Every Waking Moment Read Online Free Page A

Everest. Trees with towering boughs spread above, inspiring, almost breathtaking in their grandeur and artistry. The old woman who was pushed past it didn’t seem to notice.
    The door was heavy and clunked when Treha tugged at it, making it open automatically. At eye level on the door, easily visible to anyone in a sitting position, was a quotation by Ralph Waldo Emerson.
    Do not go where the path may lead; go instead where there is no path and leave a trail.
    Treha waited for the door to fully open, then pushed the woman through, her shoelaces clicking. A fireplace with an oak mantel centered the room. It was flanked by two six-by-six-foot windows that looked out on the expansive lawn and an iron fence that surrounded the acreage. A flagpole at the far end of the property rose to heights that suggested the need for a beacon on top to warn incoming planes. The huge American flag that usually hung limp waved and flapped in the stiff breeze, rippling and fluttering.
    Along the walls ran bench-like structures for larger meetings. They were empty now, but two ladies sat beside each other at a long table at the end of the room, choosing edge pieces from a puzzle box and speaking loudly, engaging in the conversation with grunts and chuckles and bodily noises forgiven without asking. One was Miss Madalyn, the one called the Opera Singer, and the other was a newer resident Treha hadn’t met. On the other side of the room sat Dr. Crenshaw looking out the window, staring at the golf course grass   —as if he, too, longed to be planted. He held a Bible on one knee and a folded newspaper on the other, and when Treha walked inside, he smiled and nodded and turned back to the view.
    Treha maneuvered Ardeth’s wheelchair safely up to the table, then took one of the woman’s hands and rested it on top. She did the same for the other, and the skin on the woman’s arms sagged, bearing the telltale flaking, cracking, and splotching of too many summers. Limp and compliant, she kept her arms exactly where Treha placed them as she stared at the wall.
    Treha felt neither hope nor despair but something wedgedbetween. This was her job now, her calling. A resolution to life, as if she were scrubbing dishes or sweeping a floor she had promised to finish. She took short steps from one side of the table to the other, pulled out a chair, and sat. She placed her hands on the table, her index fingers nearly touching Ardeth’s. The comparison was startling. On one side were wrinkled and blemished hands. On the other was clear, smooth skin. The old woman’s nails were polished, but Treha’s were cut to the quick, not clipped evenly but jagged and rough.
    Treha closed her eyes and took a deep breath. When she opened them, her eyes shifted and reset, the involuntary movement of her life. Walls and floors blurring and leaning. A vibration that shuddered through nerve endings. Then the swaying and quick jump, the return of a typewriter carriage in her head.
    She waited, closed her eyes again, shook her head slightly, and looked up. Still there. Still moving. But the room settled as she swayed to compensate. The eyes of the old woman were clouded, barricades of age and confusion, but she knew that behind the cloud were the words. Treha could feel them even if they couldn’t be seen. Words floating, disembodied, perhaps only unformed letters and memories drifting like smoke.
    Treha searched the old woman’s eyes and saw a chasm of darkness, a shadowed veil suspended between the inner, unseen world and the self-evident one. She lifted a finger, and then her hand hovered over the wrinkled one.
    There was no jolt of electricity, no sound or feeling other than the meeting of skin. But something happened. There was a reaching, a leaning response from the old woman’s body, moving closer.
    Treha sat forward and placed both hands on Ardeth’s. Theladies had quieted their chattering as if they could sense what was happening. Dr. Crenshaw turned his chair