Down on Earth, a man like Ace rushing toward him would’ve put fear in Andy’s heart, but I think he’s up on Planet Ace too—just temporarily. He smiles as Ace claps his hand into his and pulls him in.
“I’m proud of you, bro,” he mutters, but the words bounce along the walls of the small room and me and the nurse hear them.
Andy’s smile turns soft because Planet Ace reallyiswild. It’s the only place where a basketball player could tell a doctor he was proud of him and almost bring an ER nurse to tears.
* * *
Home is warm.
“Ason...” a feminine voice whispers. “You sure you don’t want me to get the cot for you to put her on?”
It’s so warm that I never want to leave—not even when other women’s voices wake me up from a deep sleep. I know it ain’t nobody but Nurse Shelby. That’s how she introduced herself as soon as they let us into Mama’s new room in the ICU—“Nurse Shelby from Arkansas.”
She sounds like Daisy from Dukes of Hazzard, but she’s black with box braids and looks so young that I wonder how she’s even in charge of Mama’s care. Even though she looks young, she talks to me like I’m even younger than her.
Ace bounces me closer to his chest and presses his lips against my face. “Nah. She ain’t gon' sleep on a cot, Shelby, but I’ll ask her, anyway.”
“Well, you know best, Mr. Man. Lemme get y’all a blanket then. I’ll bring back the visitation forms for you to fill out too...ohand some juice. You look like you need a lil’ something. I’m sure it’s been a long evening.”
“Okay,” Ace mutters against my face, shifting on the pullout chair next to Mama’s bed.
“Be back.”
Nurse Shelby likes Ace. All the nurses do. Even the white ones. The black nurses go out of their way for him while the white nurses are more subtle—they fling their blonde ponytails when he’s filling out paperwork for me and Mama and they lean in real close to him as if they can’t hear him when he speaks, but Ace speaks with purpose so I know they’re lying. I’m learning more and more that Earth is a place I’ll never understand, and maybe that’s why Ace didn’t want me to get lost here.
I shuffle closer into his warm chest and pry an eye open to make sure Mama is still laying in her hospital bed next to us with her pale skin and eyes closed.
“Lourdes, you wanna cot?” he asks, shaking me by my waist.
I groan back and try to claw my way deeper into his skin, but it’s impossible to get there. God probably knows how ridiculous I look trying to lay claim to a man I was just running from this morning.
Ace didn’t yoke me up and pull me onto his lap. I climbed in it when Nurse Shelby bat her falsies at him over Mama’s IV for the third time. Angie was probably laughing with God and telling him her silly lil’ wannabe daughter-in-law was being obsessive out in the open for once—even when her son had done stupid man-things that made me question us.
“Marcus is almost here,” he says, dragging a finger across my face. “Bryson text you and said he called him.”
“Okay.”
“You want him to bring you some food?”
“No.”
“You wanna sit here? I can stand up.”
“No.”
I wanted stupid and immature things. They had nothing to do with Mama and everything to do with him because he was taking care of it all like he said he would. The day had ripped my voice out of my throat and dangled it over my head. Deep down, I think he knew I couldn’t get out much more than “no” and “okay.”
“Alright, Mr. Man, I’ll put your apple juice over here.” Shelby breezes back in, talking fast and sliding the juice on a rolling tray by the only window in the room. “She can have five visitors, but they can only come in the room two at a time.”
She slaps a paper against her hip and cocks her head to the side when she notices my eyes are open. “Oh, the doll’s awake. You wanna fill this out for Mom?”
I roll my eyes up to Ace, but he’s already opening his mouth until the room door flings open. When Marcus pushes inside, Nurse Shelby forgets about the visitation list.
“Mama?” he chokes out. “What happened?”
His deep-set eyes have a layer of wetness resting on their irises and his feet won’t stop shuffling. Ace scoots forward and takes a deep breath so he can fix another thing that’s wrong. He pulls the words I want to say from my dry throat and throws them out.
“She fell at home today when Phat went to let Bryson in the house. We think she was trying to go to the bathroom by herself. The doctor’s saying it’s sepsis. She been running a fever for about three days now.”
