The long hours go by in the hospital waiting room, until all sense of time becomes suspended. Five hours, six, seven… it doesn’t matter. My mother and I and our growing line of sympathizers, from neighbors to Joe’s pastor (really? I didn’t even know he had one), stare blankly at the floor, thinking of nothing. They have come to sit with us while we wait for my stepfather to come out of surgery.
Joe’s three sons, all much older than me in their mid-to-late thirties, arrive one by one. Which of his four previous marriages they came from, I don’t know. The middle son, Larry — the one who took over the plumbing business after Joe lost it in the last divorce —arrives first.
Larry is businesslike, professional, and knows just what to say. He takes my mother’s hand, murmers the appropriate words, and sits down to wait. His older brother, Joe Jr., does the same a few minutes later.
Finally, the youngest, George, arrives looking confused and lost — George, who my mother long ago told me was badly abused by his father as a boy. He was the unfavorite child that Joe felt truly guilty about, yet somehow had never apologized to. Now, as a man, sad-faced George is the son who never seems to get anything right. He hops from job to job, wife to wife.
He sits next to his brothers and stares, glum, at the floor with the rest of us.
Ten hours. That’s how long the surgery takes. The attacker’s knife had severed Joe’s carotid artery and punctured his windpipe. The surgeon cut him open all the way down to his navel to save him. And then, he tells us when it’s over, Joe’s brain began to bleed on the operating table — a stroke.
“He’s a strong man,” says the doctor as he leads us to the ICU. “No one else would have survived.”
He pulls open the curtain around Joe’s bed, and we all gasp. George, next to me, reels and grabs my arm. I look at him and see the pain in his eyes. Whatever his father did to him years ago, this man still loves him.
The sight is shocking. Joe’s bandages and sheets are soaked and spattered bright, violent red. In the effort to save his life, no one has bothered to clean up the blood.
He is still unconscious, hooked up to oxygen and fluids, his face sunken and small.
“We won’t know how extensive the damage is until he wakes up,” continues the surgeon, “but he may never walk again.”
My mother doesn’t say a word. She sits on a chair next to the bed, takes her husband’s tethered hand, and begins her new wait.
