The Road to Tender Hearts

Annotations from "The Road to Tender Hearts" by Annie Hartnett

Curious,” Dr. Gust had said, and he agreed to look into it. In the morning, the cat was found on the chest of another patient, who had died overnight. Soon Dr. Gust was obsessed with the cat’s movements. First, Pancakes spent all his time in Mrs. Monty’s room. Dead in three days. Then on to Mr. Broomfield’s room down the hall. Dead in a week. Upstairs to Mrs. Anderson’s corner room. Mrs. Anderson lived another two weeks. One time, Pancakes snuggled with a patient for three months, but the woman was still the next one in the home to die. And so on, and so on, Pancakes made his choices. And the cat was never wrong. Dr. Gust was so excited, he called the reporter for The South Coast Daily Sun. The headline read: Nursing Home Cat Predicts Death, Provides Comfort at End. Dr. Gust planned to frame it for his office.

Get rid of the cat,” the nurses said at the next meeting. But Dr. Gust didn’t believe in getting rid of animals. He knew shelter animals were treated like they were disposable. He wished they could euthanize some of the patients in the Pondville nursing home instead.

Luna was probably a genius, their teachers said, but their parents never wanted to hear about that, because being a genius meant a special school, school they couldn’t afford, especially not for a girl. If only Ollie had been the one born with the brains, their dad often said.

it was Elaine’s best option in a world full of really shitty options. Her uncle was a stranger, but he had won the lottery.

Alive, alive, alive, they rasped. Vultures don’t screech or call like other birds; they only hiss and make clicking sounds. They’re otherwise silent animals, like death itself. But here was something new: the vultures chanting the word alive over and over, hoping those poor children would stay safe and protected, forever and ever, amen

Maybe Blanche thought that Sophie needed to try something, anything, other than what she’d been doing.

Some people will always ignore the sign, no matter how clear and direct it is.

They checked in to a Days Inn in Hellsgate, Kentucky, where PJ insisted on stopping because of the name. “The gates of hell!” he said. “Sophie, your mother has been trying to get me to come here for years!” “Very funny, Dad.”

she had to stop to read the sign. Heaven for Dummies, it turned out, was a ventriloquist museum, with thousands of puppets inside. A small sign said that dummies are what ventriloquists call their puppets, because the ventriloquist is the one who gives a puppet its brain. One of the dummies was sitting on a chair in the window, brainless but still smiling with its rows of square teeth. Sophie felt a chill, and she swore the puppet’s eyes followed her as she ran off. She ran faster.

You’ll need something,” he said. “If you expect to be happy. My dad always said a person needs three things to be happy: something to do; someone to love; and something to look forward to.”

Like the man at the Half-Moon Bar had said, about trotting out old World War II veterans to tell their stories: You need a story about your own life, or the bad stuff in your head writes the story for you. He got it. He did. Why his mother had told a different story from the one she’d been given. She had made her story better.

PJ finally believed that he could stay sober. He’d been going to AA, and he had a story about getting sober, one he loved to tell. It involved two orphaned kids, an alligator, a gas leak, and driving cross-country thinking he was in love with his sister

It was Dr. Cris’s advice that everyone needs “something to do, someone to love, something to look forward to,” which will always guide me.