The Wilder Sisters Read Online Free PDF Page B

deep shade of a bay horse’s mane. She remembered family picnics at Ghost Ranch, stuffing herself on her mother’s tamales, Pop puffing on his pipe—Captain Black, White Label—that sweet-smelling smoke get- ting tangled in her hair as he told her story after story under the sky. How she missed that wide-open blue, blue sky with the impossibly white clouds scudding across it, that catch-in-your-throat sky. Back then, there was all the time in the world to get to Happily Ever After. Then, as her last resort, because it hurt her as much as it cheered her up, she recalled every detail of the best sex she’d ever had, which wasn’t sex at all, but making love, to Tres Quintero, her high school boyfriend, their clothes strewn along the banks of the Rio Grande. Tres had gifted hands, that magic middle finger, and the instincts of a cougar. What could compare to the feel of a man’s callused hands on your body when the calluses came from real work? Or getting your butt as tan as your shoulders? Rose told her that only sluts sunbathed nude. Damn Rose anyway. Philip dies, and she won’t even let me say I’m sorry. That stripper thing was supposed to be a joke. Not to mention happened a million years ago. I need a drink , Lily thought. It’s eight o’clock in the freaking morning, and I want a pitcher of martinis, delivered intravenously. Either that, or to do my last nine years over .

    The patient was thirty-five years old, five years under the Fat, Fair, and Forty adage that seemed uncannily to support gallbladder dis- ease in Caucasian American women. But her ultrasound showed serious thickening of the organ’s wall, and she presented the typical profile:

    intractable pain penetrating all the way through to her upper back and right shoulder, an indulgence in and intolerance to a high-fat diet. Lily stood to the surgeon’s right, watching the amiable anes- thesiologist explain what he was doing in an attempt to soothe the patient.
    “This surgery’s very common. One hour and we’ll have you back out there with your husband. Here we go now. Some patients say they experience a taste in their mouth from the anesthetic similar to garlic. Do you? Okay, then I’d like you to begin counting backward from one hundred.” At the corners of his surgical mask Lily could see the man’s mouth turn up in an honest smile. She liked the gas docs. Their egos came in size medium.
    The patient’s smile faded as the anesthetic began to take effect. She had only gotten to number ninety-eight. As her lids lowered, Lily wiggled her gloved fingers and said, “Bye.”
    Meanwhile Dr. Help-Me fumbled with the trocar, probing the surgical cavity a little too enthusiastically for Lily’s taste, and nearly dropped the laparoscope. Lily waited patiently, not even bothering to look at the monitor screen. The videotape was a formality; these days a cholecystectomy was a breeze, finished off with internal staples. Thanks to her company’s innovative products and health care’s primary concern being cutting the expense of patient care while rewarding physicians with incentives, the days of lengthy in- cisions and weeklong hospital recoveries had become historical footnotes. Thanks to their regulations, she had to stand here and watch.
    “Favorite Hawaiian island,” the anesthesiologist said, posing a discussion subject, something he and Lily often did because it gave them something to talk about when the surgeries were routine.
    “Kauai, I guess.”
    “What’s wrong with Maui?”
    “Give me a break. Who wants to fly six hours to bump elbows with tourists?”
    “I admit Maui’s gotten a little touristy, but the golf courses are to die for. And restaurants. It’s got the best eats.”
    “Hawaiian vacations are about island wilderness and beaches,” Lily insisted, “not five irons and four-star dining. Um, doctor, do you really want to use that approach? I think the one we practiced might give you a better view.”
    “I’m fine