Taking Care of Terrific Read Online Free PDF

She took one last bite of baked potato, sighed, and pushed her plate a little bit away from her. She looked tired and exasperated. But for once the exasperation wasn't focused on me.
    "Mom," I said, "what would happen if just
one
nurse complained about the changes in schedules?"
    "One nurse? Nothing. She'd be told to take it or leave it. They can always replace one nurse."
    "What's going to happen if all the nurses go on strike?"
    She sighed again. "They'll negotiate. The hospital can't function with all the nurses out. Eventually they'll come to some satisfactory arrangement. In the meantime, I have several patients who..."
    She went on talking, but I stopped listening. My mind was off in the world of root beer Popsicles. Okay; so root beer Popsicles aren't as important as people lying in hospital beds; I know that. But the principle seemed the same. I kept thinking of that old woman, sitting all alone on a park bench with her worldly goods in a big black pocketbook and maybe no place to sleep that night except in a doorway, and I could hear her muttering, "They never asked anybody really, they decide things without consulting anyone, they always do that..."
    Maybe it wasn't as important in the great scheme of things as nurses, whose schedules had been changed without anyone consulting them.
Maybe it wasn't as life-and-death as people in hospital beds, people who were sick and needed nurses to bring their medicine and take their temperature and maybe just talk to them a little bit if they were scared.
    But it was the same basic thing. It was comfort. What if all you had in the whole world, besides a black bag and a chilly doorway, was a memory of a father who once made root beer, and sometimes a Popsicle that brought that memory back? And what if they took that little bit of comfort away without asking you?
    One old lady. As Mom said, one person complaining means nothing. Take it or leave it, they would say. But if a
lot
of people went on strike...
    And Joshua Warwick Cameron IV, Tom Terrific, champion counter, bless him, had told me that there were twenty-four bag ladies in the Public Garden.

    After dinner was over and Mom went into the study to watch the news with Dad, I wandered out to the kitchen to visit with Mrs. Kolodny while she cleaned up the dishes. She was puttering around, humming, and she had all the machinery running: the dishwasher, the garbage disposal, even the washing machine and dryer.
Mrs. Kolodny says she likes to run the machinery; it makes her feel like Captain Kirk in
Star Trek,
gives her a sense of power.
    "Hi," I said. She didn't hear me. It sounded like the Industrial Revolution in there, with all those engines going at once. I pushed the buttons that stopped the washing machine and dryer, then the switch for the garbage disposal, and finally she turned around, startled by the silence. Only the dishwasher was churning away now.
    "Oh," she said. "Hi. You didn't eat your broccoli."
    "I know. I hate broccoli." I flopped down in a kitchen chair and kicked off my sneakers.
    "Me too," said Mrs. Kolodny. "You want some junk food?"
    "Sure. What do we have?"
    She reached into the back of a cupboard, pulled out two Ring-Dings, and tossed me one. "Don't tell your mother."
    "I won't," I said, talking around a mouthful of sticky chocolate. "Hey, Mrs. Kolodny, I want to talk to you about something."
    She sat down heavily in the opposite chair and unwrapped her Ring-Ding. "You ever read
Jane Airy?
" she asked.
    I told you already that Mrs. Kolodny is a
reader. Almost every afternoon she goes over to Newbury Street, to the secondhand paperback bookstore.
    But I haven't told you what she looks like. Mrs. Kolodny is without a doubt the most
colorful
person I know. Her hair is blue. Honestly. She dyes it that color; she told me so. It's actually white, but once, years ago, she put on some stuff to "brighten up the white"—that's what the label said it was supposed to do—and her hair turned blue. And she