Hey! Let's go to a reading!
This Wednesday, October 17th, Jim Shepard (a New Englander) will read from his new short story collection Like You'd Understand Anyway at Harvard Book Store in Cambridge, MA. The reading is free and starts at 7pm. Check out http://www.harvard.com for more details.
On Thursday, October 18th, at Books Etc. in Portland, ME, Steve Almond (another New Englander) will read from his new essay collection Not That You Asked. The reading starts at 7pm, and it's free, too. (And, yeah, it's not fiction, but what else are you going to do on a Thursday?)
Brookline Booksmith has an event on Tuesday, October 16th, at the Coolidge Corner Theatre with Tom Perrotta (again, a New Englander) reading from his new novel The Abstinence Teacher. Tickets are $5 and you can get them by calling the store at (617) 566-6660.
See what's happening at a bookstore near you this week.
As for Meeting House, this week we have a story by Dennis Campbell. Dennis is a high school English teacher and an independent publisher. He lives in Dover, NH, but his heart never really left Boston. This is his first published story. Read on!
Reconciled: 1
My father started to sense the stroke as he was driving along the Southeast Expressway to Weymouth for an evening of round dancing with his girlfriend. Rather than getting off at the Mass Ave exit and rushing immediately to City Hospital, he kept driving the Expressway to the Neponset exit, past the vast wasteland of the abandoned, two-screen Neponset Drive In, through two red lights on Gallivan Boulevard, and got on the northbound Expressway at Neponset Circle, where the Sozio appliance store was and still is located. My father had been driving the Expressway since it was built, knew every curve, guardrail, bump and pothole, knew it as a civilian and as a cop, so seventy-five miles per hour while having a stroke did not, apparently, seem an unreasonable speed to him. He reached the Charlestown exit, passed the masts of the USS Constitution moored at the Navy Yard, and was clipping down Warren Street at fifty m.p.h. in two and a half minutes. The pains were getting worse.
He parked the car next to the curb of Johnny’s Foodmaster, Charlestown’s sparkling new suburban-style supermarket, and told his girlfriend to call me from the payphone by the entrance to the store.
Jesse answered the phone. We’d just finished a quiet Saint Patrick’s Day corned beef dinner with my best friend Bobby and his girlfriend Carol and were now enjoying dessert, which was simply watching my fourteen month old son Dominic bouncing up and down, up and down in his Johnny Jump Up seat, pausing and waiting, then squatting and pushing off and starting it all again, up and down, up and down. It was a great dessert.
Jesse scrunched her eyebrows and crinkled her eyes, looked at me oddly and said into the receiver, “We’ll be right there,” and she hung up the phone. “Kevin,” she said, “that was a woman calling from Johnny’s Foodmaster about your dad. He asked her to call you. She says he seems to be having a stroke and he wants you to come down.” Then she turned to Carol. “Carol, can you and Bob stay with Dominic while we’re gone?”
“Absolutely, honey,” Carol responded. “Go, go. Everything’ll be fine here.”
“You might want a coat, Kev,” my wife told me gently. “I’ve got the keys.
I should mention that my wife is an ICU nurse; she is wonderful in times of crisis. It is as if she sees everything in that moment with perfect clarity and can anticipate the next moment as if she has experienced it before. All men should marry nurses.
My father was sitting in the driver’s seat of his midnight blue Crown Vic, his head drooping slightly onto his right shoulder, his right arm reaching to the left side of his chest.
“Bappa, it’s Jesse. Are you breathing OK? Can you breathe pretty well?”
“Oh, hi, sweetie. Ya, I can breathe OK. My left side hurts, though. It hurts pretty bad.”
“Kevin, keep an eye on your dad. Keep talking to him,” Jesse said deliberately. “I’m going to call an ambulance,” and she walked around the car to the payphone next to the entrance to Johnny’s.
While my wife had been examining my father I had been staring at the woman who stood by the passenger door. I had seen her with my dad once before. I had been walking back to Charlestown from in town, across the Low Bridge from the North End, a cold wind blowing off the harbor chilling my face and hands, had just left City Square and was enjoying the calm windlessness of Main Street – which was years from being gentrified and was still a seedy street of vacant lots and decaying brick three story buildings, some of which still had businesses on the first floor, all of which had some windows that looked like punched eyes on the second and third floors – towards Monument Avenue when I saw my father’s car approaching. I waved hello-goodbye with my left hand, not expecting him to stop. It was not unusual to see my father driving around the streets of Charlestown; once a cop always a cop. It was a kind of hobby for him. But he pulled up to the curb, rolled down the window and said, “How are ya, pal.”
“Good, dad. Just heading home from work.” I was working for an ad agency on Commercial Wharf. “I stopped in Haymarket and got some oranges. Want a couple?”
“No, I got some the other day in Chelsea.”
I stepped off the curb and bent down to be at window level with my dad and noticed the woman sitting in the passenger’s seat. “This is my friend, Mary,” my dad said. “I’m giving her a ride home from the grocery store.”
I paused for a few moments, considering the possible meanings of what my father had just said. “Nice to meet you,” I said.
“Well, we gotta go,” he said, and he took off into City Square, his left hand waving to me as the Crown Vic passed the brick expanse of the Harvard Mall and entered the cobble stoned rotary.
Now I was meeting Mary for the second time. She was small and slight, with rouged cheeks and short, curly, brown hair. She looked to be in her late forties, and she was wearing a grey raincoat and held a lit filtered cigarette in her left hand as she stood on the curb by the passenger’s side of my father’s Crown Vic. I nodded to her and she nodded back, the edges of her mouth rising slightly.
“How ya doin’, Dad?” I asked hesitantly. “You doin’ OK?”
“I dunno, Kev. It hurts.”
I wiped the perspiration from his forehead with my right hand and flipped the moisture to the asphalt.
“Everything’ll be fine, Dad. The ambulance will be here in just a bit, and we’ll get you to the hospital. You’ll be fine.”
“I hope so. I hope so. I don’t wanna go like this,” he said, and I noticed he was drooling from the left side of his mouth. I wiped the drool with my hand and wiped my hand on my jeans.
“You’re not gonna go like this, Dad. We’ll get you to the hospital.”
Jesse came to me from around the back of the car. “They’ll be right here,” she said. “Let me have a look at him,” and I gratefully returned my father to my wife’s professional care.
I walked around the front of the car to the passenger’s side and looked at Mary. “Did you call me?”
“Ya. He told me to call you. He wanted to come back to Charlestown before he did anything, like he wanted to get home before he did anything. I told him to just drive to a hospital, but he said no. He yelled at me about it.” And again, she raised the edges of her mouth just a bit. “He’ll be fine,” she said, absolute confidence in her tone. “He gets to the hospital he’ll be fine.” As she put the cigarette to her lips and inhaled the smoke very deeply I could hear a siren getting closer. “He’ll be fine,” she repeated as she allowed the smoke to escape from her lungs.
The ambulance arrived and the EMTs did a quick vitals check on my father, put him on a stretcher and began rolling the stretcher to the back of the unit. Jesse got behind the wheel of the Crown Vic and drove off to put it in a space in Johnny’s parking lot.
“Can you get home OK,” I asked the woman who had been the passenger in my father’s car as he was having a stroke on the Southeast Expressway.
“Sure, I just live down on Pleasant.” Pleasant Street was a twisting, narrow street that descended abruptly from the elegance of Monument Square. It was a misnomer.
“OK. Good,” I said, then added, “Thank you for calling me.”
Mary started to respond, but I didn’t hear it because I could only hear my father bellowing my name as best he could under the circumstances. I ran to the back of the ambulance and called, “Dad, what is it?” and to the EMTs, “What’s wrong? Is he arresting?”
“Tell these sonsabitches that I am not going to go to the goddamn Mass General,” my father ordered me.
“What?” I could not believe what I was hearing. “Dad, the General is two minutes from here! The General is the best fucking hospital in the Northeast!”
“Kevin, tell these bastards to take me to Sacred Heart in Brighton,” he ordered his youngest son.
“Sacred fucking Heart! Dad, the Massachusetts General Fucking Hospital is two minutes from here. Sacred Heart is at least fifteen, maybe twenty. People go to Sacred Heart Hospital to fucking die, Dad. They don’t go to Sacred Heart when they are having a goddamn heart attack, you understand that!”
“I want to go to Sacred Heart or I ain’t goin anywhere.”
“Goddamn it!” I screamed. “You are an unreasonable son of a bitch.” I pounded the door of the ambulance with the side of my fist. “Take him to Sacred Heart,” I told the EMTs, shaking my head.
The EMTs put my father into the box of the ambulance, then one jumped into the back with my father, and the other ran up and slid in behind the wheel and started to drive off, red lights flashing, siren wailing.
Jesse had pulled our green Impala up to the curb. I opened the passenger door, jumped into the car, and she started following the ambulance.
“He’ll be OK, Kevin,” she said softly as we passed Bunker Hill Community College.
“I know.”
“Are you OK?”
I inhaled deeply, felt the air fill my lungs, then exhaled slowly, and said, “My father is one dumb sonuvabitch, Jesse.”
I looked at the lights of the city as she drove the car across what we Townies still called the Prison Point Bridge. To the left I could see the Mass General as we headed to Memorial Drive to get to Brighton, then I turned to the passenger’s window and looked at my dark reflection staring back at me as we drove over the train yards. “What’ll I tell my mother?” I said to myself.
