Lovey

The Other Road

A proper Southern woman doesn’t make a big fuss about herself when she’s sick or hurt or down. It’s better to suffer in silence than be a burden to others. And, of all the things she taught me, my momma embodied that one the very best.

I thought of Momma when I said to Jean again, “You are not to call her. She will feel like she has to run down here and see me, and that’s the last thing she has time for.”

Jean put her hand on her hip and said, “She will kill me if you go in for surgery and she doesn’t even know.”

“She won’t make it in time anyway, so why stress her. We’ll call her when I’m out.”

“I know, but . . .”

“But what?” I snapped. “I’m not going to die in surgery, Jean. For heaven’s sake. Who would look after your father?”

“Don’t even think about dying,” Dan chimed in from the foldout chair bed beside me. He reached over and took my hand again. “What would I do without my girlfriend?”

Jean looked at me in awe, for probably the tenth time that day. As soon as the assisted living nurse arrived for her hourly check, Dan was awake, alert and fully present. When the paramedics arrived, and I started coming back into consciousness, he was shouting at Kelly, one of our regular nurses, from the bed, “No, not that robe. She’ll want the pink one for the hospital. And make sure you get her slippers too.”

I was certain I was still dreaming, my subconscious floating back to a simpler time when my husband was in charge, when he was the breadwinner, decision maker and protector, and I was the grocery shopper, dinner cooker and pigtail braider.

By the time I was fully conscious again, sitting up in my hospital bed, oxygen in my nose, morphine pumping through my veins with the same breathtaking vengeance as an epidural after hours of labor, I realized that, indeed, it had been true.

“I don’t think we’ll be prepared to make that decision until we’ve had a second opinion,” Dan was saying to the nurse. “If there’s some way to set it while it heals and avoid the surgery altogether, we’d obviously choose that option.”

It was about that time that Jean had arrived, sprinting at her high school track pace, completely out of breath.

“Surgery?” I asked.

But before I could get an answer, she burst into tears. “Are you in so much pain, Momma?”

I held my arm up. “I am in no pain of any kind, darling. Now what in the world is wrong with me?”

“It’s your hip, Ms. Lynn,” Kelly, Dan’s nurse, said. “You broke it when you had your spill.”

“Damn stepladder,” I said under my breath.

It was one of those moments that we all inevitably have in our lives. One of those times that we wish instead of veering right we had veered left, instead of taking the interstate we had chosen the back road. I looked at Dan and then back at Jean. And I suddenly realized that, if we could all erase those moments we wish we had taken the other road, what a disturbingly different world it would be.