“Where’s Mom?”

“She’s at the beauty parlor. And your father’s playing pinochle at his club. And I hate to call the ambulance people, because then I’ll be a spectacle. There’ll be rumors I’m dead. I just need you to give me a ride to the emergency room.”

ELEVEN

LULA AND I stood in the living room, looking at Grandma’s foot.

“It looks broke all right,” Lula said to Grandma. “That’s one heck of an ugly foot you got there, but I like the polish you got on your toes. What’s the name of that?”

“Red Hot Rapture. Lucky I just painted them yesterday. Imagine breaking your foot when your toes weren’t done up.”

“Yeah,” Lula said. “I’d hate that. Does it hurt?”

“It used to, but I took a couple snorts of Jack Daniels, and I’m pretty happy.”

“We need to get her to the car,” I said to Lula.

“Okay,” Lula said. “Do you want to carry her or drag her?”

“Can you hop?” I asked Grandma.

“I could before the Jack Daniels, but now I’m not so sure.”

Lula got on one side of Grandma, and I got on the other, and we scooped Grandma up and got her out the door, down the sidewalk, and to the Jeep. I was afraid to alley-oop her, so I dragged her up onto the passenger seat.

“It’s a shame we gotta go to the hospital,” Grandma said. “I feel like having some fun. I wouldn’t mind seeing some naked men.”

“How much Jack did you have?” Lula asked.

“I don’t need Jack to want to see naked men,” Grandma said. “You get to be my age, and there’s not a whole lot of opportunity. I signed up for one of those porn movies on TV once, and it was all girls. You only got to see the men from the back. What good is that?”

“I hear you,” Lula said.

Saint Francis Hospital is about three minutes from my parents’ house. I pulled into the emergency room drive-through, off-loaded Grandma into a wheelchair with Lula in charge, and hustled to the parking garage.

By the time I got back to the emergency room, Grandma had been wheeled off somewhere to be evaluated, and Lula was busy reading magazines.

“This is an excellent emergency room,” Lula said. “They got a good selection of magazines. And people tell me they know what they’re doing here when it comes to shootings and knifings, on account of they get so much practice.”

An hour later, they wheeled Grandma back to the waiting room with a big black boot thing on her foot.

“It’s broke, all right,” she said. “I got to see the X-ray.”

“What have you got on your foot?” Lula wanted to know.

“The bone was just cracked a little, so they wrapped my foot up in this boot thing instead of putting it in a cast. I can walk on it and everything.”

Grandma got out of the wheelchair and took the boot for a test-drive.