Micro Memoir

I can't believe I never wrote about this one before...

I was new to Lehigh Acres. My husband, my son, and I moved into our brand new house during Labor Day weekend that year. Jacob was just seven and in the 2nd grade. My husband hadn't quite closed shop on his business on the east coast, so he was gone a lot. This happened to be one of those evenings I waited for him to pull in the driveway late night. I was watching TV and talking on the phone to Jacob's teacher while he was taking a shower. Mrs. Schmidt was concerned about some of Jacob's behaviors popping up in the classroom, due to what she was starting to realize was boredom. I barely knew Kim at the time, but we would later become friends. We were trouble shooting when suddenly, "smack! ahhhh!" came from the bathroom and I went running. When I got there, it looked like a horror film scene. Jacob was crying at the top of his lungs, breathless and unable to tell me what happened. There was blood across the bath tub, and splattered on the wall and the shower curtain. It was also dripping down his naked little body and turning the puddled water in the tub a runny water-colored red. After further investigation, I determined Jacob had slipped in the tub and clocked his chin on the tub, splitting it open. The blood was dripping from his chin. Meanwhile, I'm trying to ask his teacher where to go and what to do and Jacob was wailing in the background. I had no idea how to get to the hospital, and she wasn't sure what to tell me because she didn't have any children of her own. I politely hung up with her and ran back to Jacob. I was able to get him calm enough so the wailing dialed down to sobbing, and eventually whimpering, as I tried to dry him off and get him dressed. We hopped in the car and went over to the local ER where they glued his chin together with liquid stitches and sent us on our way. Everyone in my family has a scar on their chin from an accident, and Jacob was branded into the family on the scary night alone in our new house.