“Hi babe,” came Eileen’s voice over the phone. “I need you to do me a really, really big favor.”
The medical examiner’s notes say Bob,* a 59-year-old white male, was driving his own car (not a cab) when a massive heart attack hit. He lost control and struck another car, but there were no other injuries, to himself or others. Bob had called his garage that day to reserve a cab, but he never showed. He was probably on his way there when the accident occurred, nine blocks from where he lived.
But it was a really, really big favor. Mary had a few days off and had planned to get away, go visit her brother in Wisconsin. But what else could she do? The kids had nowhere else to go.
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It was nearly midnight when the plane arrived. In the swirling airport crowd Mary spotted Linda first, a buoyant young girl with a fair, slightly freckled Irish complexion. Mary wanted to run up to her, hug her, and say, “I recognize those chipmunk cheeks!” But she wanted to make sure she had the right girl first. The olive-skinned, sullen teen slouching along beside her looked nothing like Larry. He had an adolescent hint of a mustache, and steel wool on his chin. “What happened to you?” Mary said. “You used to be cute.”
“Not good,” Mary said. “Be prepared.” She had stopped by the ICU before coming to the airport. A nurse was tending to him and asking another, “When’s his family coming?” The puffy-faced man hooked to the gasping, beeping, clicking machines was definitely Bob, though his hair was thinner and grayer and he was even heavier than Mary remembered.
“It’s just a reflex,” the nurse told them. As she calmly suctioned Bob’s throat, Linda stood steadfast at her father’s bedside and peppered the nurse with questions. Larry either leaned against the wall or sat at the foot of the bed and said nothing. Linda asked what was wrong with Bob’s ear. It was gnarled and deformed and practically swollen shut. The nurse said it was from an ear infection Bob never took care of.
Practically all Larry and Linda had talked about the night before, all the way to the ICU, was how they resented the fact the doctor insisted Donna be involved. It was a disaster, Larry and Linda said, when she lived in Arizona with them, before she moved back to Chicago. She argued with Eileen constantly. They said she was incredibly selfish. She expected them all to baby-sit for her toddler son for days at a time. She kept saying she wanted to give him up for adoption.
