“I’m sorry your dad was the way he was. Are you alone? Is there someone?”
“I don’t know. I just want to be here with you, Mama.”
“Oh, sweetheart.”
* * * *
Sherman was alone when his mother died a few hours later. He asked the nurse to call; his cell phone was in his car, along with his back pack. Even if he had remembered to put it in his tool box, it would still need recharging to work.
Then he wept.
His son and daughter-in-law arrived first, with his daughter and her husband right behind them. Aunt Doris was coming, they explained, but not for about three weeks, when her husband was well enough to travel.
They kept talking, their words washing over him. Two months? Where were you? Why didn’t you call? Your phone, you didn’t have it? Where were you? Lost, sick? A storm, a wrong tur
