OCR Text |
Show fabric and dried blood on the doctor's smock. Clouds, flowers, buildings, snakes. At least here is something he can hold onto. Because of the sweating and the breathing and the general chaos the doctor brings with him into the tiny waiting room, the young man does not hear every word the doctor says, but by highlighting the key terms he comes to understand that things have gone badly in the delivery room. So badly in fact that he must now choose to save either his wife or what could be or would have been his daughter. The Kingsville County Hospital waiting room has long ago emptied, and the dark suit now seems painfully out of place. News like this should be met less formally. It could appear to someone on the outside, a bystander, one of the cigar-laden new fathers, that he has come to the hospital prepared to mourn. Faced with the possibility of losing the woman that he loves, the young man chooses his wife. In so doing he chooses to let the daughter go. V I am twelveand dressed up because my father has invited me to lunch at the Pearl City Tavern. Having never been out to lunch before, let alone lunch with just my father, I am both nervous and excited. Walking across the parking lot and toward the restaurant, he puts his arm around my waist and shows me how to hook my fingers in his belt loops to keep from letting him go. I feel very adult, walking this way, somehow longer in body. The tavern is dark; businessmen dressed in aloha shirts and hunched over plates of meatloaf and ribs fill the booths. The waitress shows us to a table, and I sit down across from my father. When he orders a coke for me, it comes with a yellow umbrella |