The Best Peace Fiction by Butler Robert Olen;Nguyen Phong; & Phong Nguyen

Author:Butler, Robert Olen;Nguyen, Phong; & Phong Nguyen [Butler Olen Robert & Nguyen Phong]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: University of New Mexico Press
Published: 2021-09-15T00:00:00+00:00

Nayma piloted Dr. Agnew’s Oldsmobile into the parking lot of Oconee Memorial Hospital, her body hung over a giant steering wheel the size of a manhole cover, her butt slid forward over the beaded seat cover as rough as the corrugated motel roof where she would occasionally hide in plain sight. It was a little like driving a boat—not that she’d ever driven a boat; she had never even been on a boat—but that didn’t stop her from imagining the car as a great yacht that rocked lightly as she turned at the traffic signal and eased nimbly around corners. She was going too fast and couldn’t get the cassette of the Statler Brothers to cut off, but then she was going too slow and she accelerated until she could feel the car bouncing on its shocks. She had driven before—she could certainly drive—but never in something this big and never over forty-five miles an hour.

She glided into the parking lot, fairly sailing over a speed bump while the dashboard hula dancer bobbed wildly and across the bench leather. Dr. Agnew’s papers and books fluttered and slipped. John Donne. Geoffrey Hill. Some ancient coffee-table atlas of Olde England. She shoved them all to the side and made for the main entrance, the glass doors sliding open onto the chilly foyer with its potted palms and new carpet. The walls were lined with Purell dispensers and signs explaining the importance of sanitized hands in English and Spanish. She took the elevator to the fifth-floor ICU, more or less bouncing on her heels and wringing her bacteria-free hands.

When the doors opened the smell hit her, not so much the sharp of antiseptic as something heavier and more frightening: it smelled here, she realized, like death. Up until that moment she had worried solely about her abuelos, but at that moment she felt her heart lurch for the Greaves woman, alone here with the tubes and wheeled machines and that smell she was starting to recognize as the aftertaste of human shit. She was in her nineties but somehow lived alone. But not anymore, Nayma thought. Not after today.

She found her grandparents in the waiting room, a couple of aged nervous children who fluttered to their feet when they saw Nayma. Her abuela had virtually no English, which made her, a woman who was otherwise a workhorse of devotion and faith, pathetically helpless. Her abeulo was fluent in English, educated, smart, and sarcastic. Or had been, once. He’d been expelled from the tomato fields of Immokalee, Florida, after attempting to organize what were effectively indentured servants. But the process of kicking him out—she suspected it had been more than simply driving her grandparents to the city limits and telling them to beat it—had cracked something in him, or widened a crack that already existed, so that these days he was mostly silent. There were no more jokes, there was no more laughing. He worked. He smoked. He drank one Budweiser every evening in a plastic chair on the indoor-outdoor carpet of the motel stoop.

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