Doctor Sleep

“What sort of arrangements?”
    Now thatshe was loaded with Valium or morphine or whatever it was they’d given her, Concetta felt quite serene. “It seems that a broken hip is the least of my problems.” She explained. It didn’t take long. She finished by saying, “Don’t tell Abra, cara . I’ve had dozens of emails from her, even an actual letter, and it sounds like she’s enjoying her summer camp a great deal. Time enough later for her tofind her old momo’s circling the drain.”
    Lucy thought, If you really believe I’ll have to tell her—
    “I can guess what you’re thinking without being psychic, amore, but maybe this time bad news will give her a miss.”
    “Maybe,” Lucy said.
    She had barely hung up when the phone rang. “Mom? Mommy?” It was Abra, and she was crying. “I want to come home. Momo’s got cancer and I want to come home.”
    3
    Following her early return from Camp Tapawingo in Maine, Abra got an idea of what it would be like to shuttle between divorced parents. She and her mother spent the last two weeks of August and the first week of September in Chetta’s Marlborough Street condo. The old woman had come through her hip surgery quite nicely, and had decided against a longer hospital stay, or any sort of treatment forthe pancreatic cancer the doctors had discovered.
    “No pills, no chemotherapy. Ninety-seven years are enough. As for you, Lucia, I refuse to allow you to spend the next six months bringing me meals and pills and the bedpan. You have a family, and I can afford round-the-clock care.”
    “You’re not going to live the end of your life among strangers,” Lucy said, speaking in her she-who-must-be-obeyedvoice. It was the one both Abra and her father knew not to argue with. Not even Concetta could do that.
    There was no discussion about Abra staying; on September ninth, she was scheduled to start the eighth grade at Anniston Middle School. It was David Stone’s sabbatical year, which he was using to write a book comparing the Roaring Twenties to the Go-Go Sixties, and so—like a good many of thegirls with whom she’d gone to Camp Tap—Abra shuttled from one parent to the other. During the week, she was with her father. On the weekends, she shipped down to Boston, to be with her mom and Momo. She thought that things could not get worse . . . but they always can, and often do.
    4
    Although he was working at home now, David Stone never bothered to walk down the driveway and get the mail. Heclaimed the U.S. Postal Service was a self-perpetuating bureaucracy that had ceased to have any relevance around the turn of the century. Every now and then a package turned up, sometimes books he’d ordered to help with his work, more often something Lucy had ordered from a catalogue, but otherwise he claimed it was all junkola.
    When Lucy was home, she retrieved the post from the mailbox by thegate and looked the stuff over while she had her mid-morning coffee. It was mostly crap, and it went directly into what Dave called the Circular File. But she wasn’t home that early September, so it was Abra—now the nominal woman of the house—who checked the box when she got off the school bus. She also washed the dishes, did a load of laundry for herself and her dad twice a week, and set theRoomba robo-vac going, if she remembered. She did these chores without complaint because she knew that her mother was helping Momo and that her father’s book was very important. He said this one was POPULAR instead of ACADEMIC. If it was successful, he might be able to stop teaching and write full-time, at least for awhile.
    On this day, the seventeenth of September, the mailbox contained a Walmartcircular, a postcard announcing the opening of a new dental office in town (WE GUARANTEE MILES OF SMILES!), and two glossy come-ons from local Realtors selling time shares at the Mount Thunder ski resort.
    There was also a local bulk-mail rag called The Anniston Shopper . This had a few wire-service stories on the front two pages and a few local stories (heavy on regional sports) in the middle.The rest was ads and coupons. If she had been home, Lucy would have saved a few of these latter and then tossed the rest of the Shopper into the recycling bin. Her daughter would never have seen it. On this day, with Lucy away in Boston, Abra did.
    She thumbed through it as she idled her way up the driveway, then turned it over. On the back page there were forty or fifty photographs not much