Chapter 10: Her Mother

My mother had been taken to the emergency room at St. Mary's in Racine at two in the morning.

A neighbor had found her on the kitchen floor, awake and furious about it.

I was already pulling on my boots when I realized I couldn't feel my hands.

Perry stood up from the couch with the blanket still on his shoulders.

"I'll drive," he said.

"I can drive."

"You can't hold the keys," he said gently. "Let me."

I let him.

It was forty minutes down the lake in the dark, and he took every curve like someone carrying eggs.

He didn't say a single smart thing.

He didn't tell me it would be all right, or that he had read it somewhere, or that he knew.

He just kept one hand on the wheel and put the other palm up on the seat between us.

I held on to it the whole way.

"Did this happen before?" I asked once.

"No," Perry said. "Not in November. Not ever."

"So you don't know."

"I don't know," he said. "I'm sorry."

It was oddly the kindest thing he could have said.

My mother lay in a curtained bay with a cuff on her arm and a monitor above her head.

Carol Keller is sixty-one, five feet tall, with a crown of grey curls and a voice like a bell.

"You drove all the way down here for this?" she said as soon as I came in. "I told them not to call you."

"Mom."

"It's an irregular beat. The doctor said so. I'm not dying on a Tuesday."

"It's Wednesday."

"Then I'm not dying on a Wednesday either."

She noticed Perry in the doorway and her eyes narrowed with interest.

"Who's this?"

"This is Perry," I said. "He lives in my building."

"Does he," said my mother.

"He drove."

"Did he," said my mother, and gave him a long look that reached all the way down to his boots.

Perry stood very straight.

"Mrs. Keller," he said. "I'm sorry it's under these circumstances."

"Call me Carol. Is that a wiring diagram in your pocket?"

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