Dust Eva Everson (story reading txt) 📖

The next day—a Thursday—Westley returned to work after dropping Mama off at the hospital. She entered my room with a vanilla milkshake from the new McDonald’s that had opened up on the outskirts of downtown, her basket of knitting, and a stack of get well cards bundled together in multicolored envelopes. “Which do you want first?” she teased. “The cards or the shake?”

“Both,” I said, sliding up a little in bed and offering her a smile. The prospects of the milkshake having a cherry on top brightened my somber mood.

“Have they had you up and walking yet?” She placed the shake and the mail on the rolling bedside table, then slid it over my lap. “Here you go.”

I reached first for the drink, peering inside to fish out the cherry. “Yes, and it hurt like the dickens. Sometimes I think they took a hacksaw to me on that operating table.”

“Well, get through it. They’re not letting you leave here until you walk enough and—you know—go to the bathroom.” She dropped into the sleeper-chair; it sighed softly under her light weight.

“I know,” I said around the straw. Drawing on the shake pulled at my stitches, so I started spooning it with the straw.

“Look at the top card.”

“Let me just finish this first …” I said. “It’s too good to let it turn to soup and breakfast was awful.”

“Soon we’ll have you home and I’ll make you a good breakfast like I used to.”

Words—and memories—that brought another smile.

Later, with the entire milkshake in my happy tummy, I slid the first card off the stack, read the return address, then looked at my mother. “Elaine?”

“She’s gone and done it from what her mama told me. Said she would and she did.”

I opened the card, my fingers quivering. “She couldn’t have …”

The last time I’d spoken to my old best friend, she’d mentioned taking her hot-off-the-press diploma and heading west to the reservations to serve as a medical missionary. I’d laughed at her, reminding her that she had planned to bake on the beach for a while first. “No, no,” she’d said to me. “The beach for a few days, but …”

“Come on, Elaine. You? A missionary?”

“Yes, me. I’m serious now,” she’d said. “Serious as a heart attack.”

“You are not …” I just couldn’t imagine Elaine doing anything so far above herself. A great girl and all, but …

“If I’m lying, I’m dying,” she quipped.

I opened the card, which included a child’s drawing of flowers growing wild under a golden sun. The words “Get Well Soon” had been scrawled in crayon along the top left corner. I turned it toward Mama who had already gone to work on her knitting. “Look,” I said.

“Did she include a letter?”

“She wrote in the card.”

“Read it to me … if you want to.”

I did and I didn’t. Elaine, of all people, working with the American Indians. Working, specifically, with American Indian children. Children. Little Miss “Let’s Live Life by the Seat of Our Pants” had actually started living for someone else. For something greater than herself. I almost couldn’t believe it, even with the color-crayoned proof lying in front of me, still half folded.

“She says: Hey, Sweet One!” I looked over at Mama. “She’s never called me that before.”

“Sounds just like her mama.” Mama’s needles clinked against each other in the familiar tapping of my childhood. “That’s what happens to daughters when they grow older. They start to sound like their mamas. I know I did.”

Oh, dear Lord …

“Bound to happen to you, too,” Mama continued as though she’d read my thoughts, her eyes on her handiwork.

Maybe so. But who would it happen to after me?

“She—um—says: Greetings from the Nizhoni Reservation in glorious northern Arizona. Nizhoni is the Navajo word for ‘The Beauty Way.’ Sounds like I’m working at some kind of spa, huh?” I looked at Mama again.

“It does, I reckon,” she said.

I took a deep breath. “Okay … some kind of spa, huh? But it’s not. I wish I had enough room to tell you all about it, but I don’t so I’ll write you a long letter soon. I’ll even tell you how I was persuaded to move here (oh my gosh, you should see Sedona!) to work with these amazing people.” I paused. Swallowed around the words I saw coming. “I love you bunches and wish I were there to help you mend. Sending prayers.” I closed the card. “Elaine.”

Mama didn’t miss a beat. “I declare I need to talk to Rose. I sure hope Elaine’s not going to take up with some strange religion while she’s out there.”

I lay back against the cool of the pillow and closed my eyes, trying to picture Elaine holding Native American children. Comforting them when they were sick. Laughing with them when they were not. Reading to them … the way I read to Michelle.

Michelle. Could I possibly miss a child more? “Mama,” I said, my eyes still closed.

“Hmm?”

“Do you know if Westley talked to Michelle?”

“He called over there last night,” she answered, her needles still working. “I heard him saying prayers with her. Or his side of the prayers, anyway.”

I smiled. “She’s so precious when she prays.”

“Are you going to read the rest of your cards?”

I shook my head. “Not right now,” I said. “I think I’ll nap a little while I can.”

“You may need to try to get up and walk a little …”

“I’ll nap, Mama,” I said, a tiny breath escaping my lungs. “Then I’ll get up and walk a little.”

I woke when the candy striper brought my lunch tray in. Mama took that as her cue to go downstairs to the cafeteria where she’d eat the sandwich and a snack-sized bag of chips she’d brought from the house with her. But she’d order a cup of coffee to make herself look less conspicuous, she told me. Less … thrifty.

After nibbling at the rubbery Salisbury steak, fairly decent potatoes with gravy, and canned peas, I devoured