The Sunday List of Dreams by Kris Radish Read Free Book Online

looks spontaneous to her and also a bit funny. Funny is good and so is the champagne.
    When she walks by the telephone she pats her t-shirt pocket as a salute to #13 that is resting on one of the white slips so very close to her braless bosom, picks up the phone, and sets it on its side so it will turn off in a few moments. In a rare act of total abandon she also turns off her cell phone.
    This is big. Really big. Connie, the mother of three daughters, the official stepmother of O’Brien’s two boys, the mother hen of dozens and dozens of nurses, unit managers, doctors and hospital administrators, has not turned off her cell phone since the day she bought it. What if there was an emergency? What if one of the girls needs her? What if O’Brien has a crisis? What if all hell breaks loose and they need a triage expert?
    Connie holds the phone for a few seconds, drains her glass, and then drops the phone into the top drawer of the desk near the front door.
    “O-h m-y G-o-d,” she says, sounding out the letters of each word as if she is just learning English. “I’m doing it. I’m actually doing it.”
    Giddy from the power of free time, and from the glorious champagne, Connie keeps walking through the house, and then makes herself a second mimosa about the same time she would normally be poring over stacks of reports from the third shift. Then, very quickly, she decides to watch two movies. Two movies right in a row. One after the other. No turning the phones on. No pause for a bath. No break to drive over to the gas station for a newspaper, a donut, or one of those slices of pizza with huge jalapeno peppers baked into the crust.
    “Forget about the shit,” she says out loud. “Sit.”
    She doesn’t get dressed, which in the old days might have resulted in a public whipping. Connie gets a little tipsy after the second movie, a holiday sleeper called
Pieces of April
. The movie keeps her plastered to the couch and she consumes half the bottle of champagne, which tastes much better without the orange juice, and goes astonishingly well with a late-morning meal of popcorn that fills up a bowl the size of a very large puppy.
    Besides being a bit tipsy, Connie is also lost in her day. She has not looked at a watch, answered a phone call, bothered to read a newspaper, or worried. When she gets up from the couch just before 3 P.M . to use the bathroom, make a sandwich and take a peek at the spontaneous shoes, she realizes it was probably the champagne that made her not worry, so she decides to keep drinking it and watch something else on television.
    And then she chugs through two Oprah reruns, watches an incredibly detailed show on the Discovery Channel about finding murderers, and decides, without having gotten dressed or turning the phones back on, that she is simply going to go to bed and read. And she doesn’t read the list. She barely gets through three pages of a novel before she turns off her CD companion and falls asleep with her fingers resting on the pocket where her little slips have been nesting for the entire day.
    By the next morning Frannie has left her six phone messages, there’s a turn in the weather and it’s suddenly 62 degrees in Indiana in early spring, Connie is out of champagne and almost out of her mind with restlessness. By 9:14 A.M . she hops out of bed, rolls her tongue around her mouth, and for a mere three seconds wonders how in God’s name they are getting along without her at the hospital.
    “You have either suffocated yourself with your own list or you’re in a drunken stupor and can’t answer the phone,”
O’Brien’s first message sings. The five after that get a bit longer and louder and include a gentle reminder that the Irishman and his wife are going to be gone for four days visiting son Numero Uno and the wife would like just one call from Connie so she won’t worry when they are on the road.
    They play phone tag while Connie shuffles through the house in the same dingy and