Read Online Lay It on My Heart by Angela Pneuman - Free Book Online Page B

hospital, she enlists me again to take my mind off the situation. Mrs. James has her own part-time job in the county clerk’s office every morning. Sometimes, like this week, she says she’s too pooped by the time afternoon rolls around to go through boxes dredging up the past. So she makes iced tea, and we sit on the couch in the air-conditioning and watch back-to-back reruns of
I Love Lucy
and
Batman
. My father says that television hijacks the mind, filling it with something other than God. We’ve never even had a set. But as long as the TV’s running at the James’s house, I don’t feel bad about anything. Right up until Lucy does the dance with Ricky and all the eggs break in her shirt, and I start laughing so hard I can’t stop, and then there’s a bad moment, and a bad sound, a croak, and it’s coming from me. It’s the sound of laughing switching to crying so fast that my face and neck are wet with tears before Mrs. James realizes what’s happening.
    She sits with me and pats my back. She calls me “sweet patootie.” She tells me when they made my father they threw away the mold, which is just how some folks are, and that he’s going to be fine. She tells me chemical burns are better than fire burns because your insides don’t heat up. She gets out her notary-public stamp and lets me notarize a bunch of junk mail envelopes, squeezing hard until the paper takes the impression. It actually does make me feel a tiny bit better for some reason.
    Each night, Phoebe brings home brief reports before falling into bed. Tuesday she says he’s alert but disoriented. They’re making sure nothing gets infected while his skin’s scabbing over. Wednesday he’s out of the woods enough, infection-wise, to tolerate a brain scan and to meet with a different kind of doctor, a psychiatrist.
    Thursday afternoon, Mrs. James feels a migraine coming on and needs absolute quiet. So I sit at my own kitchen table at home, Titus sprawled out beside me, trying to read a book the bookmobile lady thought I might like. It’s about a girl whose father is mysteriously away from home. Townspeople are speculating that he ran off with another woman, but her mother is trying to keep a stiff upper lip.
    â€œI hope you’ve done your Bible reading first,” Phoebe says when she comes back from the hospital. I’m supposed to read the Bible every day before anything else. Right now I’m making my slow way through Jeremiah, for the second time, and I tell her so. She pulls out the chair opposite me and nudges Titus off the table. She’s still smiling as politely as she has probably done all day, which makes her look strained, like something she’s wearing underneath her clothes—the same outfit she wore to the airport not even a week ago—is too tight.
    I wait for the rest of what she has to say, but then I see that she is waiting for me. When Phoebe is very upset, she switches from confiding in me, which forces me to listen, to keeping information to herself in a way that forces me to ask questions. Only she gives me the shortest answers possible, so I learn only as much as everything I can think of to ask.
    â€œWell?” She dips her chin in my direction.
    I open my mouth to speak, but I am afraid suddenly of sounding afraid out loud. I am afraid I will start crying again.
    â€œYour father won’t be home for a while,” Phoebe says, and waits again. “Why not?” she asks finally, for me. “What’s going to happen, Mother? Well, Charmaine, right now it’s anybody’s guess. He’s been moved to a smaller hospital, a facility, really, where your grandmother’s second cousin has found him a room. For long-term recovery. In the meantime, things are going to be a little different for you and me.”
    I know I should be asking why he can’t recover at home, which is what I don’t understand. But Phoebe is