broke his front tooth. The only question would be why. “Billy said Mom was a vegetable.”
It seemed to take Daddy a long time to answer. “We’ve talked and talked about this, Bret. Your mom is in a coma. She’s sleeping. If you’d come down and see her—”
“I don’t wanna see her!”
“I know.” Dad sighed. “Well, come on, sport, let’s go. They might need this bench for kids with serious injuries.” He helped Bret into his puffy winter coat, then lifted him up. Bret hung on, burying his face in the warm crook of his dad’s neck, as they headed out of the school and into the softly falling snow. At the car, Dad let Bret slide down to the icy sidewalk.
He stood next to the car, waiting for his daddy to get the car unlocked. His hands were cold, so he reached into his pockets for his gloves—but they weren’t there.
It was Mommy who used to tuck mittens in Bret’s pockets Just In Case, and now they were empty.
Dad got in his side of the car, then shoved the passenger door open, and Bret got inside. When the engine turned over, the radio came on. It was playing the first Christmas song of the season, “Silent Night.”
Dad clicked the radio off, fast.
Snow pattered against the windshield, blurring the outside world. The windshield wipers came on and made two big humps through the snow. Bret stared at them—anything was better than looking at his dad right now. Ka-thump. Ka-thump. Ka-thump. The wipers moved right and left, right and left, making exactly the same sound as a heart beating.
Dad put the car in gear and drove slowly out of the school parking lot. He turned on Glacier Way, then again on Main Street, then again on Cascade Avenue. In silence they drove past the empty parking lot of the Bean There, Done That coffee shop, past the empty front window of the Sunny & Shear Beauty Salon, and past the crowded entrance to Zeke’s Feed and Seed.
“I’ll bet old Zeke is busier than a one-armed paper hanger right now,” Dad said.
It was one of his dad’s favorite expressions. No one could ever just be busy. They had to be busier than a one-armed paper hanger. Whatever that was. “Yep,” Bret said.
“Lots of folks’ll be caught by surprise with this weather. It’s early for snow.”
For the next few miles, Dad didn’t say a thing. As they edged out of town, the paved road turned into snow-covered gravel, and there weren’t any other tracks at all. Dad put the Explorer in four-wheel drive and lowered his speed.
Bret wished Daddy hadn’t mentioned visiting Mommy. Just the thought made Bret feel sick. Usually he pretended that she was out of town, at a horse show in Canada.
He hated it when he was reminded that she was in the hospital. It was bad enough that he remembered THE DAY. He squeezed his eyes shut, but the memories came anyway, the ones he hated, the ones that lived curled in the wheels of his Corvette bed and came at him every night as soon as Daddy turned off the lights and shut the door.
Wait, Mommy. The jump is in the wrong place. Someone musta moved it …
Bret turned to look at Dad. “Do you swear Mom’s gonna wake up?”
Dad didn’t answer right away. When he finally did, it was in a quiet voice. “I can’t swear she’ll be fine, son. I can’t even swear that she’ll wake up. But I believe it with all my heart and soul, and she needs you to believe it, too.”
“I believe it.”
He said it too fast; his daddy knew he was lying.
After that, Bret leaned his head against the window and closed his eyes. He didn’t want to see his mom lying in that hospital bed. He liked it better when he pretended she was still alive. Sometimes he could close his eyes and imagine her standing beside his bed, with her hair short and spiky around her face and her arms crossed. She’d be smiling at him, and she looked like she used to—no bruises or cuts at all. And she always said the same thing: How’s my favorite boy in the whole world?
But it was just a silly old dream, and it didn’t mean a thing. Bret might be little, and maybe sometimes he didn’t know what to do with the remainder at the end of a long-division problem, but he wasn’t stupid. He knew that fairy tales and cartoons