Final Stroke Read Online Free Page A

goose fat, onion, paprika, salt—or the sour cream pan-cakes—eggs, flour, milk, sugar, salt, butter, sour cream, extra egg yolks. Or maybe it was his failure to exercise adequately during his first fifty years. Or maybe it was in his genes. Whatever the cause, he was definitely doing stroke time.
    Besides the immobility of his right side, the first thing Steve was aware of after his stroke was that he often found himself thinking he wanted to say something but was unable to say it. Case in point—he loved the word case . An important word, reminded him of the past. A man with cases. A Sergeant-Joe-Friday-kind-of-guy turning over stones until all the pieces to the puzzle are there on a table in the rehab center. No, not in the rehab center, not rehab puzzles designed to bridge the canyons left when brain cells wash out to sea like in the Mississippi delta. Different kinds of puzzles way back when he was an ex-cop but still had cases. Case in point on this business about not being able to come up with the right words at the right time was what to say to Brenda, the evening nurses’ aide, when she told him Marjorie Gianetti had moved upstairs.
    He’d wanted to tell Brenda about Marjorie being a fine lady and that he was sorry to hear about her moving upstairs. He wanted to say he wept yesterday when he saw a car being towed in the parking lot and wondered why he could not weep now. He wanted to say he knew damn well what was meant in this place by someone moving upstairs and that it had nothing to do with the floors in the building. He wanted to say he had enough trouble with words and hated the fact that nobody around this place had the guts to use the word dead . But most important of all, he wanted to say there was something fishy about Marjorie’s death because of something she’d said to him a few days earlier.
    “Mr. Babe,” she’d said, reaching out from her wheelchair to the arm of his wheelchair and putting her hand on his, “intermediate and skilled hard tile floors are beaners. Bullshit accidents don’t happen. Fuck the Pope and Medicaid gets the yolks.”
    Only after they finished laughing—his habit of smiling at every thing like a demented clown having caused the laughter in the first place—did he manage to figure out what she meant. If she could, Marjorie might have said something like, “The reason they have hard tile floors in intermediate and skilled wings is obvious. Residents being incontinent and accidents that might ruin the carpet are bullshit rea sons. They have tile floors so if one of us falls there’s a better chance it’ll be our last, and that saves Medicaid a bundle.” He wasn’t sure whether the mention of egg yolks had to do with the fragility of the residents, but he knew, by repeated hand signs she had used, that the yolk was the richest part of the egg and her mention of it was an allu sion to money.
    Marjorie was old enough to be Steve’s mother, and she had in deed adopted him on his first day at Hell in the Woods—He and Jan being given a tour of the group therapy rehab center when Marjorie caterpillar-walks out of the elevator, using her heels to pull her wheel chair along. She merges in beside him like a commuter merging into rush hour traffic. She is short with a hump between her shoulders. Despite her age, black strands of hair are mixed in with the gray, the outer strands lifting in the breeze as she accompanies him down the hall that first day. With her hair brushed back Madonna style, she reminds Steve of an Italian mama whose portrait adorns a jar of spa ghetti sauce.
    Although Marjorie had difficulty getting the words out, she man aged, “Gianetti, Marjorie, wife of Antonio. Pleased to meet.” She then turned her wheelchair toward Jan and said she was also pleased to meet Jan.
    Besides meeting Marjorie for the first time, two other things stuck in Steve’s ragtag memory of that morning. The first was the fact that when Jan pushed his wheelchair down halls