Meme 2

I felt in my chest this sinking. Neal felt in his chest a slicing, a disemboweling, a resectioning. Rather, he felt nothing in his chest. He felt the anesthetist's well-timed stupor, and Maryann, sitting under the television in the first-floor waiting room of the Mary Brigh Building at Saint Mary's Hospital in Rochester, Minnesota, felt in her chest a cough coming on. A sobbing. Her son gurneyed off to some inner room far from this hot one, with sun dripping in through the long bank of windows opposite and seniors blanketed and busy with find-a-words, the obese fanning themselves and sipping orange sodas. Her son had a cancer in him they'd taken more than four hours now to take out. They'd told her only three.

She was sixty-one, the youngest of seventeen siblings, three of whom were adopted, the offspring of a fourth who got murdered by his wife.

"I was wondering," she said at a whisper. "Should Neal be taking vitamin D?" (Vitamin D had been prescribed to her husband to treat his eye cancer.) Later, Neal will recover in a shared room with a mask strapped to his face to replenish lost levels of oxygen in the blood. "I was wondering," Maryann says at an even quieter whisper, lips just an inch from the ear. "They're going to send him home with that oxygen." (The mask is a temporary thing. It's gone in two days.) Even later, in the hallway outside his room, she was wondering. "I don't like that skinhead nurse," she said. (He was the sort of man who preëmptively embalds himself, his head a glossy dome, his body clad in the same scrubs as the women he worked alongside.)

Maryann is usually wrong. The present tense is appropriate here because at any given moment Maryann is very likely wrong. Olive oil is not, in fact, an appropriate substitution for butter in a cookie recipe. Her niece's house nearby with at last count nine cats in residence is not, in fact, a good place for a man with a cat allergy to stay five nights. The Mayo Clinic does not, in fact, have a fiscal interest in keeping Neal in recovery longer than he needs to be. Her son's boyfriend is not, in fact, Jewish.

She is not, in fact, able to provide her son any care. She had, that long morning in the waiting room, one desire, and it was the desire she always had, and it was the desire to be a mother to her children. But her children are adults, now. They know better. They're only wrong sometimes.

Sometimes, to be fair, Maryann is right. She was right that the dinner she made much later of fried fish, pasta alfredo, and beets did not, in fact, go together well. She was right that the solution to her husband's trouble hearing the alarm clock go off in the mornings was to set the bedside lamp to a timer. She was right to stay herself in the house of cats, to make herself scarce when a nurse needed to draw blood, or when Neal wanted to shower. She was right to leave town early, to leave her son with the man he needed.

But that morning, the operation complicated by the tumor's placement near the duodenum, a family of dozens eager for news, Maryann forgot to leave her phone powered on, available for incoming calls:

You have reached the Sprint PCS Voice Messaging Service...

"This is Maryann."

...is not available.