Page 181 - Sweet Embraceable You: Coffee-House Stories

Silent Mothers, Silent Sons 169

every last penny. You and that Megs can go to hell. You don’t know
what I know. Megs either.”
Against her soul, Nanny Pearl cried that she hated Nora as
much as Honora. She hated them all. They preyed upon her. What
hadn’t been taken by life they schemed to take away. She had lied
to Johnny: she couldn’t forgive any of them. She couldn’t go. She
couldn’t stay. She couldn’t die. She had stayed too long at the Fair.
She should never have come back again to St. Louis. She should
never have gone anywhere on someone else’s terms into someone
else’s house. No matter what any of them said, she was a guest, a
paying one at that, who was staying too long, long enough for Nora
to add insult to injury.
She had even managed a small smile, apologetic, and broken-
hearted, when Nora told her in no uncertain terms that she always
left the bathroom untidy, that, in fact, she who had been pristinely
clean and proud of her appearance all her life, was herself dirty.
Nora won.
She had cut her like a knife stabbed precisely into the last vestige
of her personal pride.
“Perhaps it’s true,” Nanny said.
“I can’t take care of you, mother, not like that. I can’t wash
you and feed you.”
Silently, Nanny vowed never to eat another bite in Nora’s
house again.
“I bathed and fed five of my own kids. I’m sixty years old
myself.”
“You’re sixty-two,” Nanny said.
It was only days from that remark to the Northern Pacific
Railroad Hospital, and then weeks to St. Michael’s Garden Floor
Nursing Home.
“Bill and I,” Nora said, “truly want you very much back at
home again with us.”
“Then get me out of St. Michael’s,” Nanny pleaded. “Get me
out now.”

©Jack Fritscher, Ph.D., All Rights Reserved
HOW TO LEGALLY QUOTE FROM THIS BOOK