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Show Moon - 217 her brothers were coming. James poured himself a beer, stood in the kitchen doorway and said to Joy, "I want you to see how it is for me." He took her into the master bedroom. There were two single beds where there once had been a double bed. One of them had a urine-stained tube attached to a plastic bag. In the corner was a wheelchair. He set the beer down on the floor, took her arm and pulled her over to the bed with the tube. "Here, let me show you." He held up the loose end of the tube, which had a screw-like device on the end. "When she goes to bed, you have to undo the bag on her leg, unscrew the tube coming out of the catheter, screw it in here." He jerked the end of the tube angrily. "You have to do it fast. Get it? Then you have to empty the bag that was on her leg into the toilet and rinse it out. Got that?" He pointed to the other single bed, the one without the tube. "That's where you'll be sleeping while you're here." Joy stood, appalled. Did he speak this way to her mother, his hand pointing and shaking, his face contorted with dark rage? She went back into the livingroom, looked around, turned to her father, "Where are the mums?" she said. "Mums?" "The flowers I brought her in Delaware. I got them in a pot so she could keep them." Her father shrugged. "We didn't bring home any flowers." She felt wild and angry as if she were still a child and wanted to run out of the cottage, to keep on running, down to the lake, then up the path through the woods. Last fall's leaves would crackle under her feet like small fires. She'd run |