We'll Meet Again

22

“She didn’t want to worry you, Billy.”

Billy Gallo stared across his mother’s bed at his father as they stood in the intensive care unit at Lasch Hospital. Tony Gallo’s eyes were welling with tears. His sparse gray hair was disheveled, and the hand that patted his wife’s arm was trembling.

There was no mistaking the kinship of the two men. They had strikingly similar features-dark brown eyes, full lips, square jaw lines.

Sixty-six-year-old semiretired Tony Gallo, a former corporate security officer, was a school crossing guard in the town of Cos Cob, a stern and trusted fixture at the intersection of Willow and Pine. His son, Billy, thirty-five, a trombonist in the orchestra of the road company of a Broadway musical, had flown in from Detroit.

“It wasn’t Mom who didn’t want to worry me,” Billy said, his tone angry. “You wouldn’t let her call me, would you?”

“Billy, you were out of work for six months. We didn’t want you to lose this job.”

“To hell with the job. You should have called me-I would have stood up to them. When they refused her permission to go to a specialist, I wouldn’t have let them get away with it.”

“Billy, you don’t understand; Dr. Kirkwood fought to get her to a specialist. Now they’ve okayed surgery. She’ll be fine.”

“He still didn’t send her to a specialist soon enough.”

Josephine Gallo stirred. She could hear her husband and son arguing, and she had a vague awareness that it was over her. She felt sleepy and weightless. In some ways it was a nice sensation, to lie there and almost float, to not have to be a part of their argument. She was tired of begging Tony to help Billy when he was between jobs. Billy was a fine musician, and he wasn’t cut out for a nine-to-five job. Tony just didn’t understand that.

She kept hearing their angry voices. She didn’t want them to argue anymore. Josephine remembered the pain that had yanked her from her sleep this morning; it was the same pain that she’d been telling Dr. Kirkwood, her primary care physician, about.

They were still arguing; their voices seemed to be getting louder, and she wanted to tell them to please, please stop. Then somewhere off in the distance she heard bells clanging. She heard running feet. And a pain like the one that had awakened her that morning came rushing back. A tidal wave of pain. She tried to reach out to them: “Tony…Billy…”

As she drew in her last breath, she heard their voices, in unison, urgent, filled with fear, edged with grief: “Mommmmmmmm,” “Josieeeeeeeee.” Then she heard nothing.