office just a week before.
When I stepped past them, I broke into my uncle’s attempt to believe whatever this son of a bitch was lying about. B.B. reached out to bar my advance into the room. I understood that he
didn’t want me to see her. He didn’t understand that I already had. I turned away from the two of them and walked a few steps back down the hallway. I could still hear the machine. A
tense two or three minutes later, the doctor scurried past me and B.B. was quickly at my elbow. He was an inch or so taller than me, and thirty pounds heavier, but he looked exhausted and
appreciably smaller than usual today.
“A ninny,” he spat at the doctor’s shrinking form as the nervous little man departed. I told myself I would never forget the doctor standing in the light of that forty-watt
bulb at the bottom of our stairs, sniffing the air like an allergic albatross and hissing “acidosis.”
But we should have known. And I guess the fact that I knew that, was the reason I didn’t chase the little man down the army green hallway and kick his ass like a stuffed toy. I felt too
much like kicking my own. I knew the little bird-beaked doctor should have averted this tragedy, but I should have too. And I saw beneath the shallows of my uncle’s expression that he felt
the same way I did. As though that lady in the hospital bed there had two men at her elbows whose responsibility was to look out for her, and we blew it. We blew an easy one.
Shopping for the family groceries, making that Saturday run, had been one of my jobs since before we moved to New York. Not just for my mother, but for my grandmother before that. It was one of
the ways I legitimately earned the two pennies or a nickel Aunt Sissy gave me when her budget expanded to include a cut of meat or some other extravagance from the A&P or another uptown market.
Uptown was five or six blocks up Cumberland Street, easier and quicker once I got my red truck bike with a wire basket in front.
In the Bronx, I just looked at restocking the refrigerator and cabinet as my job. My Saturdays automatically included an hour or so of carrying a list and rolling a shopping cart. I knew
sometimes as clearly as my mother what we had and what we needed. I not only knew what our regular brands were, but the weekly quantities. In a special week, when something was going on, the
six-pack of soda might clone itself on the list. In recent weeks, though, I had regularly brought back two six-packs of soda on Saturday and another one or two six-packs during the week. I
wasn’t drinking any more soda than usual. My mother was. I knew now that she had been fighting off dehydration and sugar imbalance with direct deposits of syrup and water.
She had been tired, listless, and dehydrated, and couldn’t figure it out. Uncle B.B. had lived with Aunt Sammy, who’d had diabetes for ten years by the time I stayed with them
briefly after my grandmother’s death. I guess it was different being around someone who was controlling the debilitating aspects of diabetes with tablets or injections of insulin. B.B.
hadn’t seen the onset of the illness, what their Tennessee neighbors called “sugar diabetes.”
B.B. and I left the hospital and went for hot dogs at Nathan’s, a late brunch B.B. called it. I liked Nathan’s most of the time, but this hot dog was like a rubber cigar. Not
happening. My uncle went into “normal” mode, treating the outing like one of our haircut trips or once-a-month movie trips. Those were his contributions to normal, since he was supposed
to be a father figure or male role model or some such, to teach me how to cope with things like my mother going into a coma.
“How did your interview go?” he asked halfway through the meal.
It was the first time I’d even thought about what had happened earlier that day.
“Okay, I guess,” I said. “It seemed like they were asking me stuff they already knew, either from Professor Heller or from the long
When I stepped past them, I broke into my uncle’s attempt to believe whatever this son of a bitch was lying about. B.B. reached out to bar my advance into the room. I understood that he
didn’t want me to see her. He didn’t understand that I already had. I turned away from the two of them and walked a few steps back down the hallway. I could still hear the machine. A
tense two or three minutes later, the doctor scurried past me and B.B. was quickly at my elbow. He was an inch or so taller than me, and thirty pounds heavier, but he looked exhausted and
appreciably smaller than usual today.
“A ninny,” he spat at the doctor’s shrinking form as the nervous little man departed. I told myself I would never forget the doctor standing in the light of that forty-watt
bulb at the bottom of our stairs, sniffing the air like an allergic albatross and hissing “acidosis.”
But we should have known. And I guess the fact that I knew that, was the reason I didn’t chase the little man down the army green hallway and kick his ass like a stuffed toy. I felt too
much like kicking my own. I knew the little bird-beaked doctor should have averted this tragedy, but I should have too. And I saw beneath the shallows of my uncle’s expression that he felt
the same way I did. As though that lady in the hospital bed there had two men at her elbows whose responsibility was to look out for her, and we blew it. We blew an easy one.
Shopping for the family groceries, making that Saturday run, had been one of my jobs since before we moved to New York. Not just for my mother, but for my grandmother before that. It was one of
the ways I legitimately earned the two pennies or a nickel Aunt Sissy gave me when her budget expanded to include a cut of meat or some other extravagance from the A&P or another uptown market.
Uptown was five or six blocks up Cumberland Street, easier and quicker once I got my red truck bike with a wire basket in front.
In the Bronx, I just looked at restocking the refrigerator and cabinet as my job. My Saturdays automatically included an hour or so of carrying a list and rolling a shopping cart. I knew
sometimes as clearly as my mother what we had and what we needed. I not only knew what our regular brands were, but the weekly quantities. In a special week, when something was going on, the
six-pack of soda might clone itself on the list. In recent weeks, though, I had regularly brought back two six-packs of soda on Saturday and another one or two six-packs during the week. I
wasn’t drinking any more soda than usual. My mother was. I knew now that she had been fighting off dehydration and sugar imbalance with direct deposits of syrup and water.
She had been tired, listless, and dehydrated, and couldn’t figure it out. Uncle B.B. had lived with Aunt Sammy, who’d had diabetes for ten years by the time I stayed with them
briefly after my grandmother’s death. I guess it was different being around someone who was controlling the debilitating aspects of diabetes with tablets or injections of insulin. B.B.
hadn’t seen the onset of the illness, what their Tennessee neighbors called “sugar diabetes.”
B.B. and I left the hospital and went for hot dogs at Nathan’s, a late brunch B.B. called it. I liked Nathan’s most of the time, but this hot dog was like a rubber cigar. Not
happening. My uncle went into “normal” mode, treating the outing like one of our haircut trips or once-a-month movie trips. Those were his contributions to normal, since he was supposed
to be a father figure or male role model or some such, to teach me how to cope with things like my mother going into a coma.
“How did your interview go?” he asked halfway through the meal.
It was the first time I’d even thought about what had happened earlier that day.
“Okay, I guess,” I said. “It seemed like they were asking me stuff they already knew, either from Professor Heller or from the long
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