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can he come home?” “Did the bullets hurt?” “Did Dad kill the guy who did it?”
    And then Joy piped up, her question silencing them all: “Is my daddy gonna die?”
    What Alice neglected to tell the kids was that their father would not have been shot if he’d stopped himself calling the woman’s husband “a stupid nigger.”
    By day three Joy realized that sitting on her father’s hospital bed allowed her the luxury of being near both her parents. Her mother paced the room and the hallways, every once in a while grabbing a cup of coffee from the cafeteria. Joy didn’t want to doanything to upset her mother so she sat obediently in the chair under the wall-mounted television, fighting off fantasies of a candy bar from the vending machine.
    Joy listened intently to her mother as she stroked her husband’s neck. “When did we stop finding time for each other?” No reply. “When you get out of here, let’s go on a date, like we used to, before the kids were born… park behind the drive-in and kiss for hours. When’s the last time we kissed? I’ll get all dolled up in your favorite dress, you know, the one you used to tell me made me look like Kim Novak—if Kim Novak were a redhead.” Alice’s fingers ran over the IV tube, tracing the tube up his muscle forearm to his vein. “I bet that dress still fits. I know you’re wondering why I kept it all those years. It’s because someday all those housewife dresses will be back in style. You just watch.” Alice’s ran her palm behind his ears, stroking his hair down from where it stubbornly stuck straight up. “Hey, remember the night you asked me to marry you—out on the boardwalk and I couldn’t hear you on account of the sea spray crashing against the pier? So you had to ask me four times before I understood what you were saying? Remember that?”
    Still no answer.
    And then Alice turned to Joy who was hanging onto her mother’s every word. Her look told her mother she couldn’t imagine who these two strange adults were. Certainly not her parents…
    â€œSweet pea,” said Alice, “Stay here with your father. I’m just going down the hall to make a call. See what those brothers of yours are up to back at the house.”
    Joy nodded obediently and was left, a tiny mouse in a room of cat-like hissing machines. Some made a thumping sound, pumping oxygen to her father’s rising andfalling chest, while Joy kicked the rungs of her metal chair to the rhythm of the bleeping heart monitor every time it flashed red. She quite liked the sterile sanity of her surroundings. No piles of washing, dirty plates, newspaper coupons…
    And then her dad mumbled something.
    Joy jumped from her chair and crawled to the metal rail at her father’s bedside His eyes were sealed shut, his lips smiling at the feel of his daughter’s sweet breath hovering onto his face.
    â€œWhat, Daddy? What did you say?”
    â€œWater—kid, go get…”
    â€œWhat, Daddy?”
    â€œWa—water,” he mumbled again, the oxygen tube moving under his nose as he spoke.
    Joy slid down from the mattress, and went to the bathroom sink. She turned on the cold, her eyes searching the walls for a Dixie cup dispenser or a glass. None.
    â€œI’ll be right back,” she called out, and marched down the hall a little too loudly to where her mother leaned against the wall, dangling and stretching the phone cord at the nurses’ station.
    â€œTell him it’s his turn to do the dishes!” Alice insisted into the receiver. “And be sure to have your brother put out the trash. It’s collection night.” She appeased Joy with a head pat and then turned back to barking at the wall in front of her. “No, not tomorrow morning. Didn’t I just say tonight? I said tonight, young man.”
    Joy tugged at her mother’s