The Blue Cotton Gown Read Online Free Page A

gray rolling stool, unsure how to end the encounter. Holly breaks the silence.
    “Thank you for listening. I’ve never confessed this to anyone. No one knows but my husband and our three boys.” She clears her throat. “We should have seen it coming. We should have gotten help sooner . . . I recognize it now.”
    When I stand, I don’t know my intention. I could give the woman a hug. That’s what I usually do, but instead I take Holly’s head between my hands and press my forehead against hers, my straight short gray-brown hair against the silky waves. I’m surprised and not sure what I mean by this gesture, what I’m trying to tell

    her, but I stand there for a moment, the silence in my brain going into hers. She smells like roses. It hurts to be a mother. It hurts to give birth. And it can hurt a lot worse later.
    Then I start to leave but pause at the door. “What did you say her name was? Your daughter?”
    “It’s Nora.”
    “I’ll say a prayer for her,” I whisper. Holly’s eyes meet mine. “I’ll say a prayer for her.”

    Prayer

    There aren’t many words to my prayers. I have a little box on our dresser. It’s a round red wooden box, with a yellow moon and stars on the lid. I can’t remember where it came from, probably a present from one of the boys.
    Nora, Holly’s daughter. May she eat and enjoy life and love herself, I
    write on a tiny slip of paper. And on another, Holly, mother of Nora, may she forgive herself and find peace. I open the box and gaze at the multicolored folded squares. There’s a prayer for my brother Dar-ren, crippled after a surgery and living in Texas. There are prayers for each of my sons, Mica, Orion, and Zen. And for Maria, who has breast cancer. And for Ruth, whose daughter was killed in an auto accident. I refold the prayers. The box is getting full, but I’m super-stitious. If I take someone’s prayer out too early, something bad might happen.
    In my first years of nurse-midwifery school, I was taught not to mix religion with medicine. It wasn’t considered professional, but lately I’ve broken the rule. I used to pray on my knees for the boys, passionately calling out for someone to hear. “ Please, keep my boys out of trouble. Help them learn to walk away from danger. Give them some sense. Shine your light on them.” I prayed the same

    words over and over every night. After a while, I realized I was badg-ering God. The Great Spirit had heard me the first time. I was probably getting on his or her nerves.
    Now, each night I light a small white candle. I put my hand on the round red box. “God be with you,” I say, and my love goes into the air with the light, to my patients, my kids, whoever’s in trouble. I don’t know if it helps. It’s my prayer.
    One name I finally took out of the box is Lyndie. Lyndie died of breast cancer. I took her prayer out after the funeral.
    One name I haven’t put in is my own.

    chapter 2

    Sin of Omission

    “Didn’t you notice?” Rebecca had asked, scratching her head with a pencil. “Didn’t you check his figures?” Her red hair flared around her face, and her dangling earrings shimmered.
    Now I turn over and pull the covers up to my chin, remembering the meeting with our new accountant from Pittsburgh. It’s 2:15
    a.m. and I need to sleep, but I can’t. Rebecca Gorham had reviewed the letter we received from the IRS and told us that the practice owed the government twenty-one thousand dollars. The best I can understand is that our former accountant, Bob Reed, had been un-derreporting the corporate income for two years. “Didn’t you check his figures?” Rebecca had asked again in frustration.
    “No,” answered Tom, pushing his wire-rim glasses up on his nose. “We trusted the man. It’s his job. He knows about numbers, I know about medicine. If I checked everything he did, I might as well be my own accountant!”
    Gorham had tossed her head, and her earrings had tinkled. “You understand that