Total pages in book: 60
Estimated words: 55860 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 279(@200wpm)___ 223(@250wpm)___ 186(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 55860 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 279(@200wpm)___ 223(@250wpm)___ 186(@300wpm)
Stomach twisting in knots, I tell Lara in a rush what’s going on. I say I’m sorry about eight times, but the grim line of her mouth tells me that sorry isn’t going to cut it this time. I grab my stuff from my locker and don’t bother changing out of my scrubs. When I get home, I throw the car door open before I’ve even shifted into park.
He’s exactly where I know he’ll be. Sprawled in a kitchen chair because it’s the first seat he came to when he walked in from the garage. He doesn’t go to the bathroom to clean up or even the couch to get comfortable. It’s the kitchen chair, head thrown back, legs flung wide, dried blood on his face. His location is where the similarities end. This isn’t like the other times. Nothing prepared me for how bad he looks.
He’s lost money on cards and horse races, on Super Bowl point spreads and March Madness brackets. My dad’s tried handicapping the vice-presidential nominations and everything in between. I’ve never seen him this beaten up, both eyes swelling shut, blood matting his hair on one side near the temple. Too near the temple. I drop to my knees beside him.
“Daddy?” I say, my voice shakier than I’d like it to be, scared despite my medical training. He stirs and makes a noise. He flexes his left hand, hanging down beside him, as if reaching for the phone he dropped after calling me. “I came as fast as I could. Can you open your eyes for me? What happened?”
As I grab paper towels to clean some of the blood off him, and an ice pack from the freezer for the swelling distorting his still-handsome face, I run through my options. I have four hundred dollars, and that’s all. My next paycheck will be my last for a while since HR is probably drawing up a letter of termination even now. I won’t mention any of that to him. No reason to worry him when he’s already down on his luck. I grab a towel and run warm water in a plastic bowl.
I try to assess if he’s bad enough we need to go to urgent care or not. The copay on a visit is over a hundred bucks and that’s without x-rays. Just looking at him I know he will need an x-ray. His right hand is laying across his stomach. The wrist is bent in a way that tells me I better ice it and wrap it quickly.
I get to work cleaning him up, dab antiseptic and liquid bandage on his cuts. He hisses when it touches him and does some moaning and cussing but doesn’t offer any explanation. I know better than to pester him with questions at a time like this, but my heart squeezes at the sight of him so bruised and torn up. I can’t keep the ice on his busted lip because I need both hands to bandage him. And nothing he is doing is helping.
When I gingerly wrap his right hand and wrist, he blurts out a stream of profanity and I start to get some information.
Because of his swollen lip and probably some loose teeth, as well as a severely bruised jaw, his words are garbled, slurred. I feel my own jaw clench in sympathy. I’m able to pick out ‘motherfuckers’ and a distinctly sickening, ‘thousand dollars’ before he coughs and then winces.
I’m so busy tending his visible injuries that I haven’t checked his ribs. His reaction to that cough tells me they’re cracked. I go get my tape, shove up his shirt on one side. I probe his ribs with my fingertips, find the sore spot and start taping. Surprising no one, my dad calls me something that sounds like ‘asshole’ for my trouble.
Once his ribs are taped and his hand wrapped, I switch out the water in the bowl and try cleaning the blood out of his hair. I wrap a frozen eye mask around his head and secure it with Velcro to keep my hands free to treat his other injuries. I pry his lids open a second time to check his pupils. He doesn’t have much of a concussion if any, thank God.
“Okay, you’re patched up enough to tell me what happened,” I declare, picking dried blood from his graying, once-dark hair. He grumbles, but I wait. I get him a drink of water and some ibuprofen.
“…lost some on March Madness…kept tryna win back enough to pay it off…” he mumbles.
“You’ve been in the hole for two months and betting on credit?” I say incredulously.
I shouldn’t be surprised. I know that, but it shocks me. How a grown man can be so helpless and impulsive. Like any other addiction.
“How much?” I ask, my hands going still in his hair as I steel myself.