Page 156 of Just One More Thing
The tech spreads the two halves apart, and the room instantly smells like plaster dust and dirty sock.
He peels back the soft wrap underneath, and suddenly there it is.
Her leg.
Pale. Smaller than the other one somehow. Fragile in a way the cast had hidden.
Granny looks down. “Well,” she says after a breath. “That’s upsetting.”
Miss Hattie presses a hand to her chest. “Maddy.”
“No one prepared me for the dehydrated ghost leg.”
She looks at the tech. “Removal should come with self-tanner.”
“It’s normal,” he says.
“Normal is a very low bar.”
The doctor comes in flipping through her chart while Miss Hattie stands behind him, making wildly inappropriate hand gestures every time he says words like stiffness.
Granny is visibly trying not to laugh.
The doctor hands me printed pages. Just a few sheets of paper. Nothing dramatic. My fingers close around them, and something in my stomach drops hard enough to make me briefly dizzy.
The doctor keeps talking.
Granny keeps negotiating.
Miss Hattie keeps behaving like she’s one joke away from being escorted out by security.
But all I can hear is the soft shuffle of paper in my hands.
“Resume normal activity,” Granny repeats.
The doctor nods. “Gradually.”
She waves that away.
“Gradually,” he emphasizes.
“Of course,” she says, not meaning a word of it.
He turns to me like maybe I’m the responsible adult in the room. I genuinely don’t know why people keep making this mistake.
“No driving for a little while,” he says.
Granny scoffs. “I can drive today.”
“You absolutely cannot drive today,” I say.
Miss Hattie lifts one finger. “She’s known to have depth perception issues when she’s smoking.”
“I do not.”
“You smoke?” the doctor and I say at the same time.
“Recreationally,” Granny says. “And not while I’m driving,Hattie.”
