Little came in right after
lunch to talk to her father and to Jamie. He told them that her
father could go home the next day and urged her father to follow a
cardiac diet and take his medications.
“ Anything that’ll get me out
of here, doc,” her father said.
Her mother returned to the
hospital that afternoon and Jamie went back to the house. “There’s
some tuna casserole in the fridge,” her mother said. “It needs to
be eaten.”
Jamie headed for the refrigerator
as soon as she got back to the house. She found the tuna casserole
and put a heaping amount on a plate and microwaved it. It was
steaming when she got it out. She sat down at the kitchen table and
put the first bite in her mouth. So creamy. It was the taste of her
childhood. She was home again. She was loved and protected again.
For the second night in a row,
Jamie went upstairs to her childhood bedroom. She changed into her
gown and sat on the bed to call Nate. He must be worried about her
and she had been out of touch. He answered right away.
“ How’s your father?” he
asked.
“ He’s doing fine,” she
said. “It was a mild event. He’s getting out of the hospital
tomorrow.”
“ That’s a relief,” he said.
Jamie was touched that Nate would be so worried about her father, a
man he had never met and knew nothing about.
“ I’m going to stay here a few
days to make sure he’s okay,” she said.
“ Of course,” Nate said.
“ Have you told them about us?”
he asked.
“ Not yet. I haven’t had a
chance to, everything’s been so busy with the hospital and doctors
and stuff. I’m going to tell them when Dad gets back home and
things are more normal.”
“ That sounds like a good plan,”
Nate said. “I hope I get to meet them soon.”
“ I want you to meet them,”
Jamie said. “You need to meet them because I love them so much.
They’re so important to me.”
“ I’m glad to hear that,” he
said.
“ I haven’t been good to
them,” Jamie said. She started to cry.
“ I don’t believe that,”
Nate said.
Jamie was going to have to tell
Nate about everything. If she was going to marry him, then he
deserved to know the truth of her past. What had happened to Tommy.
How it had changed who she was.
“ When I get back, I’ll tell
you all about it,” Jamie said. “I miss you right now. I love you
so much.”
“ I love you too, Jamie.
Whatever it is you have to tell me, I’ll understand.”
Jamie went back to the hospital
the next morning around ten. Her father was out of the bed and
dressed to go home. Her mother was putting clothes in a plastic bag.
“ You ready to go home, Dad?”
Jamie said.
“ Been ready,” he said.
Jamie could see that her mother
was exhausted from spending two nights in the hospital in an
uncomfortable chair that supposedly made a bed. She would need to
take care of both of her parents when they got back home.
The nurse finally came in with
discharge instructions for her father. An attendant rolled in a
wheelchair, which her father said he didn’t need, but Jamie
convinced him to sit in anyway. She walked to the elevator with her
father while her mother got her car. When they got downstairs at the
back entrance of the hospital, her mother was waiting. The attendant
helped her father into the car.
“ I’ll see y’all back at the
house,” Jamie said.
When the three of them were
standing in the living room for the first time in a dozen years,
Jamie insisted her mother get some rest. She went into the master
bathroom and ran a bubble bath for her mother.
“ I’m going to take care of
you two for a while,” Jamie said. “I’ll get lunch and I’ll
make supper, too. Something Dad will like.”
Her father was sitting in his
recliner watching television when Jamie went back to the living room.
Jamie brought him a glass of iced tea, then checked the refrigerator
for lunch. She was going to have to get her father on a low carb, low
fat diet. He wasn’t going to like it.
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