After the call Connie’s kids assembled in and around her hot room at Mercy General. Eric and Samuel played gin in the adjacent lounge. Sylvia, the youngest, paced and smoked in the garden. It was 10 AM.
At noon a tugboat hauled a barge filled with scrap iron across her window. Gulls wheeled and dove above the sill followed by sirens and smoke. Bernie, the eldest, sipped from his flask of scotch in the men’s room. A nurse appeared at 2 PM.
In Toulouse, city of her youth, couples have gathered for the moondance. It’s spring and lust is in the air. If she could remember there might be Franz or Jacques with his whips and bridle waiting for the rain to stop. The morphine took hold quickly.
She’d married Frank on a breezy November day in Ashville, North Carolina. Thomas Wolf’s mom ran her boardinghouse just down the block. She stabbed her two-timing husband on their thirtieth wedding anniversary. Divorced and moved to Richmond.
On the train to Yellowstone Park she took up with a soldier from Reno, after him, Stuart the gambler and Hank the Apache mechanic. She’s been living in Roanoke for the past ten years. The neighbors complain.
At 6PM the nurse delivered dinner. She cannot possibly eat. Martha and Bernie are drunk and asleep in the only easy chairs. A Peregrine was spotted perched on the steeple of Saint Jerome’s across the channel. The rain has stopped.
Two cops appeared with Stanley in handcuffs. He’d asked to visit mother one last time. Since Frank’s death they’d rarely shared a civil word.
She was only seventy and until last week was thought to be in radiant health. Her falling seemed eerily suspicious. Arthur suggested foul play. Doctor Evans said diabetes.
Father Paul stood beside the bed and fiddled with his beads. At 11PM she coughed once and stopped breathing.
There would be a reading of the will and a wake on Tuesday.
