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heard his father tell Ahn that Branwyn had agreed to go to the hospital in the morning.
    The blond tank rumbled up to his brother’s room and said, “They’re taking Mama Branwyn to the hospital in the morning. We should pick flowers for her so her room’ll be pretty.”
    “The hospital?” Thomas said.
    Thomas hated the hospital. He’d been there half a dozen times that he could remember. Twice for pneumonia that had developed after he’d come down with chest colds, twice for broken bones, once for a cut when he fell down on a broken bottle, and one time when he fainted in school for no apparent reason. Every time he went they gave him shots, and twice he’d had to spend the night. He knew that people sometimes died in the hospital, and so when he went to bed later that night, he couldn’t go to sleep. He sat up remembering the stories of how his mother came every day and they looked at each other through the glass bubble. He believed that she had saved him by being there, and he wondered who would be there for her if he was at school.
    Thomas went to her room after midnight. Branwyn stayed in her own bedroom when she was sick. She needed everything quiet and “no man kicking around in the bed.”
    He climbed up quietly on the bed and stared into his mother’s face. At first he planned just to look at her as she’d told him she’d done when he was asleep in the ICU.
    “Didn’t you wake me up?” he asked her.
    “No, baby. You needed to sleep to get better and so I just sat there, but I’m sure you knew I was there in your dreams.”
    Thomas planned to do the same thing, to sit so close that his mother’s dreams would drink him in. But after a few minutes he worried that maybe she had died. She was so quiet, and he couldn’t tell if she was breathing.
    “Mama?”
    She opened her eyes and said, “Yes, baby?”
    “I know how to answer the story.”
    “What story?”
    “The one Daddy said.”
    “What is it?”
    “First you take the rooster to the other side an’ leave him there. Then you come back and get the fox and bring him to the other side. Then you put the rooster back in the boat and take him back and leave him on the first side and you take the corn over to where the fox is. Now the corn and the fox are together but that’s okay, and so you can go back an’ get the rooster.”
    “You’re so smart, Thomas. Your father will be very happy.”
    “Will you be okay now that I said it?” the boy asked.
    “Why you cryin’, honey?”
    “Because you’re sick and I don’t want you to die.”
    Branwyn sat up. Thomas crawled up close to her and leaned against her slender shoulder.
    “Are you scared ’cause I’m goin’ to the hospital?”
    “Uh-huh.”
    “It’s only for some tests,” she said. “Will you do what Dr. Nolan tells you while I’m gone?”
    “Yes.”
    “And do you know that I will always be with you through rain and shine, thick and thin?”
    “Yes.”
    “I’m not gonna die, baby. I’m gonna go in there and stay for a day or two and then I’ll be back here and wide awake.”
    “But sometimes people die in the hospital,” he insisted.
    “Sometimes,” she agreed. “But even when they do they don’t really die.”
    “What happens to’em?”
    “They just change. They’re still here in the hearts of all the people that loved them. Your grandmother says that she talks to granddaddy every night before she goes to bed. He’s still there for her whenever she gets sad.
    “But you don’t have to worry about that. I’m still strong and healthy. I’m just a little tired, that’s all. You know that, right?”
    “I guess.”
    “Come here and lie down next to me,” she said. “Sleep with me in the bed tonight.”
    And Thomas nestled up next to his mother, and they whispered secrets and little jokes until he finally fell asleep in her arms.
    THE NEXT MORNING Thomas went to wake up Minas Nolan in his bed.
    “Mama won’t wake up,” he told his mother’s lover.