Read Online A Parallel Life by Robin Beeman - Free Book Online Page A

think I have some kind of flu. I just want to rest.”
    â€œYou have a home, you know. Why aren’t you there?”
    â€œI’m shivering, Mother. Let me stay here.”
    She stayed by the door keeping her distance from me. “I just put fresh sheets on my bed. Go on in there.”
    Her eyes had gone to my skirt. “You’re bleeding,” she said.
    I looked down and saw that there was a cut in the palm of my hand. Streaks of blood smeared across my skirt. “It’s just a little cut,” I said. “Broken glass.”
    I stayed in her bed sliding in and out of sleep. Perhaps I really did have a flu. From time to time outside of the door I heard voices. Bill came in and sat by me, and then a doctor, a friend he played tennis with, arrived to examine me. The girls whispered to me and left and came back with flowers they’d picked. My father came in and held my hand, which someone had bandaged. My mother was sitting beside me when I opened my eyes the next time. Then I slept.
    My mother had a cup of tea on a tray on the bedside table. I pulled myself up and let her arrange pillows so I could sit. Her face looked different. There was an odd lopsided smile now. A single lamp on the nightstand lit the room. Beyond the curtains, a street light created a false moon. I was a little girl again. I’d returned home after a long time. I could remember another life in between then and now but it seemed blurred like a scene glimpsed through the window of a racing train.
    â€œYour father and I are having lunch together tomorrow,” she said, bending over me with the tray.
    â€œOh, Mother,” I said. I must have wailed or moaned the words, because she stood up and gave me a disturbed,frightened look. “Mother, don’t get led into all of that stuff again. He’s not going to change. Don’t get your hopes up,” I said.
    She continued to stand there with the tray in her hand but her face relaxed, and the smile—lopsided and guileless, amazingly guileless—returned. “I know that. I’m not expecting miracles. It will just be nice to talk to him again after all these years. We’re not married anymore.”
    â€œAs long as you understand that,” I said. I let her place the tray on my lap. The tea was strong and bitter. There was a piece of toast too and I ate that with her standing beside the bed watching my every bite.
    â€œDo you want me to roll the television in here and we could watch together?” she asked when I’d finished.
    â€œNo. I think I’ll rest again.” I was as exhausted from eating as if I’d climbed a mountain. She left the door slightly open and I heard the sound of television voices and then the theme of the late news show and then voices again and finally the weather for the next day, then quiet. I must have slept again but I woke to the sound of my mother’s voice—chanting, rhythmic, rising, and falling—and I recognized the words. She was saying the rosary.
    â€œAre you still on the Sorrowful Mysteries?” I asked when she came in later.
    â€œYes,” she said, “but I see the possibility of moving on to the Joyful now.”
    â€œAnd from there to the Glorious?”
    â€œI don’t believe in rushing things,” she said and closed the door.
    My mother is a better person than I had believed. She has allowed my father to make peace with her. They’ve had lunch twice now, and although I know they will neverbe together again, they appear to have rediscovered something in the other that had been mislaid. Some kinds of change, it seems, are possible after all.
    On the morning I went back to work, I read the obituary for Roxanne Muller Duggan. She was forty-one years old. There would be no service. Donations could be made in her memory to the Walnut Grove Science Education Program.
    That same morning, I talked to Ben Michaelson and we agreed to exchange shifts so that he