I cringe at the name. Her handshake is surprisingly firm. “It’s a pleasure to meet you, and I’m sorry about your husband.”
“Oh, we’re just glad he’ll be fine. Grumpy for the next few weeks but okay otherwise,” she says with a smile that is a hundred percent Grace.
There’s no way they are not related. Such a coincidence is not possible. I offer to get some coffee and leave them talking.
I’m pretty familiar with the trauma bay, and I have immense respect for the doctors and nurses who work here. I once did as I’m doing now at the firehouse. I was researching the role of an ER doctor, and I shadowed a real ER doctor for two weeks. By the end of it, I was emotionally spent and wiped out from everything I had witnessed. At the end of it, though, I came out with an appreciation of the immense stress they face at work.
I take my time making my way to the hospital café on the second floor, grab three coffees from the machine, and head back to the ER. I hand Grace and her mother their coffees and sit down.
“It’s very kind of you to drive Grace all this way,” Mrs. Hughes says. “Thank you so much. It would have been an awfully long drive for her.”
“Don’t mention it, Mrs. Hughes,” I say.
“Please call me Nora,” she says.
We make chit-chat and finish coffee just in time for a man I assume is Nora’s dad is wheeled out of one of the inner examination rooms. He bears no resemblance to Grace, as I expected, which doesn’t explain why Grace is a younger version of her mother. I hate mysteries, and this one is grating at me. Worst of all, it’s not the kind of thing I would be comfortable asking Grace. We’re not close enough for such personal questions.
Grace introduces us, but I can tell he’s still in pain and understandably not in the mood to meet anyone. A hospital orderly wheels him to the car while another follows with a pair of crutches.
Getting him into the car is a process that leaves Grace’s dad angry and frustrated.
“I feel sorry for my parents,” Grace tells me in the car as we follow them home. “Dad is going to be a horrible patient.”
“Yeah, he’s probably angry and frustrated that he has to depend on other people. He’ll get used to it,” I tell her.
Chapter 7
Grace
“Have you ever broken your leg?” I ask Jack.
He doesn’t immediately answer, and when he does, the answer he gives doesn’t make sense, and I’m too tired emotionally to pursue it.
“Sort of.”
I’m distracted by our surroundings as we drive through my street. Most of my growing-up memories are centered around this one street. I see Tracy’s house as we drive by, and as I peer at the single-family home, her mother steps out of the house. I freeze and shrink in my chair, trying to make myself smaller. She looks straight into the car, but she doesn’t recognize me. The next house is Dora’s house. Their houses were next to each other and mine further down the street. We had made a threesome in all of our teenage years until we fell out when I was sixteen.
A whisper of pain comes over me when I remember the day that would remain etched in my memory forever. We had planned to meet that Saturday at Dora’s house. I’d been late as I’d been finishing a landscape I’d been doing for my mother’s birthday.
I entered Dora’s house the way I did my own without knocking and headed upstairs to her room. The two of them were glued to the computer, and they didn’t hear me enter. I stood behind them and peered at what they were reading on the screen.
I froze when the words started to make sense. I dropped my gaze to a sad-looking nine-year-old child underneath a bold headline splashed across the screen.
The Doomed Love Child.
A shrill scream filled the room. It took me a moment to realize that the scream was coming from me. I ran from the room. That was the end of our friendship. They tried to apologize, but I blanked them, and they came over less and less.
The car comes to a stop in front of my childhood home, bringing me back to the present with a jolt.
“I’ll go and help your dad get out of the car,” Jack says, getting out.
I follow him. He goes to the passenger side and quickly takes charge. He converts a process that would have been painful and embarrassing into a smooth procedure. He gently raises Dad’s feet and swings them off the floor of the car to the ground. In minutes, my dad is out of the car, and with Jack’s gentle guidance and help, he’s hobbling toward the front door, which my mother is holding open.