“Wait Time” by Katie Runde (fiction, ’12)

An excerpt from “Wait Time” by Katie Runde (fiction, ’12) published at Pithead Chapel:

Wait Time

Margot poured her second glass of cabernet. She sat in the screen porch room next to Brian’s room, as attuned to him and his breathing as she had been to her newborn babies, in those weeks when she convinced herself she couldn’t be trusted to keep them alive. She listened to Liz and Evy breathe in those weeks, waiting in a half-second of panic for each exhale. She breathed in their warm talc and milk heads, and breathed in and out to gather herself for a second when she want to scream at the ugly three-am wake-ups and the long, low cries of loneliness or hunger they let out, and she breathed in the smell of brewing coffee, the only thing that separated night from day.

Seventeen years after those babies, Margot listened to the labored letting-go of their dad, to the slight wheeze and little hum, the occasional sigh that signaled either temporary relief or awe at the constant dreams that were blurring into the end for him; she couldn’t tell which and he couldn’t tell her.

When Liz told Margot she was meeting her friend Kaylee tonight, Margot knew she was lying. She never hung out with Kaylee. But she did a quick risk-benefit analysis, taking into consideration her own depleted capacity for thinking ahead and the chances that Liz would give her that death-stare she had been perfecting lately that seemed to pierce every cell in Margot’s body if she said no. She had a feeling Liz was going to meet the guy she had been hanging around with from work, who she also knew about despite her daughter’s efforts to keep him a secret. Margot considered the inevitable, awful truth that Liz would eventually have sex with someone, someday, and the not-all-that-reassuring fact that she had at least gotten an A in her Sex Ed unit of health class. The blank, Lexapro-induced Zen state she had been operating in since May that dampened any panic took over, and she’d let her go. Evy was out too, and she realized she hadn’t even asked her where she was going. […continue reading here]