Read Eating Heaven for Free Online Page B

don’t know. It was last week. I think he looked okay.”
    “And how long has he been sick?”
    I shrug, helpless. “I don’t know. A long time. He doesn’t admit to feeling bad unless he’s dying.” I clamp my mouth shut to take back that word.
    “A guess?”
    I think back and back, without the filters of Benny’s excuses, his cheery assertions that he’s feeling much better. “Four weeks, maybe? Five?”
    He writes something down and I feel better, having supplied this tidbit.
    “Does he have any immediate family?”
    “Not really,” I say, biting my lip. I’ve flunked the good-niece test.
    “No wife? Kids?”
    “Well, yes, a wife, but they’re separated.”
    “But she’ll know his medical history?” he prompts.
    “I don’t know her new number, but her name’s Yolanda Sloan. Unless she’s gone back to Duran, her maiden name.” I pause. “Just how sick do you think he is?”
    He looks up from his clipboard. “You’re close to your uncle?”
    Whatever’s wrong with Benny, I have to know, so I confess. “He’s nottechnically my uncle. But, he’s . . . you know.” I shrug, chew my lip. “My family.”
    It works. He says, “We’re looking at a few possibilities here. The best outcome would be something like pancreatitis, which we could treat with antibiotics. It could also be hepatitis, as you mentioned, which, depending on the type, might not be too bad to deal with.”
    “And the not-so-good outcome?”
    “Probably what you’re thinking. Liver failure. Cancer. His liver didn’t feel enlarged when I palpated it, but it’s still a possibility.”
    “Would he be able to get a transplant or something?”
    “Let’s take it one step at a time,” he says. “We’ll get the results of the tests and then we’ll have a better idea of what’s going on, okay?”
    “Oh. Right.” He’s just a kid, but he’s clearly used to these kinds of things, people with serious illnesses, family members with stupid questions. Somehow, I’m almost forty and I don’t have a clue how to do this.
    “I’ll go track down his wife,” he says, tucking his pen inside his shirt pocket. “When I know more, I’ll let you know.”
    He walks away, high-top sneakers squeaking as they hit the linoleum of the hallway. I take a seat in the middle of a row of hard gray plastic chairs and say, “Tell her Ellie says hi,” although he doesn’t hear me. Suddenly, I miss her more fiercely than if she’d died.

chapter four

     
    W hen I was a child, I didn’t know it was unusual for a mechanic to take photography classes and read books and listen to classical music and jazz singers, to cry at school plays even though he had no children of his own. He seemed normal to me; he was just Uncle Benny.
    I borrowed his books all the time—I discovered brand-new copies of Mark Twain, Ernest Hemingway, Harper Lee, John Steinbeck, Louisa May Alcott lurking on Benny’s shelves between the potboilers and old Zane Grays, the Ford and Chrysler specifications manuals, and kitschy joke books. Sometimes in school I’d find that I’d already read the required book for a class and I’d be surprised that other people knew about Benny’s and my secret.
    I decided to be a writer in sixth grade; someday I’d write beautiful, heartfelt stories about important things, like the starving children in Biafra or maybe poems like Rod McKuen’s. Sometimes now, as I shift in my chair at the computer, searching for a new way to say “sauté onions until translucent,” I try to conjure the old fantasies, but it gets harder every year. I am a writer, I tell myself, I get paid to do it, but somehow I can never recapture my childhood enthusiasm.
    It seems now that we always knew her, but Yolanda didn’t come into our lives until the summer before I entered junior high and developed my own breasts. One muggy July day when a Pacific storm was brewing, Mom came home from the grocery store, looking dazed. She unloadedjust two bags from the