He gives me a sharp look. “Listen, I’ll call your brothers and sisters for you. And the girls should know.”
I shake my head. “No phone calls. There’s no point in the entire family sitting beside us with nothing to do.”
I look at the young father reading to his daughter on the other side of the room. The little girl looks to be about six years old. She has pale hair tied up with a pink ribbon. I used to tie different-colored ribbons in my girls’ hair when they were small. Blue for Lila, pink for Gracie. “She’s all alone,” I say, “and I don’t even think she realizes what that means.”
“Your mother’s not alone, Kelly.”
“Not my mother.” I shake my head again. “Gracie. Gracie is all alone. She’s doing this alone.”
Louis leans forward and rests his elbows on his knees. His barrel chest and long legs seem to overwhelm the chair and all the space around it. His voice is tight. “Let’s not talk about that here, okay? There’s enough going on at the moment. Are you hungry or thirsty? I could run down to the cafeteria. What would you like?”
I mouth the word nothing, and hope that Louis will move his eyes away from my face.
“Mr. and Mrs. Leary?” A young man in blue scrubs is in front of us.
We both stand like obedient students who have been called on in class.
“Your mother broke her hip, and she bruised a few ribs. You can see her, but I gave her something for the pain, so she’s groggy. She needs an operation to repair the break. Two other doctors checked her and agreed it was required. I’ll schedule the surgery for tomorrow morning—the sooner the better.”
“Surgery,” Louis says.
“That can’t be necessary,” I say.
“It is necessary,” the doctor says. “In over ninety percent of fractured-hip cases, surgery is the only possible course of action. Your mother isn’t one of the lucky exceptions.”
We are walking now, following the doctor down the hall. I am thinking that he looks awfully young with his smooth face and blond hair. Perhaps he is too young to understand the difficulties of someone as old as my mother. Perhaps he is mistaken.
He says, “We’ve already moved her to a room. There was no reason to keep her in emergency. She’s stable. And you’re in luck, because one of our best surgeons will be working on her tomorrow morning.”
Why does he keep mentioning luck? Do we need luck?
The doctor is walking in front of Louis and me, and he suddenly turns his head and looks into our faces. “My name is Doug Miller, by the way. I know we’ve never met, but I’m friends with your daughters.”
He gives us such a wide smile that I feel compelled to smile back. I notice Louis does as well. “You must know Lila from medical school,” Louis says politely.
“Yes. And I dated Gracie a few years ago.”
“I thought your name sounded familiar,” I say, although I know I’ve never heard his name before.
Doug Miller keeps up his big smile as if this is some kind of reunion. As if Louis and I had the faintest idea five minutes ago that this man existed, much less that he is one more in what seems to be a long line of men Gracie has been close to. As if we’re not standing together in a hospital to talk about the fact that my mother needs to be cut open.
As the three big smiles finally fade, a space spreads through the gray linoleum hallway. Space between us and the doctor, space between me and Louis, space between where we stand and the last door on the hallway, behind which my mother lies with tubes and machines attached to her. The distance seems insurmountable.
“They put these tubes in me without asking,” my mother says when I enter the room alone. “Please tell them I don’t like pain medication, Theresa.”
“It’s Kelly, Mom.”
“So Theresa couldn’t be bothered to come.” She tosses her head like a petulant child.
“Theresa doesn’t even know you’re in the hospital yet.”
“You can’t do everything yourself, Kelly.” The fog seems to lift from my mother’s blue eyes for a moment. She is tiny in the hospital bed, lost in the yellow sheets. They have her propped at a funny angle on her side, I assume to take pressure off her hip. I was worried when I walked in that she would look broken, but she does not. Any damage