Read Online On the Right Side of a Dream by Sheila Williams - Free Book Online

leaving out most of the bad stuff she’d done. But she’d had Inez smuggle in Turkish cigarettes and the fixings for her favorite drink, the Bourbon Old-Fashioned, so that when her surgeon made his two-week postsurgical visit and found his patient puffing away and sipping on a cocktail, well, you can just imagine. Millie said that his eyes bulged and his ears flapped out as if they were going to turn into wings and take off—without his head!
    “I think the man had an apoplectic fit,” Millie wrote me. “He told me that I shouldn’t mix the alcohol with my medications. I informed him that I
wasn’t
mixing them since I took the pills well before cocktail hour.”
    She graciously accepted her expulsion and went home, promising, with her fingers crossed behind her back, to behave herself and suspend her cocktail hours until she was completely off the heavy-duty Tylenol.
    Besides deciphering Millie’s letters like an archaeologist trying to read Egyptian hieroglyphics for the first time, I got to hear about it all from Jess, Inez, and Barb, the nurse who was taking care of Millie. Millie was not the kind of woman to lie around the house and get well eventually. She wanted everything to happen right now. She’d threatened poor Dr. Novak with malpractice if he didn’t have her up and salsa dancing by Easter because she and the Doc had “plans.” They were off to Palm Springs for Valentine’s Day and she had already bought her ticket and didn’t want the money to go to waste. But the going was slow: a wheelchair, a walker, and, then, a cane. She had to sit down a certain way and sleep only on her side. She limped and, worse than anything, I think, she couldn’t wear the high heels or the filmy nylons that she loved. They had been replaced by low-heeled, sensible block-looking clodhoppers and thick, milky-looking white support hose. Millie was mortified. “Ugliest damn things you ever saw!” She was hobbling back to life and, even though we didn’t say it aloud, she hoped, as we all did, that she’d hobble fast enough to outrun the things that could hurt her.
    Maybe Millie saw it coming.
    “Juanita,” she’d written in a handwriting that had lots of bows, whooshes, and exclamation marks, “old age can’t catch you if you keep moving. I see him peeking around my door. I have to get rid of this cane!”
    But sometimes, it’s the little things that get you. Little things like germs. It was cold and flu season and Paper Moon was hit as bad as anyplace else. Sedona got it, too; not even the crystals could protect us. Folks passed it around like a handshake after church. It was a sticky little sucker and some people got it twice. It was so bad that it took on a life of its own. Jess, who never gets sick, came down with it and coughed for nearly a month. He referred to it with a sneer as “the Cold.”
    “The Tilsons are as strong as oxen even though we don’t look like it,” Millie had bragged to me once. “We survived ice storms in Minnesota and drought on the eastern plains of Montana. It takes a lot to take out a Tilson.”
    No, it only took one little germ.
    “The Cold” came back like a bad check. It brought a lot of nasty stuff with it. Millie started coughing and the cough moved southward into her chest. The antibiotics made her sick and then she got a temperature. She had to go back to bed and got too weak to use her cane or even the walker anymore. Her temperature kept spiking, one hundred, one hundred and three, and then back to one hundred. Millie tossed, turned, and sang. She spoke to people who weren’t there. Asim, the Siamese cat, kept watch.
    Finally, after two weeks of touch and go, Barb felt comfortable enough to let her patient sleep alone in the room. Millie’s temperature had broken and she wasn’t coughing as much. For the first time in a few days, Millie wasn’t delirious.
    “Barbara, you’ve been a good girl,” Millie had told her. “You go and grab a nap. I am not going