How Green Your Eyes
“I know this is going to sound awful”—Jo stopped cooking up some stew for Kerry, who was sitting with Ma, and turned to me — “but I like people better when they’re sick.”
I was standing at Jo’s kitchen window watching the snow fall outside when she said this and I laughed as if I was three years old and just threw my peanut butter sandwich off the table and watched it splatter all over the floor. It was the first time I had laughed in months. Then I realized I had no idea what Jo meant.
“Give me your hand,” Jo said, walking over to me and wiping her hands on the towel over her shoulder.
“My hand?” I stepped back a bit.
Jo’s blond hair slid over the shoulder of her green tee shirt as she reached for my hand.
I felt her fingers curl around mine, then heat on the palm of my hand. She ran her finger over the back of my hand. “See?” she said, stroking my skin again. “You’re just standing here. I’m holding your hand and stroking it over and over,” she said softly, her eyes glued to mine. We stood there in total silence for a minute or so, watching her finger slide over my hand.
Then I worried that Jo could see the large pores in my nose and I glanced back out the window over the sink. The trees on the side of the mountain blurred through the falling snow.
“I look at the color of your eyes,” Jo kept on, even though she could see how uncomfortable I was getting. “I notice how green they are. I realize I’ve never seen how green your eyes are.”
I yanked my hand back. “Stop!” I said. “It’s tickling.”
Jo watched my hand slip out of hers. “See.” Her hands dropped to her sides. “Someone who’s sick wouldn’t do that. They’d just sit here and let me touch them. Your mother, you know, she isn’t used to anyone touching her. But now that she’s sick she just lies in bed and lets me stroke her hand.
“I never could have done that before she got sick.”
The Last Thing Dad Remembered
…was standing in front of his bedroom mirror trying on his shirts and wondering whether, when he went to see Ma in the hospital, she would enjoy seeing him in his crimson-colored shirt or the light blue one. He was so happy she made it through her operation he could hardly do up the buttons.
Now, one month later, a screeching sound spilled through the room as Kerry, trying to carve out a little privacy, drew the peach-colored curtain around Dad’s hospital bed.
