Chapter 2 - Company at the Door
Evelyn crossed the room and planted herself between Colin and the bed.
“Sit down, Mara,” she said, though Mara was already half-collapsed there, one hand braced on the mattress, the other pressed to her back. “Slow. Don’t twist.”
Colin stood near the chair like a man trying to decide whether to argue or retreat. From the porch, Dana called again, this time joined by her husband Eric and the scrape of kids dragging bags up the walk.
“You invited them for brunch?” Evelyn asked without looking at him.
“It was already planned.”
“The day after her surgery?”
Colin dragged a hand over his mouth. “Dana’s family drove in from Monroeville. They’re dealing with enough. I just needed Mara to—”
“To what?” Evelyn snapped. “Pour coffee with a fresh incision?”
Mara leaned against the headboard and fought the urge to vomit from the pain. Yesterday the discharge nurse had told Colin twice that she could not bend, lift, or stand for more than a few minutes at a time. He had nodded, even repeated the instructions back. Now he acted as if none of that had happened.
The front door opened. Dana’s voice came closer, then stopped short at the bedroom entrance when she saw Evelyn on the floor gathering pill bottles.
“Oh my God,” she said. “We can go. Colin said Mara was up.”
Mara looked from Dana to Colin. He wouldn’t meet her eyes.
Evelyn rose with the bottles in her palm. “You absolutely are going,” she said. “And I’m taking my daughter to her surgeon’s urgent line, because if that bandage has pulled, she needs to be seen.”
“It didn’t pull,” Colin said too quickly.
“You don’t know that.”
Dana stepped back, embarrassed, her teenage son behind her with a bag of bagels. Eric muttered something about waiting in the car. Mara had never seen Dana look small before, but she did then.
“I’m sorry,” Dana said quietly to Mara. “He told us you wanted things normal.”
Mara blinked at her. “Normal?”
Dana’s face shifted. “He said… he said you didn’t want everyone acting weird while you were still, you know, out of it.”
Out of it.
Mara had been home only one night. She had barely spoken to Dana in two weeks.
Evelyn helped her into the robe, careful around the bandage. Colin stood off to the side, jaw tight, as if the real crisis was happening on the porch and not in the room.
When Mara shuffled past him, he murmured, “Don’t do this today.”
She turned her head enough to see him clearly.
“Do what?”
May you like
He swallowed. “Make a scene.”
On the nightstand beside his phone sat a past-due mortgage notice, turned face down under a grocery receipt.
