Crooked Little Heart by Anne Lamott Read Free Book Online Page A

he was her real grandfather, and when they hiked and swam and browsed at the library, she acted like his granddaughter, basking in her closeness to such a distinguished and amiable old man. But then his stomach began to hurt, and he went to see his doctor, expecting a prescription for ulcer medicine. He gave some blood to the lab, and five days later was in surgery, “slit,” as he put it, “from gizzard to zatch.” The surgeon had closed him back up without taking anything out. There was cancer everywhere, cancer like little cauliflower buds. James had been with Charles in the hospital room two days after Thanksgiving when the doctor had said that there was nothing they could do, that Charles might live at most for a few more months. Rosie and Elizabeth had been at home reading together on the sofa when James called with the news. Rosie had answered the phone, and James said, “Hello, honey,” and Rosie could hear that he had been crying.
    “What happened?” she said.
    He did not answer right away. Then he said, “I’m with Charles.”
    Well, they already knew that, she thought. Her head started to feel funny; Charles must be very sick. She waved for her mother to come to phone, scooping armfuls of air toward her with her free hand.
    A LL the next day at school Rosie felt little lurches inside her, like when you fall asleep at the movies and suddenly pitch from your dream back into your seat.
    She and her mother drove to San Francisco late the next afternoon; James had already spent all day and the previous night there, reading magazines while Charles dozed. It had been stormy in the morning, but the sun had shown up at the very end of the afternoon. Rosie cried for a while in the car, and on top of that she had a cold; her throat ached, and she could not get any air at all into her nose, and the only way she could disguise her bloodshot ugliness was with a pair of horrible harlequin dark glasses she’d found in the glove box, a set that Rae must have left behind. They actually had rhinestones framing the lenses.
    Lost and sad and scared about Charles, Rosie obsessed instead about her red blotchy skin, about how ugly she was. It was five o’clock when they got to the Golden Gate Bridge. A low strand of clouds lay just over the water, lit by the sunset—small round gray clouds connected in a line like a baby elephant walk. Rosie lowered her dark glasses and looked in the mirror on the car’s sun visor. Her lips and eyes were red and swollen, and there were tiny pimples on her forehead. She put the harlequin glasses back on.
    In the hospital parking lot, Elizabeth handed Rosie a pack of gum and some tissues and then got out of the car. “You okay, baby?”
    “Uh-huh.” She wouldn’t take off the dark glasses even though she knew that they looked ridiculous. Ridiculous was better than hideous.
    “I won’t be long.”
    Rosie sat in the passenger seat chewing gum, noticing how stuck her breath was, staring out the window at sad people coming and going. Charles was going to die. It was too painful for words—even worse, much worse than when Grace had died three years ago of Alzheimer’s. Everyone had said how wonderful it was that she got sick with the disease and died within a year; oh, thank God, people said, but it was not wonderful at all. Charles sat by Grace every day and told her stories of their past together—alone with no children, just the two of them.
    Under the light of the street lamps in the parking lot, Rosie thought now of Charles dying, and a sudden terrible glee filled her, that he was old and dying and she was young, practically a child, her whole life in front of her while his was about to end. His candle flame was about to be blown out, and she felt the vigor of her own, the heat and light she gave off. She felt a rush of something like ecstasy that she wasn’t dying.But you couldn’t tell anyone this, this horrible meanness of yours, toward someone so kind, someone who always took you