Page 90 of Good Days Bad Days
“Yes, Don. Your first husband.” I push a little. I know I’m breaking the deal I made with my dad but I can’t stop myself. When I found out she was a Playboy Bunny, I let it go. When I found out she was on awhole-ass TV show and wrote a book, I let it go. When I found out she was married before, I let it go. But a sister? I can’t let that go.
The bell above the door rings. Betty’s eyes dart to the entrance as a family of three—husband, wife, and their teenage son—walks into the diner.
“He’s always late,” she says, disappointment abundant in her voice.
“Who’s late?”
“My husband,” she says. I lean in. “He’s late. He’s always late. I call and call and call, and he never comes home.”
“Don?” I ask, encouraging her to provide more details.
“It’s a girls’ day today,” Olivia says sweetly, doing a better job at noticing Betty’s growing agitation than my tunnel vision allows. “No husband talk.”
“He’s supposed to call when he’s late. Where is he? Doesn’t he know I’m home all day with the baby?” Betty’s temper flares as she pounds against the table, and I see the outrage of her motherhood years rise in her body, her shoulders tossed back like they carry the weight of the world. And as always, when the mother version of Betty returns, so does the hurt child inside of me, only adding to my already heightened emotional state.
“What’s your baby’s name?” I ask, convinced she’s on the verge of telling me. A sister. Can I possibly have a sister?
Olivia talks over me, opening a packet of crackers.
“Mom. Stop. I think her blood sugar might be crashing.” She offers Betty a packet of saltines, which she bats away, sending them flying across the room, and that’s all I need to snap me out of my line of questioning.
Betty’s not okay. She’s agitated and disassociated from reality. This isn’t just blood sugar. She’s spiraling.
“Betty,” I say, reaching for her shoulder. At my touch she lets out a blood-curdling scream.
“Don’t touch me! Don’t touch my baby,” she wails, swatting at Olivia and me as though we’re kidnappers holding her at gunpoint with zip ties and duct tape at the ready.
In her frenzy, Betty sweeps the plates and bowls off the table. The boiling hot soup and coffee splatter onto her hands and spill onto her lap, eliciting an ear-piercing scream. I reach out to stop the spill, my forearm catching on a jagged edge of the table. Olivia, who escaped the flood of hot liquid, pulls me out of the booth, and I notice my own hands are covered in red welts and small white pustules that grow as I stare at them. Blood pours down my arm from a deep gash and my head spins. The room grows blurry.
“Hot! Hot!” Betty cries as Olivia and Taylor help her out from behind the table. Her new pink dress is soaked with yellow and brown splotches. I can only imagine the vulnerable skin underneath, remembering how easily her flesh tore when she grew frantic in the courtyard.
“Take it off. You have to take it off,” I say, lurching forward to unfasten the buttons running down the front of the garment, when a nice woman from another table holds me back, wrapping my hands in cool, wet rags.
“Tim’s an EMT,” she says, referencing the tall, middle-aged man she’d walked in with, encouraging me to sit down. Tim speaks calmly to Betty, who is still screaming.
Taylor emerges from the kitchen, carrying pitchers of ice water with a phone pressed to her ear. Tim’s partner introduces herself and asks if there’s anyone she can call to help us. Taylor retrieves my phone, dries it off as best she can, and holds the screen for Face ID. The lock screen shows a picture of me, Ian, Olivia, and the boys on the beach, taken during our last family vacation.
“Oh, my God, I knew you looked familiar,” she says as sirens wail, mingling with the heartbreaking sound of my mom’s cries.
Chapter 36
Greg
February 4, 1974
Lake Geneva, Wisconsin
“You’ll need these,” Harry said a few days ago, dropping quilts on the end of my bed.
The attic room has no heating or air conditioning, making it hot in the summer and freezing in the winter. During the summer, I would open the windows, sleep in my underwear, and sprinkle the bed sheets with a fine mist of water before bed to help keep me cool.
After spending twenty-one months in Vietnam, my internal thermostat recalibrated to guard against the heat. Then fall hit and the cold cut through the layers of bedding like a frozen blade. I found an old space heater in the junk pile in the basement, and with a few scrap parts, I got it working well enough to keep the water from freezing in the glass on my bedside table in the frigid winter temperatures.
So when the phone in the office starts ringing at 2:36 a.m., I ignore it. The first set of rings wakes me, the second makes me think it must be a wrong number, the third makes me sit upright.
Something must be wrong.
I drag myself out of bed, my skin crawling with anticipation. Lincoln, a young sergeant we interviewed, used to call it the “gut punch.” Claimed it’s what kept him safe, even though he’d already been injured twice and awarded two purple hearts. His nickname was Hero.
