The Great Christmas Bowl Read Online Free PDF Page A

I had noticed that Marge, Bud’s wife, had arrived some time after the ambulance, and a nurse escorted her to the ER. She hadn’t returned.
    â€œNot good. He suffered a massive coronary, and if we hadn’t had EMS at the field, we might have lost him. As it is, he’s in critical condition. They’re flying him to the university hospital.”
    He came close and I filled the rest of the gap, laying my head on his chest. “He was cheering his heart out.”
    â€œLiterally.” Mike sighed and held me a moment, his strong arm over my shoulders. “Good game, though.”
    I looked up at him, at his smile, remembering Kevin’s scrabble toward the end zone. “Amazing game.”
    â€œI might be here a while.”
    â€œI’ll wait.”
    Mike kissed me on the forehead and returned to the ER, lifting his hand to Coach Grant and a handful of players who’d just arrived. I wondered where the rest of Big Lake had run off to. Yes, we’d secured our position in the run for the state championship, but our entire cheerleading squad had nearly died getting us there.
    I collapsed in a vinyl chair.
    The last time I paced the Big Lake ER hallways, Kevin had been seven. Always the boy fascinated with machinery and moving parts, he’d been riding his bike on our gravel road when his gaze caught on the spokes of his front wheel, how they whirred and reflected the sunlight. He kept watching that wheel until he steered himself right off the cliff edging the road and clattered into the ditch. Only his helmet saved his life, I am sure, because he tumbled headfirst into the rocks below. Somehow he managed to limp home, where I found him—tear streaked, bloody, and holding his arm. I didn’t wait to call Mike, just piled Kevin in the car and drove straight for the Big Lake clinic, where they x-rayed him and pronounced the shoulder dislocated, his collarbone broken.
    â€œWhat were you doing?” I asked him as they put his arm in a sling and administered pain meds.
    â€œThinking” was his cryptic reply.
    Since then, I’d learned to be worried when Kevin thinks. Not that he wasn’t a smart boy—he ranked at the top of his math class. But he had the ability to conjure up harebrained schemes and cajole members of his family into participation. Like the time he decided to spray-paint our dog red, white, and blue for the Big Lake Independence Day parade. Poor Gracie got free and ran through the house, finding refuge in the living room behind the white sofa. Or the time he decided on shooting practice and attached the target to our basement wall, right next to the sliding-glass door. When the plate glass pinged, then cracked, and shouting ensued, the jig was up.
    He had accomplices. They all suffered.
    Now, as he huddled in a cluster of concern with the other members of his team, their hair wet from their showers and dripping onto their sweatshirts, he glanced up at me. Once . . . twice. The third time I began to worry.
    I knew he was thinking.
    I blew into my coffee, got up, and paced away from his little group of cohorts. The helicopter had landed, and through the window I spotted the medical staff emerging from the bay. Mike took the lead, pulling the gurney transporting Bud covered in blankets. Next to Bud ran a tech holding a mess of IVs. Someone else carried portable monitoring equipment.
    Marge appeared last, half jogging, half running, behind them. Despite knowing Bud for nearly thirty years, I rarely saw his wife. Occasionally I’d spot Marge at the Ben Franklin, sometimes at the grocery store. She always looked tired. Rumor said she had a disease, something that kept her bedridden, yet there she was, running beside her ill husband. Her dirty parka and ancient Moon Boots revealed that she hadn’t taken any time to consider her appearance, but I could imagine myself out there in my ratty blue bathrobe and threadbare slippers. She reached out