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“Oh, Keefer, I’m sorry.”

“I’m gonna go.”

“Should I go with you?”

He thought a moment, and then he nodded.

“Sure, that’d be great.”

Mother darling wanted me home, of course. She might have already checked to see if I had listened to her, but that didn’t matter to me now. None of that mattered to me, and maybe, it never had.

Besides, I thought as we charged down the stairs and to the truck, I’m sure Kathy Ann is watching and could tell Mother darling everything anyway.

After we parked at the hospital, we went to an information desk and found out where Keefer’s mother was located. It turned out she was still in what they called an intensive care unit. Only the immediate family could go in, and only for a little while. I waited outside. I was very nervous because we didn’t know if his father was in there already, and what sort of a scene he would make as soon as he set eyes on Keefer.

Fortunately, he wasn’t. Keefer came out after ten minutes.

“She’s still alive,” he said, “but she’s lost so much blood, she’s in a coma. All the nurse would say is, ‘We’ll see.’ ”

He sat, and I held his hand.

“She looked so small in there. It was like she had shrunk or somethin‘ from losin’ all that blood. I tried talkin‘ to her, but her eyelids didn’t even twitch. It was like talkin’ to a corpse.”

“Oh, don’t say that, Keefer. She can get better.”

He nodded and looked around.

“I wonder where the hell he is. It doesn’t surprise me that he’s not here.”

“What do you want to do?”

“In an hour I can go back in again. You mind waitin‘?”

“No, of course not,” I said.

He leaned back against the sofa.

“You want a soda or somethin‘?”

“No, I’m fine,” I said. He nodded and closed his eyes.

I couldn’t help wondering how I would feel if that was Mother darling in there instead of Keefer’s mother. Would I be worrying about her or about myself? She was all I had now, all the family jn the world to me. Most of my life, she did her best to pretend I wasn’t there. Sometimes I thought that was what bothered her the most when Grandpa complained about me: he reminded her I was her daughter and her responsibility.

I supposed I had never made things easier for her. Not only didn’t I think I should, but I resented her placing herself at the top of the list of who was important and what was important. Her career was the end-all. If it meant sacrificing my advantages, my time, my opportunities, that was all right. The excuse was always that she was doing it for both of us. All I could think was, if she ever did make it in the music business, I would fall even further down the list until I did what she wanted: disappeared.

And yet, imagining her in there like Keefer’s mother with Death standing at the foot of her bed looking covetously at her thin grip on life, I couldn’t help feeling sorry for her and sad. The few good times we had together returned to memory. I recalled once when she had sung successfully at a county fair and she had me dressed in a cowgirl outfit. She brought me on the stage with her and I sang a chorus. Everyone thought it was cute and she hugged me. Afterward, we had a good time on the rides. We ate cotton candy and had hot dogs and she won a stuffed puppy on the wheel of fortune game.

I left that back at the farm.

It was part of a dream now, something unreal.

“You got a helluva nerve bein‘ here,” I heard, and opened my eyes to see a stocky, six-foot-three-inch man with the shoulders and arms of a logger standing before us. His black hair looked like it was in revolt, the untrimmed strands going every which way, some stuck on his sweaty forehead and looking like streaks of ink. He had big facial features, but I could see Keefer’s jaw and eyes.

He wore a faded plaid shirt, the sleeves rolled over his thick forearms, back to his elbows, and a pair of greasy, stained jeans and black shoe boots.

“You’re the reason she’s in there,” he said, pointing his thick forefinger down at Keefer. The rest of his hand was clutched in a fist, making it look like a pistol.

I looked at Keefer. He didn’t move, but he didn’t flinch or look frightened either.