Page 2 of Second Start: Family
Then Annie announced she was pregnant again.
I don’t know why you’re upset, Hall. I’ll take care of this new baby, just like I take care of Danny.
That had been the girls. Twins.
With Bobby, Annie hadn’t even bothered with those extra words. She’d just announced it, that cream-licking smile of hers coming out.
Making babies is one thing we’re good at together, Hall. And raising ’em’s what I’m good at.
Except she wasn’t here to raise them now.
“No, you can’t, Dan.” Hall cleared his throat.
Dan had been with him, helping with the planting. Reluctantly, as always. Nearly silently, as always. At least with him.
Your Mom’s had an accident. We gotta go.That’s all he’d said, already heading for the pickup.
The boy hadn’t asked anything until they hit the highway.Where is she? Is she okay?
They took her to the hospital, and I don’t know.
Hall swallowed now, started again. “You can’t any of you see her. Not … not right yet.”
God, what did he say to them?
Annie always cared for the kids, tended their needs, heard their hopes, nursed their pains.
He remembered trying to hold Dan as a baby, trying to turn his big rough hands to bottle-feedings and diaper-changes. Annie stepped in, guarding against gas or diaper rash. It made sense for Hall to see to the ranch — there was always more work waiting to be done than there was time — and leave the kids to Annie.
He crouched in front of the sofa, getting eye-level with the girls and Bobby. Dan stood behind Hall, out of his line of sight.
“Your Mom had something real wrong with her. Something—”
“Because of the accident?” Molly asked.
The three younger kids had been in the truck with Annie when she went off the road short of the Black Colt Creek Post Office. If she hadn’t been slowing to make the turn … but she had been, so the kids were fine. All the truck had were a few added scratches from the slide into the ditch. Mary Alberts from the post office called the rescue squad.
“No. Not the accident. What was wrong with her was why the accident happened. She had something called an aneurysm in her brain — in her head. It’s when the blood vessel, the uh, thing like a tube that the blood goes through, it gets weak and breaks—”
“No.” Dan whispered it. And again. “No.”
“But the doctors fixed it, right?” Molly asked.
Hall took off his hat, propped it on his bent knee and pushed his fingers through his hair. “They couldn’t fix it. Nobody could fix it.”
Lizzie put her thumb in her mouth. Bobby looked up at Molly as she asked another question.
“Does it hurt her?”
“No. It doesn’t hurt her. Your Momma’s not going to be hurt by anything ever again. She’s … she’s gone to heaven.”
Molly frowned at him in accusation. “You have to be dead to go to heaven.”
He nodded. A jerky motion, because the muscles in his neck didn’t work right. “Yes. Your momma’s dead.”
Three of the four babies he and Annie had made stared back at him.
Hall dropped forward to his knees, the straw hat crushed against the carpeted floor.
