Grandma looked at Dr. Hale. He nodded.
“Her name is Ruth,” Grandma said. “Ruth Calloway. Your father’s birth mother. Your grandmother.”
Calloway.
I thought about the big glass wing on the east side of the hospital. The name carved in stone over the door.
CALLOWAY PAVILION.
“She’s dying, Daniel,” Dr. Hale said quietly. “Pancreatic cancer. She doesn’t have much time. A few days. Maybe a week. Her daughter has arranged to move her to a hospice facility in Chicago this morning. The transport was scheduled for eight o’clock.”
“So that’s why you had to be here before eight,” I said to Grandma.
She nodded.
“Thomas called me last night,” she said. “He said Ruth asked for Room 214. She asked for it by name. And she’s been asking for something else, too.”
“What?”
Grandma looked down at the photograph.
“She’s been asking for her baby,” she said.
