Home Another Way by Christa Parrish Read Free Book Online Page A

prettied the house and made it warmer to walk barefoot but did nothing to reduce the offending odor of a grown man’s diapers.
    She found Beth in front of the fireplace, reading to Robert from a Beatrix Potter storybook. Robert’s bloated tongue hung out of his mouth.
    “I’m home, sweet boy,” Memory said, kissing his forehead.
    Beth closed the book. “I think he’s getting hungry.”
    “To be sure. It’s nearly three.”
    “Do you want me to stay?” Beth asked.
    “Nah. You worked all morning. You must be beat like a potato.”
    “You, too.”
    Memory smoothed Beth’s hair tenderly. “You go home.”
    Beth nodded, zipped her coat and tied her boots. “How’d it go today?”
    “That cabin is shiniest in Jonah.”
    “I bet, with all you ladies going at it. What about Sarah?”
    “Bristly as my legs when I can’t afford a razor.”
    “I’m praying for her.”
    Memory nodded. “That’s ’bout the only thing that’ll help that girl.”
    After Beth left, Memory went to the kitchen to prepare Robert’s lunch. Hers, too. She pulled two cans of Ensure formula from the cupboard, and then took leftover split pea soup from the refrigerator. After heating the soup in a pot on the stove, she poured it into a plastic bowl, which she put on a tray with the formula, a spoon, and a catheter tip syringe.
    “Are you hungry, Robert?” Memory asked, putting the tray on a small table next to his bed. “I sure am.”
    She unbuttoned the bottom of her son’s shirt, exposing his gastrostomy tube, filled the syringe with one can of formula, and inserted it into the tube. Slowly, she depressed the syringe, just a little. Then she said grace and spooned some soup into her mouth. For an hour, she told Robert about her day, until both cans of formula were gone. The green pea puree went mostly uneaten.
    Everyday she did this, every four hours, around the clock. The state insurance wouldn’t pay for a continuous feeding pump. Memory cleaned Robert’s face and swabbed around the g-tube with warm water. The incision looked red and sore, so she dabbed on some Maalox antacid and covered it with gauze.
    Memory heard Robert’s snore, a wet wheeze familiar to the point of maddening. Then she changed his diaper. She always did so, if possible, while he slept. The doctors kept telling her, in their faithless, starched-coated way, that he had nothing going on in his head. Still, cognitive or not, no thirty-one-year-old would want his mother wiping his rear.

chapter ELEVEN
    I spent five days on the couch, eating myself out of my jeans and into sweatpants. The cushions had molded around my body, and I got up only to go to the bathroom, add logs to the fire, and grab more junk food. With just a few packages of instant soup left, my insides rancid from lack of substantive nutrition, I would have to venture out of the house soon.
    I know I slept more than I was awake, a combination of exhaustion, boredom and sheer escapism. During those rare times my eyes stayed opened, I stuffed my face and watched Luke’s 15-inch television. The old, gray box had rabbit ears and picked up one scratchy channel. The daytime lineup—hours of pet psychics, voyeuristically televised blind dates, and Who’s My Baby’s Daddy? talk-show episodes—was more effective than any therapist I’d seen. Clearly, I was not the most dysfunctional person on the planet.
    The knocking had begun my first morning at the cabin, and continued well into the evening of day two. Some people pounded steadily on the door for minutes at a time, others rapped softly, once, twice, and then were gone. A few called my name. I figured someone would soon break a window and climb inside, worried I had hung myself or been eaten by wild dogs, so I nailed a note to the door: I’m fine, go away . After that, there were just footsteps as those concerned townsfolk tromped up the snowy steps, then tromped back down after they had read my admonition.
    I checked the fire, shoving in the last