Chapter 6: The Morning of the Surgery
The hospital was forty minutes away and we left at five-thirty in the morning.
Mom sat in the front seat.
David drove.
I sat in the back with a bag she'd packed herself the night before — one change of clothes, her reading glasses, a paperback she'd probably never open, and a small framed photo of Caleb that she'd taken from the shelf above her television.
I noticed the photo when she handed me the bag to carry.
I didn't say anything about it.
The intake process was slow and procedural, the way those things always are.
Forms.
Wristbands.
A nurse who went through a checklist in a practiced voice.
Mom answered everything calmly and completely, and when the nurse asked if she had any questions, she said no.
David and I sat in the waiting area outside pre-op.
He had brought coffee from the gas station down the road, and we sat with the cups going warm in our hands and didn't talk much.
There wasn't a lot to say that we hadn't already said.
At one point he looked over at me.
"You doing okay?"
"No," I said.
"Me neither."
That was enough.
They let us back to see her before she went in.
She was in the hospital gown, the thin white blanket pulled up, her hair loose around her shoulders in a way I almost never saw.
She looked younger without her usual composure holding everything in place.
More like herself, somehow.
"You don't both have to stand there looking like that," she said.
"Like what?" David said.
"Like I'm already gone."
"You're not gone," I said.
"You're annoying and you're right here."
She almost smiled.
I sat on the edge of the chair beside her bed and took her hand.
Her fingers were cold.
She didn't pull away.
"I need to tell you something," she said.
"Mom—"
"Let me say it." She looked at me directly.
"I know I scared you.
Both of you.
I know I should have told you sooner, and I know the way I handled it — the forty dollars, all of it — I know it hurt you.
I saw it on your face every time."
"You don't have to—"
"I do." She squeezed my hand once.
"I spent so many years being the one who held things together for you two.
After your father left.
After the money got tight.
I got very good at not needing anything from anyone." She paused.
"Maybe too good."
David had moved closer.
He was standing at the foot of the bed with his hands in his pockets, and his jaw was tight.
"I'm not good at being the one who needs help," Mom said.
"I don't know how to do that gracefully."
"You don't have to do it gracefully," David said.
"You just have to do it."
She looked at him.
Something passed between them — old and specific, the kind of thing that exists between a mother and a son who are more alike than either of them usually admits.
"I know," she said.
A nurse appeared at the curtain.
"Mrs.
Calloway?
We're ready for you."
Mom took a breath.
Squeezed my hand once more and let go.
"Take care of Caleb," she said.
"Mom, you're going to take care of Caleb yourself in six weeks."
"I know," she said.
"I'm just saying it anyway."
They wheeled her back at 7:14 in the morning.
David and I went back to the waiting room.
He got more coffee.
I called Tom, who was home with Caleb, and told him she'd gone in.
Tom said he'd tell Caleb that Grandma's heart was getting fixed and that she'd be calling him soon.
The surgery was estimated at three to four hours.
We waited.
David read.
I couldn't read.
I walked to the window at the end of the corridor and stood there looking at the parking lot filling up slowly as the morning moved forward, ordinary people arriving for ordinary things, and thought about my mother in a room somewhere behind me with her chest open and a surgeon's hands where her heart was.
At 10:52, Dr.
Hess came through the door.
She was still in her surgical cap.
Her expression was neutral in the careful way that doctors are trained to hold their faces neutral until they're ready to speak.
David stood up.
"The procedure went well," she said.
"She's in recovery.
Everything looks very good."
I sat back down.
I hadn't realized I'd stood up too.
"Can we see her?" David asked.
"In about an hour," Dr.
Hess said.
"She'll be groggy.
But she's stable and she did well."
After she left, David sat down beside me.
Neither of us said anything for a long moment.
Then he said, "She's okay."
"She's okay," I said.
He put his arm around me, the same way he'd put his arm around Mom in the parking lot after the pre-op appointment.
May you like
I leaned into it.
We sat like that until they called us back.
