Read Online A Permanent Member of the Family by Russell Banks - Free Book Online

with me.” She had a flattened South Shore accent. She looked directly at his eyes, but not into them, as if she had met him once long ago and was trying to remember where. “I’m sorry you had to walk all the way up here from the car,” she said. “I wasn’t sure it was you, or I’d have come down.”
    â€œThat’s okay. I needed the exercise.”
    She made a tight-lipped smile. “Because of the surgery, yes. Are you all right? I mean . . .”
    â€œYes, I’m fine,” he said, cutting her off. “Listen, this is kind of uncomfortable for me. But I did want to be able to tell you how grateful I am for what you did. I don’t know why you wanted to meet me, but that’s why I wanted to meet you. To tell you . . . to thank you.”
    â€œYou don’t have to thank me. It’s what Steve, my husband, it’s what he would have wanted.”
    â€œYeah, well, I guess I should thank him, too.” He paused for a moment. “He must’ve been a good guy. Thoughtful. Right?”
    She drew her bag in front of her, as if about to open it. “Yes. I have a favor I’d like to ask you,” she said. “May I?”
    â€œYeah, sure. Why not?”
    â€œI want to listen to your heart. Steve’s heart.”
    â€œJesus! Listen to my heart? That’s . . . I mean, isn’t that a little . . . weird?”
    â€œIt would mean a lot to me. More than you can know. Please. Just once, just this one time.” She opened the bag and withdrew a black and silver stethoscope and extended it, as if it were an offering.
    â€œI don’t know. It feels a little creepy to me. You can understand that, can’t you?” Howard looked down the hill toward the car. He didn’t want Betty to see this. He didn’t want anyone to see this. A few yards beyond the parking lot the narrow road followed the rock-strewn shore. A thickening bank of clouds had blotted out the sun, and an offshore wind had raised a chop in the blue-gray water.
    â€œPlease,” she said in a low voice. “Please let me do this.” She pushed back her hood and laid the curved, rubber-tipped ends of the stethoscope over her shoulders and around her neck.
    Howard said nothing. He merely nodded, and she placed the tips into her ears and stepped toward him.
    â€œWill you undo your shirt?”
    He pulled his flannel shirt loose of his trousers and unbuttoned it all the way down. Why the hell am I letting her do this? I could just refuse and walk away, he thought. “What about my T-shirt?” he asked. “Want me to lift it up?”
    â€œNo,” she said firmly. “I don’t want to see it.”
    The chest piece at the end of the stethoscope was the size and shape of a small biscuit, and swiftly, as if she’d rehearsed, the young woman placed it directly over the incision in Howard’s chest. Then she closed her eyes and listened. Tears ran down her cheeks. Howard put his arms around her shoulders and drew her closer to him and felt himself shudder and knew that he was weeping, too. Several moments passed, and then the woman removed the tips of the stethoscope from her ears and pressed the left side of her head against Howard’s chest. They stood together for a long time, buffeted by the wind off the harbor, holding each other, listening to Howard’s heart.
    A light rain had started falling. In the parking lot below, Betty walked around the front of the van, checked her watch, and gazed up at the couple. After a few seconds, she walked back to the driver’s side, got into the vehicle and continued to wait.

SNOWBIRDS
    Finally, after years of weighing her pros against his cons, Isabel and George Pelham agreed to shut down their home in the upstate hamlet of Keene, New York, and spend the five winter months together in a rented condominium in Miami Beach. The condo was a two-bedroom sparsely furnished