Beauty and the Mustache Read Online Free PDF Page A

do about the rest of the staff.
    I stumbled out of the
hospital around 9:30 p.m. feeling exhausted and empty. My brain
whispered to me as I walked to my car that the only thing I’d
consumed that day was a triple-grande Americano at 7:00
a.m.
    I wasn’t hungry, though. I
was the opposite of hungry, but neither full nor
satiated.
    I slipped into the driver’s
seat and stared unseeingly out the windshield, and was pulled from
my trance by the sound of my cell phone ringing. I glanced at the
caller ID. It was my friend Sandra, my best friend Sandra.
    Relief and a tangible
feeling I couldn’t name seized my body, a pain so sharp that I
gasped. It felt like the glass chamber that had surrounded me all
day had finally shattered. I was suddenly breathing, and the air
that filled my lungs hurt. The photo of Sandra’s smiling face on my
phone blurred, or rather my vision blurred because I was crying. I
swiped my thumb across the screen and brought the phone to my
ear.
    “ Hello?”
    “ Ashley! Thank God, you
answered. Marie and I need you to settle a debate. Which is worse:
not having enough yarn to finish a sweater or discovering that the
yarn you used for the sweater was mislabeled as cashmere and is
actually one hundred percent acrylic?”
    My brain told me that it
was Tuesday, which meant that back in Chicago where I lived and
worked and had a lovely life reading books and enjoying my friends,
it was knitting group night. Sandra, a pediatric psychiatrist with
a pervy heart of gold, was in my knitting group, as was
Marie.
    “ Sandra….” My voice broke,
and I rested my head against the steering wheel, tears falling
messy and hot down my cheeks and neck and nose.
    “ Oh! Oh, my darling….”
Sandra’s voice emerged from the other end earnest and alarmed.
“What’s going on? Are you okay? What happened? Who made you cry? Do
I need to kill someone? Tell me what to do.”
    I sniffled, squeezed my
eyes shut against the new wave of tears. “It’s my mother.” I
pressed my lips together in an effort to control my voice, then
took a shaky breath and said, “She’s dying.”
    “ Your mother is
dying?”
    “ They’ve called hospice.
She has stage four cervical cancer. It’s metastasized everywhere.
She has six weeks….” I sobbed, almost dropping the phone and
shaking my head against the new onslaught of tears.
    The other end was quiet
for a beat. “Okay…where are you? I can be there by
tomorrow.”
    I shook my head. “No.” I
sniffed and wiped my hand under my nose then took a deep breath.
“No, no. Don’t do that. I just…I just needed to tell someone. I’m
leaving the hospital now.”
    “ Are you in
Knoxville?”
    “ Sandra….” I covered my
eyes with my hand and sighed. “You are not flying down
here.”
    “ Yes. I am flying down
there.”
    “ So am I!” I heard
Elizabeth’s voice from the other end. Elizabeth was also in my
knitting group and was an emergency department physician. She
worked with both Sandra and me at the hospital in
Chicago.
    Their threat to fly down
to Tennessee sobered me, and I gathered a series of calming breaths
before responding. “She’s at the hospital in Knoxville. They’re
releasing her to home hospice tomorrow.”
    I related the rest of the
facts surrounding my mother’s sudden hospital admission, how she
hadn’t told anyone she was sick, how she’d ignored all the signs
and symptoms until it was too late. Reciting the details calmed me.
By the time I was finished, the tears had receded.
    “ Oh, honey.” Sandra’s
impossibly kind and empathetic voice soothed me from the other end
of the line.
    “ Tell her I found
tickets,” Elizabeth said in the background. “We can leave first
thing tomorrow.”
    A disbelieving laugh tumbled from my lips.
“You can’t just drop everything and rush down here.”
    “ Yes, we can. We’ll see
you tomorrow.” I heard Sandra say, “I want the aisle seat.” It was
muffled, as if she’d covered the phone with her