Getting Better

Bernie Kovach has spent eleven days getting the front room ready. The couch is in the garage, the rented bed is standing in the rectangle it left in the carpet, and the hospice nurse gives her a number in plain words: days to weeks. Bernie writes it on the kitchen calendar in pencil, so that it can come off.

Then her mother asks for eggs.

Irene Kovach has not eaten since the second of November. By December she is walking to the mailbox. By Christmas she is on her feet for nine hours cooking a dinner, three weeks after a physician declined to sign that she was dying and the hospital bed went out of the front room on a hand truck. Everyone on Lister Street calls it a miracle. They are not wrong, and Bernie says thank you, and means it, and cannot say the other thing.

Because Bernie is going the other way.

There is a taste at the back of her tongue that will not rinse out. She is losing weight she cannot account for and hours she cannot find. She has cleaned teeth for twenty-one years and has perfect charts, and she has started losing teeth with nothing wrong with them.

There is a completely reasonable explanation for all of it, and the book gives it to you every time: four months without sleep, a job coming apart, a sister a hundred and ninety miles away who sends money instead of time. Any doctor would say so. One does.

There is also an eighty-four-year-old woman who worked twenty years of nights beside her mother, who has been asked this question before, and who will not answer it. And when her sister finally says what happened to her in 1994, the last time their mother got better, it explains nothing at all.

A quiet novel about what it costs to be the one who stays. There is no monster in it. Everything frightening in this book is a body, a document, or a schedule.