Inflating a Dog (The Personal History, Adventures, Experiences & Observations of Peter Leroy) by Eric Kraft (novels to read for beginners .txt) 📗

to New Mexico, where I spent the summer studying the fossils of ancient mollusks. Not long after my return from New Mexico, I met Albertine Gaudet and fell in love. Albertine and I went off to college, separately, but found that we couldn’t bear being apart. We married. We had two sons. I taught school for a while. Then I answered an ad and became the most recent in a series of pseudonymous authors of the Larry Peters series of adventure books for boys. With some of the spoils from the series, Albertine and I bought a tumbledown hotel, Small’s Hotel, on Small’s Island in Bolotomy Bay, where we lived for many years.

I never quite stopped suspecting that Bert Leroy was not my father, but after a while I decided that it didn’t really matter whether he was or not. I was my mother’s son, and my own man.

Chapter 56

The End

MY PARENTS SURPRISED EVERYONE when they abandoned Babbington for New Hampshire. They had often vacationed there, so the location wasn’t surprising, but my mother’s willingness to give up her status, her local fame as “Ella, who used to run Ella’s Lunch Launch,” was. She and my father were still years away from what was considered the usual retirement age, and my mother seemed to be at the top of her game, but away they went.

So it was from West Burke, New Hampshire, that my father called Small’s Hotel on a winter’s day fourteen years ago to tell me that my mother was dying of cancer.

“It’s why we left,” he said. “Why we left Babbington. Her secret. The cancer. She didn’t want to tell anyone. And she didn’t want everyone to remember her as ‘Ella, who died of cancer.’”

“Of course,” I said. “I understand.”

Albertine and I left the hotel in the care of Suki, the chef, and drove to West Burke. It was a long snowy drive; along the way we played tapes of music from my mother’s heyday, when swing was in flower and she was dating the Leroy boys.

We pulled into the hospital parking lot, tires crunching the dry snow, got out, doors resounding in the brittle air, and walked to the entrance.

The hospital was small, friendly, almost cozy. The whole staff seemed to know my mother, and they had been expecting Albertine and me. My mother was sleeping, and they were reluctant to wake her.

“I know you came a long way,” said one of the nurses, “but I think it’s best to let her wake on her own.”

“Of course,” I said. “That’s fine. We’ll wait.”

“I’m sorry to make you wait, but it’s just that she’s apt to be a little disoriented when she wakes up, and I’d like to give her time to get her bearings before you go in.”

“I understand,” I said. “That’s considerate of you. Thank you.” Albertine gave my hand a squeeze.

Albertine and I sat in the waiting room with my father. None of us had anything to say — or, to be more accurate about it, none of us cared to say anything. The essential subject of anything we might have said, whether we had talked about the weather or the cosmos, would have been my mother’s death, its approach, its inevitability, and none of us wanted to talk about that, so we said nearly nothing.

The nurses fussed over us, brought us tea and cookies; finally, one emerged from the ward, and after some whispering at the nurses’ station, she came over to us and said, “You can see her now.”

She was fettered by wires and tubes, bloated with accumulated fluids, barely able to speak, but she seemed to brighten when she saw us, and she wanted to say something to each of us. When my father bent over her to kiss her, she pulled at him and got him to bend lower and wheezed something in his ear that made him swallow and wipe his eyes and excuse himself to pull himself together.

I heard what she said to Albertine. She had to pause between the words, and she barely got them all out. It was, “Take good care of my baby.”

When it was my turn, and I leaned over her, the thought blew into my mind that she might want to say something about my paternity. Maybe she was going to tell me that what Patti had guessed was right, that she had loved Buster first, more, and forever, that even though Bert was my biological father, she considered Buster my spiritual father. But she didn’t say anything remotely like that. She gasped “Arcinella.” She struggled for breath, shaking her head and, despite the fact that she could barely breathe, managed to say, “It was — ”

“ — quite a ride,” I finished for her.

She pulled me even closer, and in a rattle finished for herself, “ — a real blow job!”

The effort exhausted her.

I held her hand, and when she seemed to doze, I squeezed it and told her that I would see her again the next day.

Back in the waiting room, one of the nurses sighed, seemed to consider whether it would be appropriate to say what she was about to say, and decided to say it: “I just wanted to tell you how much fun Ella is to have around.”

“Fun?” I said.

“Oh, yes. She keeps us all laughing.”

“But — she could barely speak.”

“Oh — of course — but — I mean before — ”

“Oh.”

“She told us all those stories, those funny stories.”

“Funny stories.”

“About all the crazy things you did.”

“Crazy things? What crazy things?”

“Oh, I don’t know — ”

Another suggested, “The way you ran around trying to get all those kittens to stay in your little red wagon.”

“Oh,” I said. “That. Huh. I was just a little kid — a toddler.”

The first added, “How you were afraid of clams!”

There were about six of them now.

“Heh-heh-heh,” I chuckled affably. “It wasn’t quite that way. I wasn’t actually afraid of them — and besides, I was a little boy.”

“What about that trip up a river in