The knitted baby booties should have made Andrew smile. Instead, my daughter’s doctor-turned-husband went pale when she suggested a name for their first child. Before dinner ended, he pulled me aside and confessed that one page in Amanda’s old medical file had haunted him since the day they met.
“Go home, Mom. Your back hurts in that chair.”
Amanda was fourteen, connected to two machines and barely strong enough to sit up.
Yet somehow my back was the emergency.
“I’m comfortable, sweetheart,” I said.
“You make that face when you’re lying.”
“What face?”
“That one.”
She pointed weakly at me.
I laughed because she wanted me to.
Then I waited until she fell asleep before I cried.
Amanda had been seriously ill since childhood. By twenty, she’d spent more birthdays in hospital rooms than at home.
Robin and I became experts in waiting.
Waiting for test results.
