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“We need to get her to the car,” I said to Lula.
“Okay,” Lula said. “Do you want to carry her or drag her?”
“Can you hop?” I asked Grandma.
“I could before the Jack Daniels, but now I’m not so sure.”
Lula got on one side of Grandma, and I got on the other, and we scooped Grandma up and got her out the door, down the sidewalk, and
to the Jeep. I was afraid to alley-oop her, so I dragged her up onto the passenger seat.
“It’s a shame we gotta go to the hospital,” Grandma said. “I feel like having some fun. I wouldn’t mind seeing some naked men.”
“How much Jack did you have?” Lula asked.
“I don’t need Jack to want to see naked men,” Grandma said. “You get to be my age, and there’s not a whole lot of opportunity. I signed up for one of those porn movies on TV once, and it was all girls. You only got to see the men from the back. What good is that?”
“I hear you,” Lula said.
Saint Francis Hospital is about three minutes from my parents’ house. I pulled into the emergency room drive-through, off-loaded Grandma into a wheelchair with Lula in charge, and hustled to the parking garage.
By the time I got back to the emergency room, Grandma had been wheeled off somewhere to be evaluated, and Lula was busy reading magazines.
“This is an excellent emergency room,” Lula said. “They got a good selection of magazines. And people tell me they know what they’re doing here when it comes to shootings and knifings, on account of they get so much practice.”
An hour later, they wheeled Grandma back to the waiting room with a big black boot thing on her foot.
“It’s broke, all right,” she said. “I got to see the X-ray.”
“What have you got on your foot?” Lula wanted to know.
“The bone was just cracked a little, so they wrapped my foot up in this boot thing instead of putting it in a cast. I can walk on it and everything.”
Grandma got out of the wheelchair and took the boot for a test-drive.
Step, stomp, step, stomp, step, stomp.
The boot came to mid calf, was foam-padded and held secure with thick Velcro straps. The bottom of the boot was two inches of hard molded plastic. When Grandma walked, she was tipped to one side, since one leg was two inches longer now than the other.
“I feel gimpy in this boot,” Grandma said. “And my butt cheeks don’t match up. One feels higher than the other. I can’t squeeze to keep the breezers in.”
“We’ll keep the windows open on the way home,” Lula said.
Grandma looked down at the boot. “It’s pretty nifty, though. I can’t wait to show this to your mother. I bet this could get us one of those handicap parking signs. And I got some pills for when the Jack Daniels wears off.”
I brought the Jeep around to the drive-through, boosted Grandma up into it, and drove her home. I’d called ahead, and my mother was waiting at curbside.
“Here she is,” I said, lowering Grandma down to my mother. “Almost as good as new.”
“For the love of Pete,” my mother said.
“I was doing a lunge, and I broke my foot,” Grandma told her. “But it’s only a little bit broke.”
“I have to go,” I said to my mother. “I have to get back to the office.”
“Can you walk?” my mother asked my grandmother.
“Of course I can walk,” Grandma said. “Look at this.”
