Read Second Hand Heart for Free Online Page A

to the strange shock of that sight.
    One more thing I’m sure you’ll want to know: I didn’t use the paddles on your new heart. I would have if I’d had to. If it had fibrillated even a few seconds longer. But I remembered what you said, and I gave it just a tiny bit more time. Just warmed it and trusted it for a split second or two longer, and it started beating on its own. I remember you told me that was important to you. To get it off to a welcoming start.
    Have a good life, Vida. Of course I’ll see you again, but I hope to begin to see far less of you as these next few years go by. Go slow, take good care, but don’t neglect the business of living, now that you can have a chance to get on with that.
    With affection and no small measure of admiration,
Juanita Vasquez

CHAPTER 2: RICHARD
    From:
Richard Bailey
To:
Myra Buckner
    Dear Myra,
    The purpose of this email is to let you know I’m OK. I’ve been meaning to write to you for days. Ever since you more or less held me up graveside. To let you know I’m OK.
    Now if I were only OK.
    Truth be told, I’m still fogged in. I’m still pretty fully enmeshed in that no-mans-land, the one I think I tried to explain to you at the time. No doubt I failed. Worse yet, maybe I only thought it. Never actually said it out loud at all. It’s been harder, lately, to tell the two apart.
    The land I’m referring to is that numb, foggy shock that follows one around in the wake of a traumatic event. Only, not for long enough it doesn’t.
    It’s a blessing in its own way. It really is. You wake in the morning with no orientation. No memory of what was lost. Then it comes back on you like a sleeper wave, followed by the numbing shock. It’s horrible, but it’s easy. All you have to do is get up and wash your face. Then you call a friend and say you got up and washed your face, and your friend says, Fabulous, Richard. You will survive. No mention is made of the finer details: the day’s work ignored, the unbalanced checkbook, the stacks of bills and messages.
    No one would dare suggest what I’m sure they will later tirelessly insist, that life goes on from here. For the moment, simply putting one of your feet in front of the other is a source of pride.
    I’ve been talking about myself in the second person a lot lately. I’m not sure what that means.
    Anyway, my point is that later, I suspect, the bar will not be set so low on my life. But I’d rather not think about that right now.
    I almost went to see Vida in the hospital today. Even though I know you think it’s a bad idea. Even though, when we talked it over, you made that very clear. But I think I will, sooner or later. It’s one of those things that burns a hole at the back of your mind, where you store it every minute of every day. You can’t stop feeling for the way it’s resting or more likely not resting there in its makeshift storage. It becomes an irritation, and you find yourself working with that, like an oyster making a pearl out of a speck of foreign object, in self-defense.
    I’m just so sure I’m going to break down and see her, against advice, someday. Today began to look like as good a day as any to mess things up. But I was saved by an odd sort of a bell. Because first I have to have that small oil leak fixed on my car. I called the mechanic, but he needed a couple of days to schedule it in.
    That is one detail I was not about to numb away for later. If some innocent soul were to skid off the road in a fine late-spring rain, the mist of water sitting on a wash of filmy crankcase oil, unable to soak into the pavement, just pooling there where the rubber meets the road, it was important that none of the oil be mine. That this new disaster not be any of my leaving. The fact that no rain is predicted didn’t seem to influence the matter.
    Come to think, no rain was predicted on the evening Lorrie left us.
    Sorry to be euphemistic, but I’m so tender that the truth feels like a type of violence to