Bloody Nose

My cousin was the kid who always had a nose bleed. You know him. He's calling teacher and sitting with his head tilted back, bloody kleenex piling up on the desk. He's the one who stained your parents' minivan seats in carpool, the one on the plane hogging the attention of the stewardess, the one making sniff sounds and figits reminiscent of a coke addict--all at age 10.

Yesterday, he had surgery for a deviated septum, and I picked him up at the hospital to bring him home. He's now in his late 20s, but when the orderly wheeled him out, it was a strange throwback for me, to see my cousin with packed bloody gauze all over his face. Zonked on morphine, he wore the expression of a scared and hurting little kid. I took him home, put him to bed all the while observing myself behaving as his mother did, protective. Wanting to go into the kitchen to get him a tab or diet rite and some reeses pieces for when the nose bleed went away.