The Law of Second Chances by James Sheehan

Author:James Sheehan
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Tags: Thrillers, Fiction, Political, Legal, General
ISBN: 9781455574513
Publisher: James Sheehan
Published: 2013-03-09T23:00:00+00:00

37

Pat lived for another three months. Most days, after she took her pain medication, she was alert and pain free. She took short walks with Jack in the morning after breakfast and spent her afternoons on the front porch watching the traffic on the Okalatchee.

Jack’s Uncle Bill started showing up every morning around breakfast time. Pat got a kick out of him. Even though he was eighty-seven, Uncle Bill had a strong, thick, rich voice and perfect diction.

“Good morning, young man,” he’d say to Henry, as though he had stepped to center stage. “And how is the young lady of the house?” he’d ask Pat. The way he said it forced her to smile whether she felt like it or not. It was like having Shakespeare come to the house for coffee.

Jack was always the afterthought. He would simply get a “Hello, nephew.” Jack didn’t mind one bit. He enjoyed Bill’s presence as much as everybody else. It made them feel like a family.

Pat and Jack didn’t say much on their morning walks. They just held hands. Pat brought peanuts for the squirrels. They’d stop on the way and sit and drink some water and smile at each other and enjoy each moment, squeezing it for everything it was worth.

In the afternoon, Henry would join Pat on the porch for a while. Her eyes were going bad, and Henry had taken to reading books to her. They were halfway through Cross Creek, by Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings, but it was going slowly. Pat kept having him go back and read her the final paragraph at the end of the first chapter before he could pick up where they had left off the day before.

“Read it to me, Henry,” she’d say. “Just one more time.” And Henry would open the book to page fourteen and read:

Folk call the road lonely, because there is not human traffic and human stirring. Because I have walked it so many times and seen such a tumult of life there, it seems to me one of the most populous highways of my acquaintance. I have walked it in ecstasy, and in joy it is beloved. Every pine tree, every gallberry bush, every passion vine, every joree rustling in the underbrush, is vibrant. I have walked it in trouble, and the wind in the trees beside me is easing. I have walked it in despair, and the red of the sunset is my own blood dissolving into the night’s darkness. For all such things were on the earth before us, and will survive after us, and it is given to us to join ourselves with them and be comforted.

“That is so beautiful,” she would say when he was done, and then he would find their place from the previous time and continue reading.

One day she stopped him before he finished the chapter he was reading. “That’s enough for today, Henry. I’m tired.” Henry closed the book and started to get up to help her into her bedroom. “Sit down here next to me, Henry,” she said.

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