Read Online Trinity by Kristin Dearborn - Free Book Online Page B

life. The CDs in the visor seemed like a museum exhibit, untouched for so long. The truck, with its sparse layer of trash on the floor, felt like a time capsule. Coke had changed its bottle design at least once since the plastic bottle in the cup holder.
    He turned his music up, an early Suicide Machines album, and it pumped through speakers worth more than the truck itself. Val cranked his window down so he could feel the cool, wet air on his face. Cleansing rain, good tunes, and his best girl…he could almost trick himself into thinking that things were looking up.

9

    With a clap of thunder, Val realized the hum was gone. He wasn’t sure when it left him, but everything in his mind felt sharper, clean—as if the rain had scraped away the muffling fuzz. A stray patch of sun in the storm lit the Nassar Valley Hospice. Dark, wet pavement indicated he’d missed the rain here, but not by much. Val parked in visitor parking.
    He turned the truck off and sat with his fingers on the keys. He could leave. He could come tomorrow. What was one more day of putting things off? Ignoring the temptation, he pulled the keys from the ignition and stepped out into air that smelled like hot, wet asphalt and clean rain.
    He walked to the glass doors, taking as much time as he could. They’d told him his mother would be dead before he got out of jail, so he’d spent a great amount of time preparing himself in case he never saw her again. It didn’t happen, but his mother’s letters eventually stopped coming, replaced by updates written by Angelina Warder, a nurse at the hospice. Angelina was a pretty name, and he’d always pictured her to look like the actress.
    Still, he really didn’t want to go in there.
    Feeling the sun on him, he stopped walking and acknowledged that he could head back to the truck and go. His mother, in and out of consciousness, would never know.
    The sun looked both sickly and bright in contrast to the dark storm clouds surrounding it. The hospice was named for the valley it overlooked; the land below was dark with rain.
    Apparently they wanted you to have a nice view as you died.
    So much goddamn brown. Val, though born here, spent most of his formative years in leafy green Massachusetts, and a slight longing for all that foliage and the ocean pawed at him. Anything, though, was better than the institutional gray he’d faced for the past few years.
    He crossed the threshold into the air-conditioned hospice. As the doors slid shut behind him, goosebumps covered his skin in the cool air and he paused to look out a huge picture window overlooking Nassar Valley.
    “I’m here to see Caroline Slade.” He pulled off his hat and ran his hand through his hair in a final attempt to make it stand down.
    The receptionist clacked on her keyboard and slid a clipboard across the desk to him. “Sign in here, please.”
    “Room 127,” she said, looking back to her monitor.
    So no one would be going with him? He had to go and face this alone? He didn’t know what to expect. Stomach cancer, he knew, but that was about it. Could she talk? Would she know him? The prognosis had been so bad for so long, he sometimes wondered if this was all some manner of psychological prison abuse. Angelina, in her letters, suggested Caroline was waiting for Val.
    The receptionist looked back up at him. “Yes?”
    “How is she?” he asked. “Is Ms. Warder here?” Nurse Warder? Miss? Mrs.?
    The girl clacked on some more keys. “Angelina will be in at five.”
    Val looked at the clock on the wall. Four-forty.
    She looked at his name on the sign in sheet. “Are you her son?”
    He nodded. That’s me, the son who’s never been able to visit his dying mother because he got busted for banging his underage girlfriend. He felt a dark cloud of guilt.
    “Sir?”
    “Sorry, what?”
    The receptionist had been speaking.
    “Why don’t you go ahead and I’ll send Angelina down as soon as she gets here.”
    “Thanks,” Val mumbled, and