The Sister Who Drove Me to Bangor

What I learned in the waiting room

Two weeks later, Colette drove up from Portland for my surgery, on three days of leave. She came into the hospital lobby at six in the morning with her hair in a knot and her scrubs still on under her jacket.

My sister was sitting in the waiting room in the barn coat with both hands around a paper cup.

I was on the gurney by then, in my gown, and I watched my only child walk straight up to my sister and put her arms around her.

“Aunt Gin,” she said.

“Colette,” said Ginette. “You look tired.”

“Mom,” she said. “I need to tell you something, and I need you to hear it before they put you under.”

When Colette was eleven, she found Ginette’s name on the back of an old funeral card in a box in my closet. She wrote her a letter and did not tell me. Ginette wrote back, with a ten dollar bill, and that began a Christmas card that went between them every year for twenty-one years.

Ginette knew about Raymond the day he died. She knew the hour and the church. And when Colette hung up with me that Tuesday and sat in her car in the hospital parking lot in Portland, shaking, not knowing what to do, she called her aunt’s number.

“Aunt Gin,” she said. “She won’t ask. So I’m asking.”

“What time do I come?” Ginette said.

Colette gave her the Thursday appointment and my street in Caribou, and Ginette hung up. That was the entire call. Four hours later she was on my porch.