Read Past Due for Free Online Page A

I’ve always liked them myself. Very flattering to the hips.”
    “I need to tell you.”
    “Sure, Dad. That’s fine. But how are you feeling? It looks like you’re in pain. Are you?”
    “What do you think? Whenever I breathe. I haven’t slept in days.”
    I jumped up. “Let me find a doctor.” Before he could reply, I was out the door.
    “My father’s in a bit of agony,” I told the nurse behind the desk. “You think he could be given something to ease it for a time, maybe let him sleep.” The nurse told me to wait a moment as she went off to find the intern, and I stood dutifully at the nurses’ desk, playing the part of the dutiful son, glancing uneasily at the door to my father’s room, just down the hall.
    I didn’t want to hear that he had been thinking of things, my father. I didn’t want to hear what he was thinking about. And I really really really didn’t want to hear about the girl in the pleated skirtthat had suddenly popped into his consciousness as he stared un-blinking at his own mortality. The girl who got away, the girl who broke his heart, the girl, that girl, the girl, the one. It was all too sad and ordinary. It didn’t take much to imagine it all in one sad swoop. The shy glances, the sweet romance, and then the cheating, his or hers, it didn’t matter, the cheating and the recriminations, and then the breakup that left him sad and wounded, that left him weak and unguarded, like a boxer ready to fall into an exhausted embrace with the first girl who came along, even someone totally unsuited to him, even someone certifiable, someone like, well, like my mother, from which all his ruin and misery had come, including his only begotten son. No, I didn’t want to hear how with the girl in the pleated skirt everything would have been different, how with the girl in the pleated skirt life would have been more than a sad burden to be shouldered through to death. Because it wouldn’t have been different, my dad’s life, and we both knew it. My father was someone who trudged through life while others floated, a man who set a course of low expectations for himself and then mercilessly failed to meet them, a man who chose bitterness and anger because they just came naturally, dammit, and what do you know anyway, you little bastard.
    “Are you Mr. Carl’s son?”
    I pulled myself out of my self-absorption to see a set of scrubs and a chart and a woman wearing and holding them both. She was young and thin and her eyes, though tired, were very blue. And she was a doctor, Dr. Hellmann.
    “Like the mayonnaise,” I said.
    She smiled thinly as if she hadn’t heard that more than a thousand times before and then went right to the chart. “You said your father has been in acute distress, is that right?”
    “Yes.”
    “We don’t give opiates to COPDers.”
    “Excuse me?”
    “Chronic obstructive pulmonary disease. It’s what your father has, it’s why he’s here. But there is something maybe I can prescribe to ease his pleuritic pain. It won’t put him to sleep, but it will let him sleep if the pain is keeping him up. I’ll need to talk to him first.”
    “Sure,” I said as I followed her down the hall. “How’s he doing?”
    “We’re waiting for the antibiotic to work.”
    “Maybe you should pump in some Iron City. That’s his usual medication of choice.”
    She looked at me with her eyes narrowed. “Is that a joke?”
    “Yes,” I said.
    “Try harder next time.”
    “How long have you been on duty?” I asked.
    “Thirty so far.”
    “Maybe after thirty hours nothing is funny.”
    “Maybe,” she said, as we reached my father’s door, “but I couldn’t stop laughing at the evening news. That Peter Jennings, he was just cracking me up. You, on the other hand…” She gave me a jolt of her baby blues as she backed into the room. “Wait here.”
    I waited. She spoke to my father for a long while and came out, writing on the chart. “The nurse will be back in a moment