Mercy Train Read Online Free PDF Page B

tucked his cigar box under his arm and saluted her with his free hand before bounding down the stairs, jumping two-footed onto each landing with an echoing boom, all the way down.
    When she could no longer hear him, Violet knelt on the grimy floor and pulled the door open with her finger. She had never been inside. The last time she had come looking for her mother, an old man had chased her away, swinging a walking stick at her and screaming in Chinese. The ceiling was high, and bands of sunlight stole through fabric nailed across the windows. Patrons lay on their sides on straw mats or on flat mismatched cushions, their heads on their arms like napping children.
    Madam Tang was a middle-aged Chinese woman with parchment skin and corncob teeth, a layer of flesh between her chin and her neck. She reclined on a frayed divan. Peeking out from beneath the hem of her long silk smock, her small feet were fat and bare, her toes contracted and gnarled.
    The smokers were all men except for Lilibeth, who curved her body gracefully around her tapped opium pipe. Her eyes were at half mast, but they seemed to smile in spite of her slack, slightly parted lips.
    â€œMama,” Violet said.
    Madam Tang whipped her head to the door, a snarl slashed across her face, but she knew better than to disturb her customers by raising a fuss.
    Lilibeth lifted her eyes slowly to her daughter. “Vi,” she said, in a low, throaty voice. “Vi, Vi, Vi, Vi, Vi. What am I going to do with you?”
    She patted the mat. Violet lay down under the crook of her mother’s arm and breathed in the smell of stale, sweet smoke from her sleeve, the faint hint of lilac from her perfume. Violet took hold of Lilibeth’s delicate fingers, and then closed her eyes.

 
    IRIS
    Iris decided that her birthday would be a good day to die. That gave her three more weeks. She would have liked to see the end of the millennium, out of some desire for the tidiness of reaching a milestone year, she supposed, but this was not an option in even the most hopeful of scenarios. She had always thought cancer would be a banal way to go, but in fact it felt personal, almost intimate, an insidious march beneath the surface of her skin. Seventy-two years didn’t seem like an unfair sentence. She had lived plenty. She had tried to express this to her children in an attempt to curb their need to find a solution, some other specialist, treatment, or drug to prolong the inevitable, but her passivity—her equanimity, really—frustrated them more than it comforted.
    Morning was the least painful part of the day. Iris sat up in bed and placed her feet on the floor, waiting for the stars to recede from her vision and her blood pressure to stabilize. Even as her body had gone to hell from age and sickness, her feet still looked girlish, her toes painted petunia pink. She had been barefoot every summer of her Minnesota childhood, her soles tough and dirty, the tops of her feet tanned deep. The older she got the more recent those years seemed, while the decades she spent as a suburban housewife grew flat and faded. That wasn’t completely true, she thought, rubbing her feet lightly against the white Berber rug. There were her children, and sometimes memories of when Theo and Samantha were little would strike her with vivid wallops. Motherhood was its own universe with its own nonlinear time line, its own indefinable pain and reward.
    The overhead fan spun lazily above her head, the air cool through the open window. Iris wondered if she would ever need to turn on the air-conditioning again. This was a game she played with herself: would this be the last manicure, shampoo purchase, mu shu pork, thunderstorm, visit to the post office, Saturday crossword puzzle? This musing imparted ceremony to the mundane, which she appreciated. There weren’t many things she longed to do again, though she would have liked to revisit her childhood home near the south fork of the