Chapter 20: After Everything

The family room opened onto the main waiting area, and my mother walked straight through the door into it.

She was fifty-eight, with her honey-brown bob gone silver, and she still had her phone in one hand.

The pill bottles were in her other.

Forty people sat in the plastic chairs, and every one of them had nothing to do but watch.

"Ingrid," she said. "Is he alive?"

"He's in the cath lab. The cardiologist on tonight is the best in this building."

"Thank God."

"He signed, Mom. Faye got him to sign."

"Faye." She wiped her face with her wrist. "Of course. Faye."

I stood a few feet from her with my hands in my coat pockets.

I did not step closer, and she did not ask me to.

"I've been coming here for eleven months," she said. "Every Thursday. I sit in that lobby for an hour and they tell me it's the list, and I go home."

"I know."

"Eleven years, Ingrid. I wrote you more than a hundred letters."

"I know that too."

"After everything we did for you."

She said it in a thin shaky voice, and several heads in the waiting area turned.

A man near the triage desk lowered his phone.

It was the man with the splinter.

I had expected to feel the old pull when she said it, the one that turns a person into a daughter before she can think.

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