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CHAPTER TEN
GLASS ORNAMENTS
1
Abra’s father was standing at the kitchen counter in his bathrobe and beating eggs in a bowl when the
kitchen phone rang. Upstairs, the shower was pounding. If Abra followed her usual Sunday morning
MO, it would continue to pound until the hot water gave out.
He checked the incoming call window. It was a 617 area code, but the number following wasn’t the
one in Boston he knew, the one that rang the landline in his grandmother-in-law’s condo. “Hello?”
“Oh, David, I’m so glad I got you.” It was Lucy, and she sounded utterly exhausted.
“Where are you? Why aren’t you calling from your cell?”
“Mass General, on a pay phone. You can’t use cells in here, there are signs everywhere.”
“Is Momo all right? Are you?”
“I am. As for Momes, she’s stable . . . now . . . but for awhile it was pretty bad.” A gulp. “It still
is.” That was when Lucy broke down. Not just crying, but sobbing her heart out.
David waited. He was glad Abra was in the shower, and hoped the hot water would hold out for a
long time. This sounded bad.
At last Lucy was able to talk again. “This time she broke her arm.”
“Oh. Okay. Is that all?”
“No, it is not all!” Nearly shouting at him in that why-are-men-so-stupid voice that he absolutely
loathed, the one he told himself was a part of her Italian heritage without ever considering that he
might, on occasion, actually be quite stupid.
He took a steadying breath. “Tell me, honey.”
She did, although twice she broke into sobs again, and David had to wait her out. She was dead
beat, but that was only part of the problem. Mostly, he realized, she was just accepting in her gut
what her head had known for weeks: her momo was really going to die. Maybe not peacefully.
Concetta, who slept in only the thinnest of dozes now, had awakened after midnight and needed the
toilet. Instead of buzzing for Lucy to bring the bedpan, she had tried to get up and go to the bathroom
by herself. She had managed to swing her legs out onto the floor and sit up, but then dizziness had
overcome her and she had tumbled off the bed, landing on her left arm. It hadn’t just broken, it had
shattered. Lucy, tired out from weeks of night nursing that she had never been trained to do, awoke to
the sound of her grandmother’s cries.
“She wasn’t just calling for help,” Lucy said, “and she wasn’t screaming, either. She was shrieking,
like a fox that’s had a limb torn off in one of those terrible leghold traps.”
“Honey, that must have been awful.”
Standing in a first-floor alcove where there were snack machines and—mirabile dictu—a few
working phones, her body aching and covered with drying sweat (she could smell herself, and it sure
wasn’t Dolce & Gabbana Light Blue), her head pounding with the first migraine she’d had in four
years, Lucia Stone knew she could never tell him how awful it had really been. What a stinking
revelation it had been. You thought you understood the basic fact—woman grows old, woman grows