More Than Enough by John Fulton Page A

“I thought they were letting you out of that thing today,” she said, gesturing at my sling.
    â€œThey asked me to wear it for another week or so,” I said, lying to avoid what I sensed was going to be a very unpleasant situation.
    â€œYour arm is healing, isn’t it?” she asked.
    â€œI guess I’m not healing as well as they thought I would.”
    â€œWhy is that the case?” she asked.
    â€œThe doctors aren’t sure.”
    â€œWonderful. Great,” my mother said. She looked at me, and I saw that she was not only sad but angry, too.
    I should have stopped, but sometimes I just didn’t know when to stop. “They said it might take months more. They said they’d have to do some tests and things.”
    â€œJesus.” She hit the steering wheel with her hand. “Why can’t anything go right with this family? Why?”
    â€œWhat’s wrong with everybody?” I asked.
    â€œNothing,” my mother said. We’d stopped at a light, and she looked at me and smiled, as if to prove it. “Nothing.” A tear dropped quickly from her eye, then another and another. She let out a laugh. “Oh, shit,” she said.
    â€œYou’re scaring me,” I said. I looked out my window at a hippie on a chopper who’d just pulled up beside us. He wore no helmet, and his long hair and beard dripped with rain. “I want somebody to tell me what’s wrong.”
    â€œIt’s nothing. Nothing at all.” My mother put her head down on the steering wheel and really started to cry.
    â€œThe light’s turned,” I said. The people behind us had begun honking. “You have to go.” I nudged her, and she sat up and began driving, her eyes focusing, drying a little as she watched the road.
    â€œMr. Warner died today,” my mother said, looking straight ahead. Mr. Warner, I guessed, was one of the tenants at Oak Groves. “I have this job where people actually die, Steven. It’s crazy, crazy. He just fell over on me. I couldn’t believe his weight. I’ve never felt anything so heavy.”
    â€œWho’s Mr. Warner?” I asked.
    â€œJust an old man,” she said. “A very old man who died a few hours ago and fell on your mother. How insane is that?” She looked at me and began laughing out loud as the tears came to her eyes again. “Now I have to go back there and talk to someone about it—the coroner or someone—so that they can make out a report. I’m the sole witness to Mr. Warner’s death.” She was taking a left turn and stopped talking to concentrate on her driving before starting in again. “I have to make a statement. I was telling him to lift his arms up so that I could sponge him there. That’s when he fell on me. Jesus.” I could see by the way my mother was shaking her head back and forth, back and forth, that she was remembering it in detail and trying as hard as she could, flexing her jaw and then spitting out a laugh, not to remember it. In the backseat, Jenny was looking down at her lap. She’d probably heard the whole story by now. I could picture Jenny wanting to tell my mother about making the drill team, being a Billmorette, and then my mother telling her about the dead guy. “He still had soap on him,” my mother continued, “and I was rinsing him off. If you send them to lunch with soap suds still on them, they get sent back to you and you have to rinse them off again. That’s when he just fell over on me like I was supposed to comfort him or do something. So now we need to go back there. I have to sign something. I guess that’s what you do when somebody old with no living relatives dies. I didn’t even know him. He was too old to know.”
    â€œAre we going to Oak Groves right now?” I asked.
    â€œHe never said anything that made sense, anything that you could reply to,” she said. “You