The Body Human by Nancy Kress Read Free Book Online Page B

slip showing underneath. Have a great day! Have a great five minutes!
    “Last-period 7H looks like a zoo, Margie. But when doesn’t last period look like a zoo? They’re revved up like Ferraris by then. But both algebra classes look good, and there’s a girl in 7A whose transcript is incredible. I mean, we’re talking future Westinghouse Talent winner here.”
    Talk to her , the doctor had said. We don’t know what coma patients can and cannot hear. That had been a year and a half ago. Nobody ever said it to me now. But I couldn’t stop.
    “There’s a new sacrificial lamb in the room next to mine, eighth-grade English. She had a cat fight in there today. But I don’t know , she might have more grit than she looks. And guess who called. Bucky Romano. After all this time. Thirteen years. He wants me to give him a call. I’m not sure yet.”
    Her teeth gapped and stuck out. The anti-seizure me d ication in her gastrostomy bag made the gum tissue grow too much. It displaced her teeth.
    “I finally bought curtains for the kitchen. Like Libby nagged me to. Although they’ll probably have to wait until she comes home at Thanksgiving to get hung. Yellow. You’d like them.”
    Margie had never seen this kitchen. I could see her in the dining room of the house I’d sold, up on a chair hanging drapes, rubbing at a dirty spot on the window.…
    “Gene?”
    “Hi, Susan.” The shift nurse looked as tired as I’d ever seen her. “What’s this new tube in Margie?”
    “Antibiotics. She was having a little trouble breathing, and an X-ray showed a slight pneumonia. It’ll clear right up on medication. Gene, you have a phone call.”
    Something clutched in my chest. Libby . Ever since that ’93 Lincoln had torn through a light on Lexington while Margie crossed with a bag of groceries, any phone call in an unexpected place does that to me. I limped to the nurses’ station.
    “Gene? This is Vince. Romano. Bucky.”
    “Bucky.”
    “I’m sorry to bother you at…I was so sorry to hear about Margie, I left a message on your machine but maybe you haven’t been home to…listen, I need to see you, Gene. It’s important. Please.”
    “It’s late, Bucky. I have to teach tomorrow. I teach now, at—”
    “ Please . You’ll know why when I see you. I have to see you.”
    I closed my eyes. “Look, I’m pretty tired. Maybe a n other time.”
    “ Please , Gene. Just for a few minutes. I can be at your place in fifteen minutes!”
    Bucky had never minded begging. I remembered that, now. Suddenly I didn’t want him to see where I lived, how I lived, without Margie. What I really wanted was to tell him “no.”
    But I couldn’t. I never had, not our whole lives, and I couldn’t now—why not? I didn’t know.
    “All right, Bucky. A few minutes. I’ll meet you in the lobby here at St. Clare’s.”
    “Fifteen minutes. God, thanks, Gene. Thanks so much, I really appreciate it, I need to—”
    “ Okay .”
    “See you soon.”
    He didn’t mind begging, and he made people help him. Even Father Healey had found out that. Coming in to Bucky’s life, and going out.
     
    The lobby of St. Clare’s never changed. Same scuffed green floor, slashed gray vinyl couches mended with wide tape, information-desk attendant who looked like he could have been a bouncer at Madison Square Garden. Maybe he had. Tired people yelled and whispered in Spanish, Greek, Korean, Chinese . Statues of the Madonna and St. Clare and the crucified Christ beamed a serenity as alien here as money.
    Bucky and I grew up in next-door apartments in a neighborhood like this one, a few blocks from Our Lady of Perpetual Sorrows. That’s how we defined our location: “two doors down from the crying Broad .” We made our First Communion together, and our Confirmation, and Bucky was best man when I married Marge. But by that time he’d entered the seminary, and any irreverence about Our Lady had disappeared, along with all other traces of humor, humility,