Saints of Augustine by P. E. Ryan

Author:P. E. Ryan
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Publisher: HarperCollins

9.

(You’re like money waiting to happen.)

The thumb started bleeding again. Charlie was sitting next to his father, watching a tennis match on TV, when the dark spot on the bandage caught his eye. “Your hand, Dad.”

His father glanced at him. “Huh? Oh.” He looked down. “This is one stubborn thumb. Can you get me the first-aid kit?”

“Yeah.” Charlie walked into the kitchen, a faint sensation of panic creeping into his chest. He brought the kit back to his father and knelt down in front of him to help.

They’d gone through four bandages of folded gauze and surgical tape in the past two days. When his father cut away the old gauze, the wound—surrounded now by pale, wrinkled flesh—began to seep bright red. “We should have gone to the emergency room,” Charlie told him.

“I don’t think they would have stitched it; it’s a puncture. Cut me some tape?”

“Maybe you should get a tetanus shot.”

“That’s for rusty metal. This was just a piece of glass.”

“Well, why won’t it stop bleeding?” Charlie dangled the strips of tape from the ends of his fingers. The feeling of panic was clutching the inside of his chest. He and his father hadn’t talked about what had really happened that night. They’d talked about how the glass had exploded like a grenade. They’d talked about how his father had gone to bed early and slept for ten hours, and how he hadn’t been able to eat for most of the next day, but it was if they were discussing someone who had the flu and was just fighting normal symptoms. Neither one of them had mentioned the drinking.

Charlie was still angry at his father for throwing a wrench into his evening with Kate. He was mad at himself, too, for getting high (though who wouldn’t want to get a little high after watching your drunk father practically bleed to death at dinner?) and for taking that stupid nap in the middle of getting ready to go. The whole evening was like one bad joke. Here it was, two days later, and Kate still wouldn’t take his phone calls (and boy, was he sick of hearing Mrs. Bryant say, “I’m sorry, Charlie, but Kate doesn’t wish to…”).

More than anything, he was worried about his father. Watching the thumb get rebandaged, he fought his sense of panic, and yet couldn’t help wondering if there was something wrong with his father’s blood. Maybe it wasn’t clotting right. Maybe he was a bleeder, a…whatever the name was for that condition they’d studied in human anatomy just a few months ago that he couldn’t think of now if his life—or his father’s life—depended on it. What’s happened to your memory, Perrin? He imagined himself hearing it from a doctor: The results of some awful blood test were in, his father was at the start of a long illness and probably wouldn’t recover. Forget it, Charlie thought. Get it out of your head. He knew he was only thinking about something so grim because of his mother.

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