Dandelion

I need to get going, but there is one more patient on the schedule. They’re talking about the weather on the receptionist’s radio. The roads are 75 percent snow and ice covered. It’s a two hour drive to my mom’s house.

“Maybe the patient won’t show,” Jan, the receptionist, says. She has a little Christmas tree on her desk, decorated with cat ornaments. Most everyone has gone home. Jan’s working on a sudoku puzzle, tapping her front tooth with her pen.

“Can you stop that?” I ask. “Please?”

***

The neurologist is in his office and the light above the door is red, meaning we have to leave him alone. He goes by one name, Steele, like a rock star. I have runs in both my stockings and it’s too warm in the neuropsychology lab. At lunch, I take the elevator down and stand outside the hospital for ten seconds, letting the snowflakes pelt my face.

***

Mrs. Turpo shows up. She is with her husband, who is wearing a bright red carnation in his lapel. Since her aneurysm, she recognizes no one, not even her husband, until she hears his voice. He wears the red carnation so she can pick him out of a crowd. She recognizes me by the star I always draw on the back of my hand. I show it to her and she says, “Jennifer!”

***

I take her arm and walk with her to the exam room. She won’t remove the fur coat she’s encased in. Maybe it makes her feel bear-like and safe.

“Almost there, almost there,” I tell her. She smiles at me and I smile back. We get settled and I pull all the basic exam sheets out of the file drawer and tap them on the table. I hold up a picture of a dog.

“Dandelion,” she says.

***

It’s scary, driving in a snow storm at night. My dad used to say just get behind another car and keep just enough distance to see its taillights. Focus on those lights and you’ll be all right. But who was the guy in front following? My dad used to tell me that he had the utmost confidence in me, but he used the word utmost too freely. I know, and my mother will remind me, that I was mostly a disappointment.

***

The last time I saw my mother was in the church basement, after Dad’s funeral. People were chowing down on sandwiches and potato salad and corn on the cob like it was a picnic. She slapped me and I slapped her and a little kid with cake all over his face started to cry.

***

Mrs. Turpo is fidgety. I think she has to go to the bathroom. She reminds me of my mom. It’s in the way she is frightened but smiling all the time. My mom misses my dad and Mrs. Turpo, misses knowing her husband’s face.

I fill in the rest of the tests, referring to her last visit, making her scores slightly worse.

“I really don’t want to go, Mrs. Turpo,” I tell her. “Do I have to go?”

She is humming steadily now, like an electrical appliance. Out in the waiting room, Jan and Mr. Turpo burst into laughter. I can’t get the exam sheets into a neat pile like I want. I am stuffing them into her chart. A couple of them slide off the desk onto the floor. Mrs. Turpo leans in close and touches my cheek. She’s looking into my face like she’s seeing something she recognizes. Her coat falls open and I see that underneath it, she is naked.

___________________________________________

Kathy Fish’s stories can be found at Indiana Review, Mississippi Review online, Denver Quarterly, Keyhole Magazine, Everyday Genius, Quick Fiction and elsewhere. A collection of her work is available from Rose Metal Press in a book entitled A Peculiar Feeling of Restlessness: Four Chapbooks of Short Short Fiction by Four Women.