The Deep End by Joy Fielding Read Free Book Online Page B

called after her as the woman disappeared into the other room. “Who’s she kidding? She’s already buried three husbands. She’ll outlive us all.”
    “She hasn’t changed a bit,” Joanne marveled. “You should be used to her by now.”
    “Some things you never get used to,” Eve told her, and Joanne knew instantly that would be true of Paul’s departure. “You look tired,” Eve remarked suddenly.
    “Some idiot phoned in the middle of the night and hung up,” Joanne told her. “Eve …”
    “You don’t think these pains really could have anything to do with the miscarriage, do you?” Eve interrupted, looking very fragile.
    “How do you mean?”
    Eve tried to laugh. “Well, you know, maybe they left something in there after they cleaned me out. I did lose a lot of blood.”
    “I’m positive they didn’t leave anything inside you,” Joanne assured her, watching a hint of color return slowly to her friend’s cheeks. “You’d be dead by now if they had,” she added, and both women laughed in earnest.
    “Thanks,” Eve smiled. “You always did know how to cheer me up.”
    Baycrest Nursing Home was located on South Drive, a block and a half from Great Neck Hospital. It was an old brick structure that had survived several renovations without noticeable change to its appearance. Outside, the windows had been replaced by more modern Thermopane glass; inside, though the walls had recently been repainted in shades of trendy peach, the corridors still looked as sad and abandoned as most of the residents who walked them. No amount of bright colors or modern art could disguise the forced joviality of the institutionalized setting. Death row with flowers, Joanne thought as she moved toward her grandfather’s room at the end of the hall.
    She could hear the commotion even before the nurse appeared in the doorway. “Honest to God, that man!” the very fat, very black nurse exclaimed, smoothing her uniform as she struggled to calm herself. “Oh, not your granddaddy, honey,” she said to Joanne, recognizing her and smiling. “Your granddaddy is no trouble at all, sleeps like a baby all the time. And he looks so cute in his little hat.”
    “Is Mr. Hensley giving you more problems?” Joanne asked. Sam Hensley was notorious among the nurses at the Baycrest Nursing Home. He had been shuffled between the various floors ever since his arrival six months before.
    “I went in to ask whether he needed help in relieving himself, and you know what he did? He threw the bedpan at me. Thank God it was empty! Honestly, I don’t know what happens to some people when they get old.” The woman stopped abruptly. “I don’t mean any disrespect, Mrs. Hunter,” she stammered. “Your granddaddy is such a sweet little man. He never gives anybody any trouble.”
    “My grandfather doesn’t know where he is most of the time,” Joanne said softly, thinking how strange it sounded to hear the massive man her grandfather had once been described as sweet and little.
    He had started shrinking, she recalled, in the year following the death of his wife of almost sixty years. Little by little, his weight fell away; his shoulders sank; his long neck withered. She felt lately that he resembled not so much a man as an ancient snapping turtle.
    He had begun spinning his cocoon soon after he checked himself into the Baycrest Nursing Home five years ago, and he had sealed himself inside it forever around the same time that Joanne’s mother had discovered a lump in her left breast. He had never asked why his daughter’s visits became less frequent, and when she had succumbed to the disease three years ago—three years ago already? Joanne marveled as she pushed open the door to her grandfather’s room—Joanne and her brother had decided not to tell him. Instead, she had stepped in to fill the vacant role, visiting the old man every week, lessfrom a sense of duty, as Eve’s mother had earlier suggested, than because he provided her