My Own Country by Abraham Verghese

Author:Abraham Verghese
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Scribner

CLYDE WAS STILL sleeping when I left to go back to the VA. Vickie took me for a quick drive through the hollow.

Before I left, I told Vickie about TAP and about the support group meetings organized by Fred Goodson, “the bear.” I suggested that she and Clyde go to a meeting. I wasn’t sure how much Clyde would get out of it, but I wondered if Vickie would not be helped by seeing that there were others with the disease. “You want me to sit and talk with a bunch of queers?”

“Try it. This disease is too much to carry alone.”

“Why, hell, everyone in this hollow knows. I wish they didn’t, but they do. I ain’t carrying it alone.”

I pictured her life in this isolated hollow where people avoided her gaze, where she and Clyde and even the children were probably social pariahs, the untouchables of the hollow.

The support group was perhaps the one place in Johnson City where she could be sure that she would not be condemned.

“Promise me you’ll think about it.”

“I will.”

I left her standing in her doorway, a cigarette in one hand, waving at me with the other. I drove up out of the hollow, back into Johnson City.

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