Mad River Road Read Online Free PDF

for surgery on his ankle this morning,” she informed the woman, tightly clutching the gift she’d brought him, the plastic bag crinkling beneath her fingers.
    The woman typed the information into her computer, a worried look flashing across her handsome features. “I’m afraid Mr. Rannells has been moved to intensive care.”
    “Intensive care? For a broken ankle?”
    “That’s all the information I have.”
    The woman directed Jamie to the intensive care ward on the third floor. But the doors to the ward were locked and nobody answered when she pushed the call button, so Jamie spent the next several minutes pacing back and forth in the sterile waiting area, trying to figure out how a healthy, thirty-five-year-old man could enter the hospital for a relatively minor operation and end up in intensive care.
    “You might as well sit down,” a middle-aged woman with pale white skin, short brown hair, and tired blue eyes said from one of the orange plastic seats lining the bare walls. “I think they’re pretty busy in there.”
    “Have you been waiting long?”
    “I’m actually waiting for a friend.” She spread the
People
magazine she’d been reading across her lap. “She’s inside visiting her daughter who was in a car accident. They’re not sure if she’s gonna make it.”
    “That’s terrible.” Jamie looked around, but there was nothing to see. “My boyfriend was scheduled for surgery this morning,” she offered, unprompted. “Somehow he ended up here.” She returned to the call button, pushed it several times in rapid succession.
    “Yes?” a disembodied voice answered seconds later. “How can I help you?”
    “My name is Jamie Kellogg. I’m here to see Tim Rannells,” Jamie shouted at the button.
    “Are you a relative of Mr. Rannells?”
    “You better say yes,” the woman advised from her orange plastic chair. “Or they won’t let you in.”
    “I’m his sister,” Jamie answered without thinking. Probably because she had her own sister on the brain. Cynthia had been bugging her for weeks about coming over to go through their mother’s things.
    “Please have a seat for a few minutes,” the disembodied voice said before clicking off.
    Jamie swiveled back toward the woman in the orange chair. “Thanks for warning me.”
    “They have these rules,” the woman said with a shrug. “I’m Marilyn, by the way.”
    “Jamie,” Jamie said. “I wish someone would tell me what’s going on.” She stared at the call button. “You don’t think something terrrible’s happened, do you?” A stupid question, she realized immediately, although that didn’t stop her from asking another. “You don’t think he could have died, do you?”
    “I’m sure someone will be out in a minute,” Marilyn said.
    “I mean, he just came in for a broken ankle.”
    “Try to stay calm.”
    Jamie smiled, although tears were already forming in the corners of her eyes. Her mother was always telling her to stay calm. “My mother was always telling me that,” she repeated out loud. “She said I was too impulsive, too quick to react, that I had a tendency to jump to conclusions before I was in possession of all the facts.”
    “That’s quite a mouthful.”
    “My mother was a judge.”
    “She certainly sounds judgmental enough.”
    Jamie sat back in her chair, unsettled by Marilyn’s remark. People were forever reminding Jamie what a great woman her mother was. She was surprised by this stranger’s unsolicited comment, and by how grateful she felt for it.
    “I’m sorry. I hope I didn’t offend you.”
    “You didn’t.”
    The woman turned her attention to the magazine in her lap.
    “I have a sister,” Jamie continued, unprompted. “She’s pretty much what I was supposed to be—a lawyer, married, two kids, you know … perfect.”
    “A perfect pain in the butt, you mean.”
    Jamie smiled. The more Marilyn talked, the more Jamie liked her. “She’s okay. It’s just hard sometimes because