Ned brought it home on Friday, and by Sunday Alex was snarkling and coughing. “Alex, blow your nose!”
I hold my hankie to his nose and he blows; I feel tiny pulses down through my fingertips as the stuff comes out. Too much detail there for most, I imagine. “Alex, bring some tissues.” I keep meaning to go to the store and buy more, but for some reason I keep forgetting.
Alex wakes up on a school morning with the cough still taking his whole throat, but not that often. A moment here, a moment there. Hack and hack with the voice he uses to cough. He feels cool. “Alex, do you want to go to school?”
“Go to school.”
I send a kid to school with a cough when he can't talk. I wonder what they’ll think of me. I wonder if I’ll get away with it, remembering the bullies who ran his pre-school when they gathered all us parents together in a conference room one sunny cool day and said, “If your kid’s sick, don’t dope him up and send him to school. We’ll know.”
We get by the school bus – at least the getting-aboard part. I imagine my cell ringing. Hi this is the matron and he threw up on the school bus. I imagine the matron at the end of the day, when the bus pulls up with the autumn sun setting with longer and darker shadows and she says, “He's been coughing a lot…”
I wonder about the calls through the day. I watch my cell and I watch the home phone for the call from the nurse at Alex’s school. She knows little about him but much about his forms from the NYC Department of Education. “This is the school nurse. Alex is coughing a lot, and we have no forms or medicine authorizing us to give him medication because you haven’t fucking sent them back ...” We do have a spare Xopenex (remember when, in my life, I didn’t know how to spell that?) but I hesitate to send it to school because I don't know if our insurance will pay for another one short of a month.
By noon, I figure if they were going to call they would've by now. What am I trying to pull here? Get him out of my hair and into the care of the state? Soon it’s pushing one and still no call. I do want Alex home if he's sick but still I want him to get through the day.
Alex gets through his day. The bus comes and he bounces off and no one says anything. Is that so wrong? No, because when you're cool suffering through a mucus-y nose is just what you have to do to get through the day sometimes when you're just a normal person.
Posted by Jeff Stimpson
at 8:21 PM EDT
Updated: Monday, 24 September 2012 8:22 PM EDT
