What They Wanted by Donna Morrissey Page A

What’re they saying?”
    I was spared a reply by Mother slipping in through the curtain, smelling fresh as soap, her hair pulled back with combs. “He’s worried about not getting back in the woods again,” I said.
    “No more you’re not.” She looked him up and down. “Laying you out in boat like a babe in a cradle when I gets you home, and mooring you off the kitchen window. Let the water rock you for a bit—you likes that, don’t you, being rocked?”
    “The doctors,” said Father, wrestling for her eyes.
    “The doctors,” she snorted. “The doctors got no say in how you’re going to be treated. Did you have breakfast? How come they haven’t fixed your hair—Sylvie, find me a comb, he looks a bigger fright than me. And when you goes home, tell Chris to burn his paddles, and his saws, too. See if that don’t trim your tail,” she said, fussing with his sheets as she kept on scolding him about his worrying, his overworking, his driving her to the brink.
    She would’ve been banished by the nurses had they heard her speaking so to one so sick. But I saw how he was unable to keep from grinning as she continued threatening him with a floating bed moored at the kitchen window. I saw, too, how he kept turning to her hands fussing with his blankets, his pillow, recognizing in them a strength, a decisiveness that tolerated no fussing in return, a decisiveness he was gratefully accepting of—most times—I thought, watching a faint shine grow in his eyes. But god help them both when the showdown came over his paddles.

    SUZE, BEN ’ S MOTHER and Mom’s old friend from when they were girls drying fish on the flakes down Ragged Rock, came later that evening for a visit. She was a big woman, her springy dark curls and quick smile so like Ben’s it tripped my heart. A squall of wind, Mother called her, as she blew in through the quiet of the waiting room, her flushed cheeks like those of an overly excited youngster, her big grey eyes snapping as she dragged me and Mom to the cafeteria for a late supper. Afterwards she accompanied us back to the room, determined to spend the night with us. She stuffed herself into one of the armchairs and pushed down the back, sprawling her legs across the coffee table in front of her.
    “I balls my coat into a pillow and won’t feel a thing,” she assured us, settling into the chair like a duck into its feathers.
    Tilting back her armchair, Mother too settled in, directing me to the sofa. “I didn’t sleep there the past two nights,” she argued against my protests, “so why would I tonight? I couldn’t breathe if I had to lie down in a place like this—and the chair’s comfortable, and I’m up and down all night long anyway checking on your father. Besides, the size of this chair,” she said, nestling into the yawning mouth of the wingback. “Now, tell me, Suze, did you check on Gran on your way down?”
    “Ye-es, spinning like the top, she is. My, the go she got. And there’s my own mother then, crooped up on the couch like an accordion; couldn’t sit herself up if the cushions caught fire. And Benji called—worried as anything about Sylvanus he is. That Benji—got me worried sick, he do—way out there in Alberta, working them rigs. I curses them rigs and his going off like that.”
    “My, Suze, Ben left home for university, not the rigs,” said Mother.
    “Still, he never comes home—would’ve tied him to the door if I knew he’d just go off like that—whatever he found so grand in St. John’s. Could hardly get home for Christmas after he left—still wonders how he hardly ever comes home.”
    “Not much here for him, I suppose,” said Mother.
    “Holidays, Addie—he can come home for holidays—got to beg him every time. And now that he’s way out there—do you see him much, Sylvie?”
    “Ben’s good.” I was shaking out the flannel sheet Mother had tossed me, fitting it around myself as she and Suze were doing. After plumping up a small