why couldn’t they see it?
    Dad seemed to have an inkling, but he rarely interfered. She remembered just a handful of times. “Let her have horse-riding lessons, Barbara, for heck’s sake!” he’d said to Mom when Jodie was seven. “It’ll make her stronger.” And then ten years later, “If she wants to work with horses as a career, then she should. She should follow her heart.”
    â€œNo, thanks,” she repeated to Elin more gently, because anger wasn’t the way to go. “Send out a search party if I’m not back in forty-five minutes or so, okay? And I have my phone. You think anyone in Leighville is going to look the other way if they find someone collapsed on the sidewalk in front of their house?”
    â€œYou sure?”
    â€œI’m sure, Elin. You can help me down the front steps, is all.”
    It felt so good, once Elin had gone back inside. To be on her own, but not alone in a hospital rehab bed. To be out in the warm, fresh day, with no one watching over her, or telling her,