Tired from an afternoon of supervising her division’s efforts to help Gagarinsk with their IT problems, Steffi Roderick retreated to her office for a moment’s respite. Might as well check her e-mail while she was waiting for her coffee maker to heat up.
She usually didn’t check personal e-mail accounts during her duty hours, but as rough as things had been of late, she figured she could make an exception. Just take a quick peek, see if there was anything that needed her immediate attention.
At first glance it looked like the usual mishmash of mailing lists and commercial pitches that weren’t quite spammy enough to fall into her spam trap. And then she saw her dad’s name on one e-mail.
Dad usually e-mails me on the weekend. Is something wrong?
Deciding that this departure from routine constituted something significant enough to be considered an emergency, she clicked on it. A guilty part of her mind was halfway hoping that the opening pleasantries meant that whatever was behind the unexpected e-mail was a happy surprise.
Then she hit the next paragraph. Sure, her father tried to soften the blow, but she could recognize minimizing when she saw it. No matter how gently you tried to put it, discovering that a family member had been taken to the hospital was not good news in a time like this.
Even if her mother’s chest pains were just a mild heart attack as her father was saying, a hospital was not a good place to be right now. And to have to go there alone, now that family wasn’t allowed to visit… it wouldn’t be an easy situation for her mother to face, alone among strangers, not certain what was wrong with her or how serious.
And then Steffi realized she had a more immediate problem. How much did she tell her family up here? Reggie had a full plate already with everything going on, and she hated to add one more thing, especially since it wasn’t his parents. And while the kids weren’t total innocents to loss — the Moon was an unforgiving place, and more than a few of those names on the Wall of Honor were people they knew personally — they’d been relatively lucky in terms of extended family.
In any case, it was news best delivered in person, and privately. And it might be best to arrange some real-time conversation with her dad first, to make sure she had the most up-to-date information. Not necessarily FaceTime — she couldn’t remember whether his phone even had the capacity for videoconferencing — but at least a voice conversation.