THIRTY-NINE
“I talked with my mother.” Charlie sat up in bed. The blue curtain was parted down the center of the room. James hadn’t seen who the new roommate was. They were quiet though so the two of them talked using what his own mother would have called indoor voices.
“They’ll be up later today?” James asked. He thinks he would have preferred the other half of the room. The new patient got to look out the window. All they had on this side of the room was the open doorway where they could see the hospital staff in the halls.
“This weekend,” she said.
“This weekend?”
Charlie rolled her eyes. “Okay, I might have lied to them, saying things might not be as bad as I had initially made them sound.”
“But why would you do that?” James didn’t understand. Charlie’s doctor had stressed the im
