Linda and Joanne, both Atlantans, returned to Linda’s car and got in. Joanne broke into tears. Linda waited before starting the car. Let her get it out of her a few minutes, she thought.
Joanne wiped her eyes but had not stopped crying. “It’s just so hard seeing her this way,” she said, haltingly. “Mother was always so spry, so active. I don’t think I can handle another visit.”
“I know it’s hard, Mother,” Linda said. “But we have to come back. Why, Aunt Shelby, her daughters and us are practically the only ones who visit grandma. What would she do without us?”
“Sometimes I wonder if she even knows for sure it’s us,” Joanne added. “When she doesn’t answer us or when she’s sitting there staring out the window, not saying a word to us.”
“But I feel she knows we’re there in the room with her,” Linda continued. “I know, it’s weird. But that’s grandma. She was always different.”
“God help me, but I’ve never wanted to be 90 years old. Just look at those poor souls in there,” Joanne said with bitterness in her voice. “They can’t do a thing by themselves. They’re no more than sheer babies.”
“That one who couldn’t stop shaking her head. It was awful,” Linda said. “Of course, I don’t ever want to lose you—my own mother. What would I do?”
“Oh, it’s so sad, isn’t it honey? Let’s not talk about it anymore,” Joanne said. “Let’s stop by Dunkin’ Donuts for a snack. It might just cheer us up.”
Linda stopped completely at the stop sign and looked both ways before pulling out onto the busy four-lane. In spite of her youth (She was thirty.), she’d miscalculated and knew it the moment she pulled out of the nursing home’s driveway. What was worse, the car sort of “paused” there in the middle of the highway.
The impact of the semi was such that it was a miracle that Linda lived at all. She was seriously injured in the accident. Joanne, Linda’s 60-year-old mother, did not survive the passenger-side impact, needless to say.
“God was good to her,” Ralph, Joanne’s widower and Linda’s father, said to every sympathetic friend and relative who looked his way. “And let’s face it, she never wanted to grow truly old. I guess her wish was granted.”
End of “Sheer Babies”
