by Delia Parr
“I’ve got one. I mean, I just finished making up a gift basket. You can take that one.”
Aunt Dorothy’s eyes lit with surprise. “I can? You wouldn’t mind?”
“Wait right here,” Charlene instructed. Within moments, she returned with the gift basket she’d made for Melanie, along with a white shopping bag. “How’s this?” she asked, and held the basket up for her aunt’s approval.
“It’s perfect, of course, but didn’t you make that up for someone else?”
“I was going to surprise Melanie Arbor on my way home, but I have time to make another. It’s Daniel’s bowling night. He won’t be home until late,” Charlene explained. She was more relieved than disappointed to have time for herself on her husband’s night out. Whether she spent that time at home or here in the shop mattered little. She set the gift basket into the shopping bag, handed it over and wrapped her hands around her aunt’s. “Here. My treat. Take this to Annie and tell her my thoughts and prayers are with her today, too.”
When Aunt Dorothy looked up, her eyes were moist with tears. “Thank you, Charlene. You might not be much of a businesswoman, since you wind up giving away almost as much candy as you sell, but you are a very precious woman. You know that, don’t you?”
Charlene swallowed hard and smiled. “It’s a family tradition. Makes a girl worry, you know, about being as good as her role model.”
Chuckling, Aunt Dorothy tiptoed up a bit to kiss Charlene’s cheek. “You’re twice as good as I am, which you’d know for sure if you ever found out some of my secrets. Which I’m hoping you won’t,” she teased. “I’m heading across the street to pick up some supper for me and Annie. Do you want me to get something for you to eat on the ride home?”
“Thanks, but I have half a sandwich left over from lunch. I can drive you to Annie’s if you like,” she offered.
“You need to get yourself home. Somebody’s bound to be at The Diner who can drive me. If not, I’ll call a cab,” her aunt insisted. “I’ll stop by and see you tomorrow. I’ll get up early and make some of those caramel brownies you like so much,” she added before heading to the door.
Charlene followed her aunt, locked up behind her and watched the elderly woman cross the street. Aunt Dorothy did not seem to have her usual bounce to her step, but after such a long day, neither did Charlene. She waited until her aunt had gone into The Diner—a family-friendly restaurant that had anchored the Welleswood business district for years—before heading back to the workroom again.
An hour later, with her heart still glowing from her visit with the Arbors, Charlene headed toward home. When she hit the highway, she polished off the half sandwich left from lunch and chased it down with a diet soft drink. Dinner on the run was a frequent occurrence in her life now, but that, too, was a blessing of sorts. She did not manage to get home for dinner with Daniel very often these days. Her hour-long commute each way solved the problem of sitting at the dinner table each night in silence with the man she had married forty-one years ago.
Once their two children had grown up and left home, the awkward quiet between them was like an uninvited guest, at first. Now the silence was an invisible, integral part of their relationship, a testament to the struggle of maintaining a marriage that neither of them seemed to know how to revive.
Dwelling on the sorry state of her marriage, however, was not how Charlene wanted to spend the rest of her drive home. Using her hands-free cell phone, she called her son, Greg, a physical therapist living in Bucks County, Pennsylvania, with his wife, Margot. When he did not answer, Charlene left a message and tried reaching her daughter, Bonnie, now a high-school guidance counselor who had moved to New York City straight from college to share an apartment with several friends who also had a love for the faster-paced city life. No answer at Bonnie’s, either, so Charlene left a message.
She often played telephone tag with the children, and it seemed that this, too, was another sign that the pattern of her life had changed. After being a full-time homemaker and stay-at-home mother, she found owning and operating her business just as demanding, but in different ways. Her mothering days might be well behind her now, but she was blessed to have the kind of store where she could channel her instinct to nurture to her customers.
Nothing, however, seemed to ease the yearning in her heart for the happy marriage she had once shared with Daniel.
For the better part of an hour, she concentrated on the heavy traffic and set her worries aside. When she finally pulled off the highway onto Magnolia Road, she hesitated for a moment, then called Daniel to let him know she was just fifteen minutes from home. To her surprise, he didn’t answer, so she left him a message, too, and then remembered that he was bowling with friends this evening.
A few moments after she hung up, her cell phone rang. She answered without reading the display screen, keeping her eyes on the road.
“Is this Mrs. Butler? Mrs. Charlene Butler?”
Charlene stiffened at the sound of the unfamiliar voice. Aside from her family, no one called her on her cell phone for one very simple reason: she never gave out the number. She rolled her eyes, resigned to the idea that telemarketing had invaded the world of cell phones, too, and made a mental note to see if she could add her cell phone number to the national Do Not Call list. “What can I do for you?”
“Is this Mrs. Charlene Butler?”
A deep sigh. “Yes, I’m Charlene Butler, but I can assure you that I am definitely not interested in buying anything you might be selling. As a matter of fact—”
“Mrs. Butler, this is the emergency room at Tilton General Hospital. Your aunt, Dorothy Gibbs, asked that we call you. She arrived here about twenty minutes ago and—”
Charlene’s heart pounded hard against the wall of her chest, and her mind raced with questions that she hurled at the caller. “Aunt Dorothy? Are you sure? I was just with her. She was fine. What’s wrong?”
“The doctor is with her now. She appears stable at the moment, but she’s asking for you. We couldn’t reach you until she found the paper she had written your cell number on. Can I tell her that you’ll be coming to be with her?”
“Yes. Absolutely. Of course I will,” Charlene cried, blinking back tears as she looked for a place to turn around. “Tell her I’m on my way. It’ll take me an hour. Just tell her I’m coming,” she directed, praying that the good Lord would continue to keep watch over Aunt Dorothy.
Chapter Two
Charlene pulled into a parking space in the visitors’ lot across the street from Tilton General Hospital just after nine o’clock—well ahead of her husband, who was on his way from the bowling alley to meet her. She slammed the car into Park, grabbed her purse and locked up with a quick click of the remote.
She practically jogged toward the emergency room on the east side of the hospital, where she could see the steady pulse of the flashing red lights on the ambulance parked at the entrance. Her purse, which hung from her shoulder, swung in a short arc with each pounding step, mirroring the emotional pendulum that dragged her from fear that Aunt Dorothy might be seriously ill to the hope she had just had another one of her little “spells.”
When Charlene finally reached the entrance, she paused to whisper a prayer before passing through the automatic double doors. Inside, a security guard seated behind a desk cocked a brow, and she shifted the strap of her purse. “My aunt…Dorothy Gibbs…They brought her here…I need to see her,” she stammered.
His gaze softened when he handed her a visitor’s pass. “Information desk is straight ahead. Then take a number. Take a seat.”
She swallowed hard and glanced around the emergency room to get her bearings. Like most people, she supposed, she was not fond of hospitals. She had been fortunate to have raised two active children without ever needing to visit an emergency room.
As she might have expected, the air was heavy with anxiety and suffering, but also held a peculiar sense of boredom or, perhaps, a sense of resignation that she found disturbi
ng.
Straight ahead, a bank of signs hung from the ceiling over a long, low counter in front of a series of five small, semi-partitioned areas. One sign read Information. Three were labeled Patient Registration. One read Intake. Non-medical personnel in business attire toiled with computers and paperwork at their stations, serving visitors and patients at the counter.
Charlene got in the information line behind two women and looked around. Through an opaque wall behind the security guard, she could see a good two dozen people seated in a stark, gray-painted waiting room, but Aunt Dorothy was not among them. Several children were lying on the floor, coloring or reading, while other youngsters raced back and forth between the restrooms and the water fountain.
The gray plastic chairs along the walls were nearly all filled with patients and their loved ones. An elderly woman sat alone in a wheelchair in the corner. Another woman lay on a gurney, her face to the wall. Everyone was waiting for medical attention. Charlene didn’t know if Aunt Dorothy had had to wait, too, or if she had arrived by ambulance. Either way, Charlene’s heart trembled with regret that she had not been by her aunt’s side.
At that moment, a pair of metal doors swung open on Charlene’s right, revealing the very heart of the busy emergency room, where she caught a glimpse of medical personnel hustling to care for patients behind curtained treatment rooms.
“Next.”
With her visitor’s pass in hand, she stepped up to the counter, where a middle-aged woman with frizzy orange hair sat filing a broken fingernail. Her name tag read Joy Wohl, but her bored expression was certainly joyless. “My name is Charlene Butler. I got a call from the emergency room saying my aunt had been brought here and that I needed to come right away. Dorothy Gibbs. Her name is Dorothy Gibbs,” she explained, anxious to see her aunt as quickly as possible.
Without making eye contact, the woman slowly turned and pressed a few keys on the computer with the tip of her emery board. She sighed, put down the emery board and handed Charlene another visitor’s pass, this one blue.
“Press the button to open the double doors. Once you’re inside, there’s a small waiting area to your left. Wait there until someone comes for you. You’ll need to keep this pass visible at all times,” the woman explained as she picked up the emery board again and resumed filing her nail.
Charlene nodded, peeled the backing from the blue pass and pressed it on her coat. She proceeded exactly as she had been told.
Too anxious to sit down in the waiting area, Charlene remained standing at the entrance, watching medical personnel hurry from a central station in and out of the treatment rooms. After waiting for five long minutes without any offer of help, she approached the central station. Not one of the three women behind the counter stopped working to acknowledge her; instead, an older woman dressed casually in khaki pants and a matching sweater approached, wearing a gentle smile. “You look like you need some help. I’m Kathryn Campbell. I’m a volunteer with the hospital’s spiritual-care team.”
“I’m trying to find my aunt, Dorothy Gibbs.”
The woman’s smile broadened. “Then you must be Charlene. Your aunt’s been asking for you.”
Charlene sighed with relief. “Then she’s fine. Will I be able to take her home?”
Kathryn Campbell’s smile deepened. “She’s in the emergency room, so I’m not sure I’d say she was fine, but she is resting comfortably. You’ll have to speak to the doctors about her medical condition. I’ve been checking in on her while she was waiting for you. She’s alert and oriented, and she’s feeling much better. She had a bit of an ordeal, but I’ll let her tell you all about that. To be honest, I think she’s still pretty frightened. If you’ll follow me, I can take you to her. She’s right down the hall.”
Charlene followed the volunteer down the hall to the third room, where the woman peeked in and then motioned for Charlene to enter. “She’s in the first cubicle. The curtains have been pulled to give her privacy, although she’s the only patient in the room at the moment. While you visit, I’ll see if I can find Dr. McDougal. She’s been treating your aunt. One of the nurses will probably be in to check on her shortly, and I’ll stop back later, too.”
“Thank you. Thank you so much,” Charlene murmured. Unsure of what to expect when she saw Aunt Dorothy, she caught her breath and entered the room. An off-white curtain framed the far side of the hospital bed where her aunt lay, eyes closed, clutching her battered purse to her breast. The cubicle, like all of the emergency room, reeked of alcohol and medicines.
Aunt Dorothy appeared paler and smaller than usual, and uncharacteristically frail. Charlene approached the bedside slowly, and smiled when she caught the scent of her aunt’s perfume mingled with the pungent smells of antiseptics and medications. Relieved to see the gentle rise and fall of her aunt’s chest, Charlene ignored the monitors at the head of the bed, since she couldn’t make sense of them, anyway.
She slipped off her coat and placed it and her purse on top of the plastic chair beside the bed, trying not to make a sound. When she turned back to the bed, a pair of hazel eyes, dulled by fatigue, greeted her. Charlene stroked her aunt’s head, damp with perspiration. “I was trying not to wake you up.”
“I wasn’t asleep. Just resting,” her aunt said, and smiled weakly. “I’m sorry. It looks like you might have to wait awhile for those caramel brownies I promised you. I don’t think I’ll be up to making them by tomorrow.”
Charlene returned the smile. “Don’t worry about the brownies or anything else right now.”
Aunt Dorothy closed her eyes and sighed. “I’m sorry to be such a bother. After your long day, the last thing you needed was to drive all the way back here.” Her hands trembled as she shoved her purse toward Charlene. “Take this for me, will you, dear?”
“You’re not a bother,” Charlene insisted as she laid the purse near her own. “What happened? Why didn’t you call me earlier if you felt ill? I would have brought you to the hospital. Makes a girl worry, like maybe you had somebody else you liked better,” she teased.
Aunt Dorothy kept her eyes closed, but smiled again. “I really didn’t think I needed to come to the hospital. Not at first. I was visiting Annie, just like I told you earlier. We’d just been sitting around after dinner, talking, when I started feeling woozy. Then I had one of my little spells.”
Aunt Dorothy opened her eyes and blinked away a few tears. “Poor Annie. She didn’t quite know what to do. I started coughing and coughing, and I just couldn’t stop. Then I started sweating and I couldn’t catch my breath and my heart just started racing faster and faster. That’s when I got scared, too, so Annie called nine-one-one. The next thing I knew, I was in the ambulance. Let me tell you, riding in one of those things is not much fun. I never realized they were so bumpy,” she grumbled, but managed a lopsided smile. “The emergency medical technicians were a nice bunch of young fellas, though.”
Charlene chuckled. “You didn’t flirt with them, did you?”
Aunt Dorothy attempted another grin, but didn’t quite succeed. She looked out of energy. “Only a little. They were a tad on the young side, but they were awfully strong. They got me to that ambulance easily enough, and they took good care of me all the way here—all except for going over all those bumps.” She pointed to a basin of water and some cloths on the table by her bed. “I’m still feeling a little pasty. Could you wipe my face for me, dear?”
“What does the doctor have to say about your spell?” Charlene asked as she moistened a cloth.
“Not much yet. They did some tests, but I haven’t heard back on them yet.”
Charlene gently wiped her aunt’s face, looking tenderly at the aged features that were so dear to her. “Did you take your insulin today?”
Aunt Dorothy’s eyes flashed. “I never forget my insulin. You know that. Between the trip and going to Annie’s for dinner, I probably just overdid it today. I’m sure I’ll be fine.”
“Yes, you will,” Charlene murmured, and s
et down the washcloth.
A nurse entered the room with a cup of ice, looked from Aunt Dorothy to Charlene, and smiled. “You must be Dorothy’s niece. I’m Sandy. I’m helping to take care of your aunt,” she explained before turning her attention to her patient. She scanned the monitors and checked Aunt Dorothy’s IV. “Feeling better?”
“Better, but I’m not feeling like myself at all. I don’t think I’m up to going home tonight,” Aunt Dorothy replied, surprisingly admitting to a frailty when she was usually so unwilling to be anything less than independent.
“Whether or not you go home tonight is up to Dr. McDougal. She’ll be here to see you again in a bit. In the meantime, I’ve brought you those ice chips you wanted.”
Aunt Dorothy took the cup of ice chips. When she tried to sip at some, her hand shook so hard she spilled a few onto her chest. “Look at the mess I’m making.”
The nurse scooped up the spilled chips and tossed them into a trash can. “No problem. The mess is gone. Do you want some help?”
“Charlene can help me,” Aunt Dorothy informed her.
Under the nurse’s watchful gaze, Charlene held the cup steady while her aunt took some ice chips, sucked them away and then took some more.
“Is there a preliminary diagnosis to explain my aunt’s spell?” Charlene asked.
The nurse looked at Aunt Dorothy. “Is it all right to discuss the diagnosis or test results with your niece?”
Aunt Dorothy swallowed the ice in her mouth. “Of course.”
“We’re still waiting for test results, so we can’t be sure,” the nurse began. “We’re concerned about her lungs, of course. They’re congested, which is why we’re limiting fluids for the moment, at least until we get the results of her chest X-ray. And we’re concerned about her heart. The symptoms she’s exhibiting are all consistent with CHF, but they may or may not indicate she’s had a heart attack. The electrocardiogram was inconclusive, but we’ll know from the blood test whether or not she actually suffered one.”
