Chapter 29 Nate - June 2024, Camden, Maine
They put him in the acute stroke unit on the third floor and he had the nurses on his side inside a day.
By the second morning John Sinclair, eighty-four years old, with the left side of his face doing about half of what it used to do, knew four nurses by name, and the physical therapist, and a woman from environmental services named Dolores whose son played goalie in high school in Rockland, and he had asked about that boy's glove hand twice.
"They've got the vents wrong in here," he told me on the second afternoon, out of the side of his mouth that worked.
"Don't. You've been saying it since I got here."
"I'm not saying anything about it. There's a return on that wall and a supply on that wall and they're on opposite sides of the room.
You could smoke a cigar in that corner and nobody in this building would know for a week.
" He shifted an inch and let his left hand lie where it was.
"That's not a criticism of the nursing."
"It's a criticism of the building."
"It's an observation about the building. Your friend's father would agree with me. The one who does the plant, in Minnesota. You told me about him at a lunch four years ago and then you did not bring him up again, and I noticed that too."
I did not answer that, and he let it go, which was the thing about him.
By the third day he had radicalized an orderly named Terrence, who was smuggling in wedges of blueberry pie in a plastic container inside a laundry cart, one a day, in direct contravention of a dietary sheet clipped to the end of the bed.
"He's not eating that," my mother said, on the phone.
"He's eating it, Mom. The man had a stroke on Wednesday and he'd organized a supply line through a hospital by Friday. I'm not going to be the one who shuts it down."
On the third evening she went home to sleep, because she had not, and I got her into the car myself and stood in the parking lot until the taillights turned.
Then I came back up and it was quiet on that floor the way hospitals are at nine at night, which is not silence, it is a very regular set of small sounds. The monitor kept its metronome. Somebody's television down the hall.
He was awake. He had the bed up and his glasses on and nothing to read.
"Sit down, Nathaniel." I sat down in the chair. "I'm going to tell you about Terry."
"You've told me about Terry."
"I've told you a version of it since you were a boy, and your father does an impression of it, and I've heard him do the impression." He was looking at the ceiling. "I'm going to tell you the whole thing now, and it's going to take a while, and I'd like you not to be kind about it in the middle."
"Okay."
"Terry Lavoie. 1971, we roomed four seasons, Providence and then Rochester and then Providence again.
Best hands I ever saw. I've said that to you a hundred times and every time you thought it was a compliment I was being polite about.
It wasn't. He had hands like a card mechanic and he never got a run at it, because he was five foot eight in an era when that was a medical condition. "
"You said he ironed his laces."
"He ironed his laces." My grandfather turned his head about two inches. "Flat as paper, every game, on the board in the room. And then he checked them again before he went down. Twice. Always twice. And I'd say, Terry, they're laces. And he'd say, Jack, you don't understand."
"You've told me that part."
"I've told you that part for twenty-five years, and I have never once told you what he was actually saying."
I did not say anything.
"He was careful," said Big Jack. "That's what he was saying.
That was a man who had worked out, by about nineteen, that he was going to have to be perfect at every single small thing in his life so that nobody ever went looking at the big one.
So he ironed his laces. Twice. Every night for four years, in a room with me in it, and I sat on the other bed and read the paper and thought it was a superstition. "
The monitor did its thing.
"I visited him through the eighties. Every couple of years.
Providence, a one bedroom on the second floor with the kitchen at the back.
And there was a man there, name of Emmett, and Terry introduced him to me the first time as his housemate, and he introduced him to me as his housemate the last time, in 1993, and there were twenty years in between and neither of us ever moved one inch off the word. "
"Did you know?"
"Nathaniel." He looked at me. "I have been in dressing rooms since 1958.
Of course I knew. I knew the first afternoon and I never said one thing about it in twenty-five years, because that is what I thought a friend did, and I want to be very clear with you that I was wrong about that, and that I've had thirty years to sit with being wrong about it. "
"Granddad."
"He died in 1994. Heart. Fifty-one years old.
And I went down for the funeral and there was a program with a list of names in it, family, and it went nieces, and a cousin from Woonsocket, and Emmett was not on that program.
Emmett sat in the fourth row on the aisle in a good coat and did not speak to anybody, and at the receiving line the family shook his hand and thanked him for coming and one of them called him the roommate.
To his face. At the door of the church."
I sat there in a hospital chair and did not move.
"And I stood eight feet away," said my grandfather, "and I did not say one word either. I shook the same hand and I used the same voice and I got in my car and drove home to your grandmother, and I have thought about that receiving line more times than I've thought about any game I ever played in."
The heat came on somewhere and went off again.
"So here's the whole of it, and then I'll stop.
Being careful is not free. Everybody talks about it like it's the safe option.
It isn't. It's a debt. You pay a little every year and it looks like nothing, and then at the end the whole thing comes due at once, with interest, and it is not collected from you.
You're gone. It gets collected from whoever loved you, in a fourth row, from a man who did not get his name in a program after twenty years. "
I put my hand over my mouth.
"Now. The other thing."
"Granddad."
"I've been holding a door for a while and I nearly died on Wednesday with it still open, so I'm going to shut it properly." He got his right hand up about six inches off the blanket and put it back down. "You called me at five in the morning from Las Vegas in June of 2018."
The room went very small.
"You were walking. I could hear traffic and I could hear you not talking.
Twenty minutes on a telephone, and I talked about a carburetor the entire time, because you were not able to start and I was not going to make you.
" He looked straight at me. "I have known since that phone call.
I did not know a name and I did not need one.
I knew there was a person, and I knew you had walked out of a room and gone into the street to call an old man about a boat instead. "
"Why didn't you ask?"
"Because I have watched what happens to a man who gets asked before he's ready.
I watched it in 1971 and I have never once been sure I did right by it.
So I decided to go out on the porch every month and turn the light on and stand there for one beat too long, and let you come to it at your own speed, and I have done that for six years.
Last Wednesday I found out I do not have unlimited months. "
I was crying by then. I had not done that since I was fourteen years old and I did not do it at my grandmother's funeral.
He got his good hand across and took mine and held onto it.
"I've got one piece of strategic advice left," he said, "and then I'm going to eat that pie.
The sport gave me everything I have. This house, your grandmother, the boat, the ring, all of it, and I am not ungrateful for one minute of it.
" He tightened his grip a little. "And it is not the sport I think about at night.
Nobody at the end thinks about the sport. "
"Granddad."
"Whoever taught you to read a room like that.
Whoever it is you called at five in the morning about nothing.
He should meet this family while this family is still all here to be met, and I would like to be in the room when it happens, and I have just been given some information about my own schedule. "
I could not say anything at all.
He looked at me and something went across the working side of his face. "You're the only Sinclair who ever hid something worth hiding."
My mother was in the corridor when I came out. She had two coffees, one in each hand, from the machine on the second floor, which is not good coffee and which she had been buying for four days anyway.
She looked at my face and understood, in about a second, that whatever had happened in that room was the largest thing that had happened in her family in some years, and she did not ask one question about it.
She put a coffee in my hand and put her other hand on my sleeve, just above the elbow, and left it there.
And her eyes went, once, deliberately, down and to the left.
My bag was open on the chair by the wall, because I had been living out of it since Thursday, and the navy silk was folded on top of the shirts where I had put it that first morning without deciding to. She looked at it for less than a second and then she looked back up at me.
That is a woman who has been sending me ties twice a year since I was fifteen years old.
She knows every single one of them by sight.
She picked that one out of a shop in Camden in the spring of 2017 and mailed it to a hotel in Chicago, and it is the only one I have ever been photographed in more than once, and it had not been out of a drawer since April of 2019.