Talk Before Sleep (28 page)

Not so for my father, who left when he learned my mother would not fully recover, that her only progress would be to move to a portable respirator. On his last visit to my mother, he told her that he would take care of getting me adopted out. My mother told him to fuck himself. In those words. She made arrangements to rent a house and hire a caretaker for me, and then she stayed in the lung for three years, driven to survive so that she
could come home and raise her daughter as well as any other mother. Or better.

She and I lived in a two-bedroom mill house just north of downtown Tupelo, Mississippi. You know the town. Elvis’s birthplace. He had a kind of great luck and then terrible tragedy. For us, it was the opposite.

E
LIZABETH
B
ERG
is the author of sixteen novels, including
The New York Times
bestsellers
The Art of Mending, Say When, True to Form, Never Change
, and
Open House
, which was an Oprah’s Book Club selection in 2000.
Durable Goods
and
Joy School
were selected as ALA Best Books of the Year, and
Talk Before Sleep
was short-listed for the ABBY award in 1996. The winner of the 1997 New England Booksellers Award for her work, she is also the author of a nonfiction work,
Escaping into The Open. The Art of Writing True
. She lives in Chicago.