Read Online Eating Heaven by Jennie Shortridge - Free Book Online

Benny.
    “Mm . . . myello?”
    “Geez, Ben. You had me scared half to death,” I say, sounding angrier than I mean to. It’s the first time I’ve talked to him since last night at his house, so I soften my tone. “I’m sorry, I’ve just been worried. Are you okay?”
    “Bebe?”
    My heart rips inside my chest. “No, Ben, it’s me, Ellie.”
    “Yolie?”
    Jesus. That’s what he used to call Aunt Yolanda.
    “It’s Eleanor, Benny. El-uh-nor. What’s going on? Are you all right? Is there a nurse anywhere?”
    The phone clicks dead, so I dial the nurses’ station on his floor. There’s no answer.
    He’s been alone in there for nearly twenty-four hours.
    I pull on my wet boots and coat, find my keys and purse. I’m halfway down the stairs when I remember the crème caramel and run back up to turn off the oven. There goes my article, and Stefan’s appreciation of me as his best freelancer right along with it.
     
    I walk as quickly as I can to my car; it’s been buried in dirty slush and ice by a snowplow. “Oh, for God’s sake,” I mutter, digging my cell phone out of my purse to call a cab. At least the major streets are passable. The taxi takes forever to show up, during which time I realize I could have given them my address and been waiting in the comfort of my living room. Instead I pace and shiver on the corner and try not to imagine the worst.
    After a painfully slow ride with a chatty Somalian driver, I rush through the hospital to Benny’s room, only to find him sleeping as peacefully as a child, curled on his side, hands splayed expressively in front of him as if he fell asleep while telling a story.
    I settle into a chair near his bed and close my eyes.
     
    I was not quite twelve in the late-summer days just before Benny married Yolanda. Mom regained her composure and decided to throw them a party. “They have no family here,” she said by way of explanation to Dad, who always looked grim when she announced party plans, especially if her plans included Benny. If only he would have said no to her, but he’d grimace and make some comment like, “So Freddy the Freeloader’s invited?” She always got her way, though, as she did this time. “We’re their family now,” she stated in a way that sounded like she had just arrived at this decision for all of us, and that was that.
    It wasn’t true, of course. Yolanda had family by the carload in Northeast Portland, but we knew Mom was talking about Benny. He’d moved here years before from somewhere in the Midwest to be with his first wife, leaving behind a family he never talked about and never returned to after his wife died.
    We weren’t invited to the wedding—it was just to be a simple ceremony at the courthouse downtown, with Yolanda’s unhappy Catholic parents as secular witnesses—and Mom didn’t trust that they’d throwthemselves a decent party afterward. We’d heard rumors of cake and coffee at two in the afternoon.
    “What, no booze?” Dad said, getting on board with the idea. It must have hit him that Benny would soon no longer be single.
    In the week or so between her decision to have the party and the Friday night of the event, Mom threw together the swankiest backyard affair we’d ever seen. Twenty people were coming, she said, and I couldn’t imagine what our backyard would look like with so many people in it. She’d called the guys at the auto shop where Benny worked, told them to bring their wives, invited the photography-class couples and a neighbor of Benny’s she knew he liked. She told Benny to have Yolanda invite her parents.
    We helped Mom sew lace to the edges of white squares of cotton for tablecloths, arranged white roses in bud vases, set up the buffet tables and chairs she’d rented. “Why can’t they all just bring lawn chairs?” Dad asked, but Mom shut him down with one of her favorite lines: “That may be the way things are done out here, but where I come from we’ve got a little more class