Call Me Tuesday by Leigh Byrne Read Free Book Online

Seeing him in such a weak, desperate state shook me at the core of my sense of security, and I began to tremble with fear.
    Within minutes an ambulance had arrived, and its red lights were tracing around and around the living room walls. Daddy went next door and got Lana to come and stay with my brothers and me, so he could follow Mama to the hospital. Nick, Jimmy D., and I all sat on the sofa, unusually close to one another, and still as statues. We watched out the window as the paramedics loaded our mama into the ambulance on a stretcher, not knowing whether or not we were ever going to see her again.

9
     
    This is what happened: Our house was laid out such that one end of it was a mirror image of the other. The living room, kitchen, and my room, which was originally intended to be a small den, were at one end, and two bedrooms and the bathroom were at the other. When you walked out of my parents’ bedroom and took an immediate right, you were in the boys’ room, which used to be Audrey’s. When you walked out of the living room and took a right, you were at the top of the stairway leading to the den. Half asleep, and thinking she was in her bedroom, Mama, in her frantic effort to get to what she thought was Audrey calling out to her, walked out of the living room and took a right, running full force into what she thought was Audrey’s bedroom, but was actually the stairs to the den.
    From her fall down the stairs, Mama suffered what Daddy called a frontal lobe brain concussion. She also bruised one shoulder and hip. The puddle of blood I had seen around her head was from a laceration down the side of her face that required several stitches. Daddy said she had most likely cut it on the sharp wooden corner of the bottom step.
    Daddy spent every night at the hospital with her. He got his mother, Grandma Storm, to come from Nashville to stay at our house and take care of my brothers and me. Mama was in the hospital for just under a week, but it seemed like an eternity.
    Finally the day she was to be released arrived. My brothers and I woke up early, got cleaned up, and helped Grandma Storm straighten the house. Then we all sat in the living room and waited for Mama to come home.
    When we saw the station wagon pull into the driveway, we all ran out of the house, but Daddy stopped us in the yard and told us to go back inside and wait for them. We went back in and sat on the sofa, and watched from the picture window as he pulled Audrey’s old wheelchair out of the back of the station wagon, unfolded it, lifted Mama from out of the car, and lowered her into the chair.
    It took them forever to make it up to the house, and when at last they were at the door, I was disappointed, because the person Daddy wheeled inside was not my mama. The strange woman had a bandage on her left cheek where Mama had cut her face on the stairs, and she resembled Mama, but her head appeared larger, and her eyes that glared into the empty space in front of her were much darker.
    She didn’t even look at my brothers and me when Daddy pushed her by us in the living room. That’s when I knew it was definitely not Mama; she would never have ignored her kids, no matter how bad she felt. Daddy had obviously brought the wrong person home from the hospital by mistake, and I told him so. But he kept insisting it was Mama, and he even went so far as to wheel the stranger into their bedroom and put her on Mama’s side of the bed.
    For the rest of that day, and the days immediately after Mama came home from the hospital, she spent most of her time sleeping. She only got up when she had to go to the bathroom. If she needed something from the kitchen, she had Daddy, or me, or one of the boys get it for her. This made me worried, but Daddy assured me it was a good thing because the doctor had said rest was the best way to heal a brain concussion.
    During her second week home, she got out of her room more. Once in a while, she even stepped into the backyard to