One Summer Read Online Free PDF Page A

I’ll run up and see him. Call me if you need any help, Mother.”
    “You know I don’t need any help cooking.” Elisabeth’s cooking ability was her pride and joy. Rachel’s offer had been more in the nature of riposte for her mother’s earlier jab than anything else.
    “I know, Mother.” Rachel’s voice gentled, and she smiled at her mother before she left the kitchen and turned left, climbing the narrow backstairs. Her relationship with Elisabeth had always been as much prickles as hugs, but still she loved her. It was hard on her mother, the fate that had befallen Stan. More even than she loved Becky, Elisabeth loved her husband.
    Well before she reached the third floor, Rachel could hear the rollicking strains of “Hound Dog.” The ballroom, which was a grand name for what was in essence a large glassed-in sleeping porch that took up about half of the top of the house, was devoid of furnishings and had a hardwood floor without the noise-deadening oriental carpets that warmed the rooms below. Sound was amplified by the room’s bareness. Despite herself—she had neverbeen a big Elvis fan—Rachel found herself bopping to the beat as she walked along the upstairs hall. The song was infectious. Stan had always loved Elvis and had mourned as if at losing a family member when he died.
    The door to the elevator, which they had had installed for Stan and his wheelchair, stood open as she passed it. Later it would take Stan and J.D. down to the first floor, where he would eat and be wheeled outside for his daily walk. Still later, it would bring him back to the second floor to be bathed, given his sleeping prescription, and put to bed. Such was the unremitting routine of his days. Whenever she thought of her vigorous father being reduced to such never-ending monotony, Rachel wanted to weep. So she tried not to think about it.
    Just as she had expected as she turned the corner to enter the ballroom, Rachel found that her father was seated in his wheelchair, eyes closed, nodding his head in time to the music. Listening to Elvis’s songs was one of the few pleasures that remained to him. They managed to reach him when nothing else could.
    J.D. sat cross-legged on the floor beside Stan, his belly protruding hugely over the waistband of his gray work pants, his lighter gray shirt unbuttoned to reveal the white undershirt beneath. Darker skinned than his wife, he was also more ebullient, with a ready smile for anyone who passed his way. He hummed along with the music, his gnarled fingers drumming a beat on the polished floor. Rachel must have made some sound, because he looked up, grinning when he saw her. Rachel waved at him. Any attempt at speech was almost certainly doomed given the volume of the music.
    She crossed to her father and touched his hand.
    “Hello, Daddy.”
    He didn’t open his eyes, didn’t even seem aware of her presence or of her fingers resting on his. Rachel kept them there for a minute, then removed them, sighing. Not that she had expected any other response. These days it wasenough for her to see him, to know that he was comfortable and well cared for.
    Attending to his physical needs was all she or anyone else could do. At least they’d managed to keep him at home. Without J.D., who alone could handle him when he became unruly, and without Tilda to help, they would have had to put him in a nursing home.
    Rachel cringed at the mere idea, although Dr. Johnson, Stan’s physician, had warned that institutionalization might yet become necessary as the disease progressed through its last stages. Elisabeth could not even consider the prospect without hysterical tears. They had been married forty-one years.
    Stan had once been a big man, over six feet two and about two hundred twenty pounds. He was still physically large, but his illness seemed to be shrinking him. Or perhaps, now that he depended on her instead of the other way around, it was Rachel’s perception of his size that had changed. In