Visiting Hours: Utopia Bay: A Flower a Day, #3

By Jessi Hammond

Colin is enjoying his retirement years… until, without warning, his wife Joan is admitted to hospital.

Lost without her, and terrified he will lose her forever, Colin realises he has to find a way forward. But it's hard.

Until the day a teenage boy with a bunch of flowers crashes into his life.

But will his crazy plan to help Joan recover work? Or will he just make things worse?

 

Utopia Bay is a small town on the east coast of Australia. This is one of its stories.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Kincaid Publishing
• Release date: Dec 18, 2019
• ISBN: 9781393720942

Book preview

About this book

Utopia Bay is a small town on the east coast of Australia. This is one of its stories.

Colin is enjoying his retirement years… until, without warning, his wife Joan is admitted to hospital.

Lost without her, and terrified he will lose her forever, Colin realises he has to find a way forward. But it’s hard.

Until the day a teenage boy with a bunch of flowers crashes into his life.

But will his crazy plan to help Joan recover work? Or will he just make things worse?

Visiting Hours

One

Colin was actually mildly surprised at the amount of people who boarded the bus until he remembered it was Thursday. Market day in town all morning, and late-night shopping tonight. His pension would be in his bank too, which meant he should probably go shopping.

He really didn’t feel like it.

Besides, forgetting which day it was worried him a lot more than the lack of food in the house. He hadn’t been eating much lately, not since the day five weeks and two days ago when he and Joan had been doing their morning puzzles together. She liked Sudoku while he preferred the mental challenge of logic puzzles. They’d been sitting on the couch when Suki, their tiny black rescue poodle, had come racing in from the garden and started barking at Joan, rearing up on her back legs to put her front paws on Joan’s knees. She’d been sitting still, her book in her lap, and Colin had assumed she’d been thinking…

But instead her book had slid sideways onto the floor. Colin had leaned across to pat Suki’s head, to stop her barking, and almost fainted. The left side of Joan’s face was drooping, her eyelid, her lips, the skin of her cheek. He remembered that second with intense clarity, the sound of their ceiling fan swishing the air above, Suki’s barks, transitioning into whines of distress, the smell of the neighbours’ freshly-mown grass carried in through the open windows by a brisk morning breeze, the feel of Joan’s hand in his, his own calm voice telling her that everything would be all right as he reached with his free hand for the mobile phone on the coffee table to call 000.

The ambulance had come within five minutes, Colin hearing the faint siren rise in the distance before it cut out two streets away. The paramedics had taken swift and gentle care of Joan – and of Colin too. He’d gone to pieces a bit, to his own shame, but the paras had been understanding, making sure Suki was safely inside before helping him lock up and taking him in the ambulance with Joan to the hospital. Most of the rest of that day was a blur of controlled haste and incomprehensible