Eat Cake: A Novel Read Online Free PDF

complicated for everybody, but we’ll work around it.”
    “It doesn’t make things complicated. It makes things impossible. I don’t mean to be cold-hearted here, but you remember that Mother hates you, right? This is her home now. I can’t just—”
    “Ruthie, listen again.”
    This time I imagined my father holding the phone up to the ceiling and suddenly I could hear quite clearly what the intercom voice was saying. “Dr. Lewis, please report to the ICU.” It was the way he would break some sort of bad news, to make a riddle out of it, to come around to the information by the most circuitous route possible.
    “Dad, what’s happened?”
    “I had a little accident.”
    “And you’re hurt?”
    “I’m fairly hurt,” he said, his voice as chipper as ever. “It isn’t an impossible situation but I am going to need to come and stay with you even if it means we have to grind up a few Valium in your mother’s Metamucil.”
    “How are you hurt?”
    “I broke my wrists.”
    “You broke your wrist?” That didn’t seem so impossible. A person could still get around in the world with a broken wrist.
    “Wrists. Plural. Both of them. I’ve got a lovely nurse named Gina who’s holding the phone for me right now.”
    “You can’t hold the phone?”
    “I can’t hold a fork.”
    “Let me talk to Gina.” I pressed the phone against my chest and whispered to Sam, “This isn’t good.”
    “She wants to talk to you, darling,” I heard my father say, and then Gina said hello.
    “Are you Guy’s daughter?” Gina had a big, solid smoker’s voice. I imagined her heavyset, bleached, with frosted lipstick. My father’s type.
    I owned up to being the daughter and asked her what the problem was.
    “The problem is your dad has three sets of pins in each of his wrists. They did the surgery when they brought him in last night.”
    “Surgery?”
    “Those pins don’t get in there by themselves.”
    “This is serious.”
    “This is pretty serious. Bones don’t heal so quickly when you get to be a certain age.”
    “You think I’m too old for you?” I heard my father say in the background.
    Gina didn’t answer his question. “The doctors think with time and a good bit of physical therapy he should make a solid recovery.”
    There were a million questions to ask but none of them came to mind. I just saw my father propped up in a hospital bed, his arms plastered straight out in front of him, and for reasons I could not explain I felt guilty. Maybe he hadn’t been much of a father but I certainly hadn’t been much of a daughter. Suddenly there were tears in my eyes and Sam was whispering to me, “What happened? What happened?”
    “What happened?” I said to Gina.
    “It seems to be a pretty complicated story. We’ve had a couple of versions since last night. The bottom line is he fell and smashed his wrists.”
    “But nothing else.”
    “His wrists, his right elbow. I think he’s got one shoulder that’s sprained. It was enough.”
    “Oh, Dad,” I whispered. “Let me talk to him again.”
    “He’s taking a good bit of Percocet for the pain right now. He may not sound entirely like himself.”
    But he had sounded exactly like himself, which made mewonder if he had been taking Percocet for a while. “Dad? Can you hear me?”
    “I didn’t fall on my ear, darling.”
    “I didn’t know if Gina had the phone up.”
    “She’s doing a great job.”
    I almost couldn’t ask it. The question got halfway up my throat and then lodged there like a chip of crab shell. “Do you know if you’re going to be able to play the piano again?”
    And then my father roared. His laugh was huge and round and I could hear the nurses laughing with him even though they wouldn’t have known why they were laughing. He sputtered and coughed, trying to bring himself down again. “Ruthie, you’re a genius! That was the first thing I said. I’m smashed to bits and they’re taking me off to surgery, all these doctors