Read Online The Art of Mending by Elizabeth Berg - Free Book Online Page A

why did you ask?”
    “I just wanted to hear you say it again. Warms my heart. Brings back a lot of happy memories.”
    My mother came into the room and nodded to us. She looked exhausted: face wan, lines pronounced. Her hair had not been combed; it was in the same messy twist that it was this morning. I stared at her in some removed kind of fascination: I was trying to remember if I’d ever seen her go outside the house this way. As though she was aware of my thoughts, she reached up to push back the sides of her hair, to tighten her pearl studs. “I must look a fright. I left the house without doing anything.”
    “I doubt they’ll take points off for your appearance, Mom,” Caroline said.
    “My appearance matters to me.”
    “Well, I guess we all know that.”
    “Stop, Caroline!” I exploded.
    “Never mind,” my mother said. “We’re all a little edgy, that’s all.”
    “I’m going in to see him.” I walked down the short hall to the intensive care unit. Inside, the lights were low. Two nurses sat at the desk, working at computers. One looked up and smiled at me, and I said I was there to see my father.
    “His name?”
    “Oh,” I said. “Right. Stan Meyer.”
    “Mr. Meyer is right here,” the nurse said, and opened the door to one of the small rooms. My father was dozing, snoring lightly. I sat quietly in the chair beside his bed and looked around at all the equipment, most of which I’d only seen on television. Three moving lines of glowing green ran across a small monitor screen. There was an IV dripping into my father’s arm, a bruised area around the place where the needle was inserted. I could see one of the electrodes on his chest; they’d shaved the hair off around it. On his thick wrist was a plastic name band, and for some reason the sight of this really bothered me. He could be anyone in a hospital. Therefore, anything could happen to him. I thought of a friend who’d lost her father recently, how she sat in the chair beside his unconscious form and told him she forgave him everything and that she hoped he forgave her too. How, moments after that, she’d watched him die.
    I changed my position in my chair, cleared my throat. Then, “Dad?” I whispered.
    His eyelids fluttered, then opened. He stared at me, blinked. “Oh, hi, Laura. I was dreaming. I was home, outside, painting the fence.” He smiled. “Isn’t this is a kicker? That’s the last time I’ll have those jalepeños.”
    “What happened, Dad?”
    “Well, it’s the damnedest thing. I ate a few last night, and then a few hours later I woke up and I was so dizzy. Then this morning, my arm went numb—your mother says I was lying on it. But I got all dizzy again too, and kind of scared, I must admit, so I called nine-one-one and they sent an ambulance. Anyway, the doc told me the good news, which is that it doesn’t look like it’s my heart. Might be what they call a TIA, a ministroke, but I can come back next week and get checked out for that.”
    His speech was a bit slurred, his mouth dry. I felt sorry for him, lying there with a half-full urinal hanging off the bedside rail—he was normally a very fastidious man. Then it came to me how lucky I was, to be feeling sorry for him because he was in a hospital bed and not walking the fairgrounds with us. He was fine; he’d go home tomorrow. So many others had been faced with so much tragedy—our family had been remarkably lucky.
    “You know,” I said, “you’re messing up our amazing track record.”
    “What do you mean?”
    “Nobody’s ever been hospitalized in our family except for childbirth.”
    He nodded slowly, then said, “Well, that’s not exactly true.”
    “Really?”
    “It was . . . something happened a long time ago that I never told you kids about. I wasn’t sure I should. But I was lying here after I first came in, and I thought, My God, this could be it. I could never make it out of here. And all of a sudden . . . well, I just wanted to say