Sumner Gardens - A Coming-of-Age Novel by Brendan P. Myers

Author:Brendan P. Myers [Myers, Brendan P.]
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Tags: Coming of Age, Fiction
ISBN: 9781442195486
Publisher: Exigua Publishing
Published: 2009-07-07T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter Seventeen

My father came home ten days later. My oldest brother drove my mother to the hospital to pick him up. My mother let me stay home from school that day so that I could be home when he got there.

It was about one o'clock in the afternoon when I heard the car pull up and I ran out onto the back porch to greet him. My father smiled as he saw me and we waved to each other. My oldest brother tried to help him out of the car but my father gently pushed him aside and walked on his own up to the front porch.

He looked thinner but as he got closer, I could see that his color had changed from the grayish hue that I had gotten used to and was a now a more normal pink. He hadn’t shaved in a couple of days and I noticed for the first time that some of his whiskers were coming in gray.

He walked up the steps and bent down and gave me a gentle hug and kiss. My brother and my mother were carrying his things and I ran over to see if I could help. He walked slowly into the living room and then turned around and sat down gingerly in his lounge chair. Home safe.

But we did have a little bit of a scare.

I had left the screen door open to bring his things into the house. We were all in the living room when Whisper ran into the house through the open door from wherever she had been at. When she saw my father in his chair, with her tail going a mile a minute, she immediately ran over to him and jumped up onto him full speed, slamming her powerful front leg directly into the center of his recently stitched together chest.

All talking in the room stopped. My brother ran over to grab Whisper but my father just lifted her off of him and placed her back on the floor and scratched behind her ear. Whew.

After he had been home about an hour and was all caught up with everything he asked me to come over to his chair so that he could show me something. He took a piece of paper out of his wallet and unfolded it. It was a narrow piece of paper about ten inches long. He told me that it came from something called an EKG and it was a printout of his heartbeat during the operation. From left-to-right the lines went up and down which were the beats of his heart.

About one-third of the way in the line went flat. The up and downs stopped. About two-thirds of the way in they started up again. He said the flat line was the part where they had stopped his heart from beating. He folded it up and put it back into his wallet. He would be out of work for a few weeks and would only go back for half days at first.

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