LITMIR.BIZ

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came out.

      “You sure something’s up there?”

      Suddenly his eyes puddled up. He really was scared.

      “It’s okay, George. We’ll go call Mom. It’ll be okay. You’ll see.” I picked him up.

      I carried him back to the house. I didn’t want to jerk him or move him. I wasn’t sure exactly how far up the rock was, but I figured if I tilted him too far either way it might end up somewhere worse, like his brain.

      “Mom.” When I got her on the phone, I wasn’t sure how to break the news.

      “Yeah, Drew. What you need?”

      “Oh, nothing. We had lunch. Didn’t burn the grilled cheese. Didn’t burn the house down either.” I laughed. Then when she didn’t: “That’s a joke, Mom.”

      “Oh.”

      “No, I unplugged the electric frying pan, just like you told me. The beans were good. The apple was fresh, too, no bruises.”

      “Drew, why are you calling?”

      “We got just one little problem.”

      “What’s that?”

      “George put a rock up his nose.”

      “Oh God!” She sucked in her breath. “It could go to his lung! It could kill him!”

      “It could? I wasn’t sure if it was really serious.”

      “It is. It’s awful. I’ve got to come home. No, first take him to the clinic. To that new doctor. I’ll call first, tell them you’re on the way. I’ll meet you there.”

      She hung up, and we flew into high gear. “Don’t move your head, George,” I said. “Don’t sniff or do anything. Just hold yourself like a frozen person.” I took him by the hand. The clinic was half a mile away, just up the road and one turn. Mandy rode the bike beside us. I put George on my back, piggyback. I had decided not to ride my own bike, because I might jostle him. This way I could put a lot of spring into my feet and keep him steady. I could also keep his mind off himself by playing like I was a pack mule and we were headed up Pike’s Peak.

      When I walked into the clinic, which is this little white building next to the bank, the whole waiting room was full of people. The clinic seemed to be drawing from all over; people weren’t just from Palm Key. George was still on my back, and just like my mother said, the nurse, Mrs. MacHenry, was waiting for us. There just wasn’t much of anything she could do. She said Dr. Haley wasn’t there. I hadn’t seen him since I’d knocked the front in on his Mercedes. Now he was up the highway at a nursing home giving flu shots, she said. She’d sent for him, and we’d just have to wait a little while. She set George down on a chair in the waiting room and gave him a sucker. “Breathe through your mouth, George,” she said. “Every time you lick this sucker, breathe in, then out.”

      It was at least a comfort to turn George over to Mrs. MacHenry. She lived on the same street with us, in a stilt house with a boathouse on the canal that went behind all our houses. She had red hair about the color of a rusted yard chair and a mouth that wouldn’t quite close because of her teeth. And to me, that made her look like any second she was about to scream. She was a good singer, though. She was asked to sing at all the weddings and the Shrimp Festival on the bandstand. She had this deep-throated country voice that, if it hadn’t sounded so much like she had something caught in her throat, might have been good enough for making a record. My mother used to always call her a mess. “Oh, Betty, you’re such a mess!” she’d say, which supposedly was a compliment.

      My mother has all these funny sayings from having grown up in Alabama. (She’s passed them on to me, too, and I’m not too sure I’m glad of that. Sometimes my friends, Northerners who’ve moved down here to get away from snow, can’t understand what I’m saying, like when I tell them I’m fixin’ to go fishing, and they say, “Why don’t you just say go?” To me and my mom, it wouldn’t be the same. There’s a whole lot that goes into going somewhere, and, in that sense, fixin’ makes sense.) One time soon after my dad moved out, Mrs. MacHenry paid me to baby-sit because, as she said, she was fixin’ to drive my mother up the highway for some fun, which turned out to be The Flesh Paradise. They had male strippers there. Mom never did mention it. Only reason I ever knew that’s where Mrs. MacHenry took her was that Mom’d insisted on leaving me a number where I could reach her. And then George threw up, and when I dialed the number, some deep­throated dude had answered, “Flesh Paradise.” So I hung up. Told George Mom said it was just a two-hour virus, and he had only five more minutes before time was up. Which seemed to work, because George just sat down and watched ‘’The Flintstones” on TV, ate a package of Cajun spiced potato chips, and fell asleep.

      Now Mrs. MacHenry was coaching George on how to breathe. “Through your mouth, George. That’s right. In. Out. Up. Down.” And Mandy had picked up the movie star magazines and was sitting on the floor, reading them, or at least flipping through the pages.

      Meanwhile, everybody in the waiting room was looking at George. It was as if any minute he could just keel over and die, like an old person barely hanging on. He sure was sucking that sucker like there was no tomorrow.

      I didn’t have a place to sit down, so I stood, leaning against the wall beside George. Then Mrs. Conner, my first grade teacher, came in. I hadn’t seen her in a while. She didn’t look good. She didn’t look around, just walked straight up to Mrs. MacHenry’s desk. “Is the doctor in?”

      Since Mrs. MacHenry was standing with me, it was like Mrs. Conner was announcing the president or something. She just spoke her question out loud, and Mrs. MacHenry headed over.

      Mrs. MacHenry’s white uniform brushed against her hose, which sounded to me a little like a katydid. (In the Florida heat, women don’t wear them often, but I’ve decided I really love the sound of stockings.) And all the while she was explaining: “Dr. Haley’s up the highway, giving flu shots at a nursing home.”

      Mrs. Conner looked around. She’d always tried to come off as this sweet old lady, but she was the kind who’d give you pencils with no erasers and then make you stay in at recess for spitting on your paper and rubbing out mistakes. I could never understand why she had this thing about mistakes. She said we were supposed to not worry about them. But hell, even at six you know you make them, and want to fix them. In my book, that’s normal.

      “I have to see Dr. Haley today,” she said, still looking around. “Do all these other people have appointments?”

      Mrs. MacHenry sat down at her desk. “No. We do walk-ins. You just have to be willing to wait a while. Sometimes maybe even a long while. “

      Mrs. Conner leaned over closer, but there was no way an old first grade teacher could talk low. “Betty, I got this sore on my nose, you see, and I’m afraid it’s cancer. I got to see him. I put a little of this medicine on it that I got from my sister. A little home remedy.” She laughed. “But it hadn’t gotten a bit better.” She lifted up her Band-Aid.

      I’d never heard that before—home remedy. It must have been the name of something an old person would use. But instead it sounded like something we ought to get—me, Mandy, George the Second, and especially Mom. Mrs. MacHenry looked at Mrs. Conner’s nose. “Sure is some bump, Elaine. You better get it checked. I just don’t know when exactly Dr. Haley’ll get to you.”

      “So you think this is a bad bump, too?”

      “Could be nothing. Could be a mosquito bite. Could be a passion hickey. “ She laughed, flashing her teeth. “Could be, I guess, something more serious like a skin cancer, or a wart. Why don’t you just join in with the rest and wait.”

      “Guess I’ll have to.” Mrs. Conner looked around the waiting room, then saw me. “Drew,” she said, coming over. “Just look at you—all tall and nearly grown.”

      “Sort of.” I grinned. I could never get over trying to get on her good side.

      “And

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