Page 185 - Sweet Embraceable You: Coffee-House Stories

Silent Mothers, Silent Sons 173

The nurse stood bolt upright.
She spun the computer screen away from the counter.
Too late.
Megs, always the quick sister, had read the screen.
Her face, reddened by the excitement of her dangerous drive
through the snow, blanched whiter than white.
“I’m sorry,” the nurse said.
Blankness filled the space between the two women.
“Perhaps,” the nurse said, “you’d like to sit down. Perhaps some
coffee while I page Dr. Carrier.
“You fucking careless bitch,” Robert said.
“Sir, I’m sorry. I just came on duty.”
A second nurse, Nanny Pearl’s nurse that morning, ran apolo-
getically up to them. “We’re so sorry. I called your home myself.”
“You told my husband?” Megs said. “He’s so sick you could
have killed him.”
“He sounded very weak. We told him. He knows. He said,
‘Why Pearl? Why not me?’”
“Oh, Mom!” Megs said. “She didn’t know we were coming to
get her.”
“Your husband called the Highway Patrol to try and stop you
to tell you.”
“Oh, my poor Mom,” Megs cried. “She got out the only way
she knew how.”
“You people,” Robert, the Marine Sergeant, said, “are real
fuck-ups.”

*

Winter that December, 1972, in St. Louis was early and fiercely cold.
In Forest Park, snow capped the soft curves of what graceful build-
ings still stood from the 1904 World’s Fair. Small floes of ice clung
to the piers of the Eads Bridge. Automobile traffic across the span
was more choked than usual as the hearse, and the cars following
in cortege, their antennas flagged with mourning ribbons, headed

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