We Were Mothers: A Novel by Katie Sise

Author:Katie Sise [Sise, Katie]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Fiction, Thrillers, Suspense, Contemporary Women, Family Life
ISBN: 9781503903623
Google: Kc9xswEACAAJ
Publisher: Amazon Publishing
Published: 2018-10-14T23:00:00+00:00

SARAH

11:38 a.m.

Sarah Ramsey? Follow me, please,” said a heavyset nurse in white. She led Sarah into Dr. Madsen’s examining room. Sarah moved toward the table covered in a white paper sheet and put her purse on it.

“You can put your things there, actually,” the nurse said, pointing toward a lone chair. Sarah obeyed. Above the chair was a framed poster of a human body with all its fleshy muscles and sinewy tendons. “Sit here,” the nurse said gently, like she was talking to a child.

Sarah sat on the exam table. She wondered about the heavyset nurse: Did Dr. Madsen ask her to lose weight out of fear for her joints? The nurse wrapped a blood pressure cuff around Sarah’s barely there biceps. She puffed it up, and then let it slowly deflate.

“Nervous?” she asked Sarah.

“Yes, I often get white-coat hypertension,” Sarah said. She was quite proud of herself for knowing the terminology. “But I’ve taken my blood pressure at home with one of those Omron devices, and it’s in the normal range.” Sarah spent a lot of time on WebMD.

The nurse smiled. She handed Sarah a clipboard with a few sheets of paper attached. “Just fill this out, and Dr. Madsen will be right in.”

The nurse left, and Sarah looked around the room. Her eyes settled on a skeleton hanging from a wooden stand. Now that was something you didn’t see every day. Sarah could practically hear the joints creaking. She’d have to tell Cora about it. Cora loved science things. There were so many awards she’d won growing up for science fair projects and math tournaments. She was extremely smart, and now she was just a mother, and not that there was anything wrong with that, but didn’t she want to finish her dissertation? Would she ever want to? Did Maggie’s dying suck the math right out of her bones?

Bones. The paperwork.

Sarah looked down at her clipboard to see the outline of a body sketched out on the paper. She used a pen labeled Westchester Orthopedics to circle the areas where she felt pain, as instructed, rating the pain on a scale of one to ten, and then she moved on to the section for family history and started scanning the boxes.

Well, you see, my family history is really so complicated, and you don’t quite have the right boxes for me to check.

Sarah felt like one of the absolute worst parts of sharing what had happened to her family was seeing how people’s faces changed when she told them not only that her daughter had died in a drunk driving accident, but that her daughter had been the driver. Of course she usually just said car accident, but when she got closer to someone, or if they asked for details, she’d tell them what had really happened. And it always seemed like somehow, in some way, the fact that the accident had been Maggie’s fault took away from her death for almost everyone whom Sarah told, and that felt so ragingly unfair.

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