Unremarried Widow Read Online Free PDF

said.
    â€œYou need to come down here.”
    My mother didn’t even put on shoes. She ran to the car barefoot and drove to the county road that traveled parallel to the farm. She followed the blacktop until she could see the crash site in the distance, threw the car in park, and dashed across the field. My grandfather met her at the plane.
    â€œWhere’s A.J.?” she said.
    â€œIn the ambulance. They need to take her now.”
    â€œWhere’s Lamar?”
    â€œIn the plane.”
    â€œI need to see him.”
    â€œHe’s bad,” my grandfather said. “There’s nothing you can do for him.”
    â€œI need to see him,” my mother insisted.
    She made her way to the plane, to where my father hung from his seat, his neck all wrong, blood on his hands. She reached out and took his wrist and searched for a pulse.
    â€œCome away,” my grandfather said. “You need to come away from there. You need to get in the ambulance. They’re waiting on you.”
    My mother let him lead her away and put her in the back of the ambulance, where I was strapped to a backboard but conscious.
    â€œHi, Mommy,” I said.
    â€œHi, baby.”
    â€œMommy, I’m scared.”
    â€œI know, baby.”
    â€œI’m hurt.”
    â€œI know, baby,” she said. “I know.”
    At the hospital, my mother sat in the room with me as people filtered in. My grandparents. My half brother and his wife. My uncle, who brought my mother steaming cups of coffee one after the other.
    â€œI need to see my husband,” my mother said to anyone who would listen.
    Finally, a nurse stepped into the room.
    â€œHe’s arrived,” she said. “I’ll escort you to the morgue.”
    My mother followed the nurse through the hospital hallways, her bare feet against the cool floor.
    â€œYou are about the strongest person I’ve ever seen,” the nurse said as they walked together. “You’re not even crying.”
    In the morgue my father lay beneath a white sheet. There were cuts on his cheeks and stains of blood on his hands. His body had started to swell from the trauma and his skin stretched tight across his face. His eyes were open.
    â€œI’ll be right here,” the nurse said off to the side. “Take as long as you want.”
    My mother laid her hand on my father’s shoulder and on his arm—already he felt cold to her touch—and she looked at him. She looked and looked until she had seen enough.
    â€œYou know you’re going to have to tell A.J.,” my grandmother said when my mother came back to the room. “You have to be the one to tell her. About Lamar.”
    â€œI know,” my mother said.
    Three days later, when I was fully conscious for the first time since the crash, the people who had crowded into the room made their way out, leaving my mother and me alone.
    â€œDo you know where you are?” she said.
    â€œI’m in the hospital.”
    â€œDo you know why?”
    â€œDaddy crashed the plane.”
    â€œYes, he did,” my mother said.
    â€œDaddy’s dead,” I said. “I saw him hanging upside down.”
    My mother took a long, quiet breath.
    â€œHe lied to me,” I said. “He said we weren’t going to crash. He told me to hold on really tight and that everything would be okay.”
    My mother cried softly then, the way people will when they have been crying for a long time.
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    Doctors spent more than six weeks repairing my broken spine. They soldered a rod to my backbone, looped hooks through my vertebrae, and pinned my skeleton in place. When they finished they stitched the skin together, a neat job that left a straight scar running down the middle of my back. A doctor plastered a cast around my middle that drove me mad with itching, and for weeks afterward I had to take a bath standing up in a bucket. I often dreamed of planes crashing, reliving in the night