Chapter 16: Mom's Couch

"Then don't," I said.

Mom looked up from her keys.

"Don't go home. Come to mine."

"Honey, your flat has one bathroom."

"It has a couch, a floor and Gemma. That's more than Doug's got."

She laughed, and it turned into something else, and she put her face in her hands in the middle of the surgical waiting room.

I held her until she stopped.

Then I went back to recovery and found Tate sitting up in a bed with his arm strapped to a foam pillow, glaring at a cup of ice chips.

"There's no pin," he said.

"There's no pin."

"I asked." He squinted past me. "Is that your mom?"

Mom waved from the curtain.

Tate looked at her for a long, drugged second.

"Hi, Mom," he said, and his eyes filled, and he blamed the anesthesia for a week.

By Saturday night there were seven of us in a two-bedroom flat in Bay View.

Mom drove home while Doug was at the arena and came back with the twins, two sleeping bags, one suitcase and a laundry basket full of cereal.

"Is this a sleepover?" my brother asked on the stairs.

"It's a week," Mom said.

"A week of sleepover?"

"A week of sleepover."

Mom took my bed.

Gemma and I shared hers, which meant I slept on eleven inches of mattress with her elbow in my kidney.

Tate got the couch, because a repaired shoulder sleeps sitting up and our couch was the only thing in the flat that could hold him.

The twins slept in their sleeping bags on the floor on either side of it.

He was miserable.

He couldn't shower without help. He couldn't cut his own pancakes. He couldn't put on socks.

"I'm thirty-one years old," he said on Sunday, while my sister put a sock on his foot.

"Thirty-one and a half," she said. "Hold still."

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