Chapter 14
The Shoemacher place sat west of Cobbler Cove, a sprawling horse facility with four-board oak fences in need of paint around empty pastures, and the conspicuous absence of a main barn to house the racehorses they were depicted in the iron arch over the front entrance from the road.
Hank drove up to the southern plantation-style mansion with his medical bag on the seat beside him and the windows down because he needed to bank all the fresh air he could get before walking into a house where Lucas Shoemacher chain smoked cigars and was slowly dying alone.
Lucas was in end-stage congestive heart failure and refused to change his lifestyle one iota.
Which meant there was no fixing his prognosis.
There was only managing the long slide down, which Hank did with a house call every couple of weeks.
He increased the medications that could still be increased and was honest with Lucas about his decline.
The mansion felt empty and echoing inside, a place built for a big family and crowds of visitors that had stopped coming.
Columned porches stretched across the front and back of the house.
He knew there were eight bedrooms upstairs, a guest bedroom and one for each of the children who no longer came home to visit.
The day nurse let Hank in, gave him her report in the low voice medical people kept for hallways, and disappeared to take a break from Lucas. He didn’t blame her. Lucas was a terrible patient, cranky, uncooperative, and defiant.
The old man was set up in what had been the casual family room in the back of the house.
An oxygen concentrator chugged in the corner like a small, tired locomotive.
Lucas sat propped up in a hospital bed facing the wall of big windows.
The view ran clear down the valley passed his empty pastures, uncut hayfields, and far off in the distance, the gray smudge of the town he’d run for the past dozen years.
Hank took a critical look at him. He’d lost more weight. His skin was the color of an old nickel, and his ankles, when Hank pressed a thumb into them, held the dent the way bread dough did. Lucas sat up and leaned forward so Hank could listen to his lungs.
“Well,” Lucas rasped while Hank moved the stethoscope across his back. “Give it to me straight, Doc. Am I gonna live?”
It was the same joke every visit. Hank listened to the wet crackle at the base of both lungs and didn’t laugh.
He came around the bed to the high bar stool a nurse must’ve brought in from the billiard room and sat down. He’d given this particular news often enough across his career to know there was no good way to deliver it. There were only honest ways and cowardly ones.
“No,” he said. “You’re not.”
The oxygen machine huffed in the silence.
“I figured you’d be upping the diuretic pills again,” Lucas said eventually.
“I will. They’ll buy you comfort, but they won’t buy you time.
” Hank kept his voice level, the same voice he used to talk down a panicked horse or kid.
“Your heart’s done, Lucas. It’s pumping a fraction of what your body needs.
The nurse says your kidneys are slowing down, too.
There’s no surgery or pill or machine left that will change the math.
We’re talking weeks. Maybe less, if your kidneys quit before your heart. ”
Lucas turned his face to the window and looked down the long green run of the valley for a while. He was eighty-one years old, and looked every single day of it.
“Fix it,” he said. The bluster had gone out of the words. What was left was smaller and terribly sincere. “You’re a doctor. You fixed the Henderson boy’s arm and Earl Tatum’s hip and half this valley besides. There’s got to be a way to fix my heart . . . or at least make it run better for a while.”
“I’m not God, Lucas.”
Saying those words did something strange to Hank. They vibrated through him like a gong, resonating oddly deep inside him.
“I can’t fix a heart that’s used up its years. Nobody can. As for the other kind of heart trouble you’ve got . . .” He held the old man’s gaze. “. . . that kind was never mine to fix in the first place. That kind, a man has to fix himself. While he’s still above ground to do it.”
Lucas’s gaze slid away from his. Which told Hank what he already suspected. He was right about the other kind of heart trouble.
He took out the blood pressure cuff and worked through the rest of the exam because routine was a mercy and they both knew it. Only when his bag was packed again did he say the rest of what he’d driven up here to say.
“There’s a rumor been floating around town. It runs along the lines of whatever mess the state finds in the town’s books will turn out to be Bonnie Watson’s doing.”
He watched the old man’s face while he said it, the way he watched a patient’s face when he pressed on a spot he suspected was the real problem.
“Dale Tolliver may be a slick politician, but I’m thinking he didn’t invent that lie out of thin air. Dale hasn’t had an original thought since gas was a dollar a gallon. Somebody handed it to him. And I’m thinking I’m sitting in that somebody’s presence.”
A long exhale rattled out of Lucas. “Dale drove up here a while back. Not long after my heart attack. Wanted to know if I was running for mayor again, and if not, he wanted my blessing to take his place.”
There was a long, pregnant pause, and Hank waited out Lucas patiently.
Finally the old man huffed and caved in.
“He figured Bonnie was the likeliest person to run against him and he wanted ammunition to use against her. I told him whatever the state found wrong with the paperwork would have Bonnie’s fingerprints all over it.
She did all the filing.” A pause, and a ghost of his old defiance reared its head. “It wasn’t entirely a lie.”
“It was entirely a lie,” Hank said without heat.
“She did most of your job. Kept the town’s lights on and the city’s employees paid.
She covered for you for years while you let the accounts rot.
And when the bill finally came due, you handed Dale a stick and pointed him at her.
” He shook his head once, slowly. “She was the most loyal soul you had left, Lucas. And you spent that loyalty like pocket change.”
The old man’s jaw worked. Hank suspected that on a stronger, healthier Lucas it would’ve built into a roar that rattled the storm windows. What came out instead was barely louder than the oxygen machine. “I know.”
It was likely the truest thing the man had said in years, and Hank let it stand without piling any more on top of it. There was no profit in punching a man who’d already gone down to the mat.
“Here’s what I came here to say to you today.
” Hank laid it out the way he would lay out a diagnosis, step by step.
“Call your lawyer this week and get your will and your affairs in order. Not next month. This week. Tell your lawyer the truth even if you’ve never told it to another living soul.
And whatever else you’ve been carrying all these years .
. .” Lucas’s gaze snapped to him, wary and defensive “. . . and get it off your chest. Write it down somewhere, talk with the pastor, I don’t much care how.
But set your burdens down while they’re still yours to set down.
Don’t make this town dig it all up from under your headstone. They’ve been digging long enough.”
For a long moment the only sound in the room was the machine pumping oxygen to lungs the man’s heart could no longer support. Lucas stared down the valley at the distant shape of Cobbler Cove.
“One last thing,” Hank said. “If your children want to see their father alive one last time, they need to come now. I’m going to ask Bonnie to call them.”
“They won’t come.” He stated it as flat fact, not self-pity. Just certainty. “Not a one of them has set foot in this house in years. I saw to that, one way and another.”
“Maybe they won’t come.” Hank stood and picked up his bag.
“But they’ll have been asked. And you’ll meet your Maker knowing you made the effort to reach out to them.
” He settled his hat on his head. “The rest of it is theirs to decide, and none of it is mine. I’m just the doctor. I’ll be back Thursday.”
He was at the door when Lucas spoke behind him, his voice thin as onionskin paper.
“Doc. That thing you said. About not being God.” A breath, hauled in with visible effort. “Does it ever bother you? All the ones you can’t fix?”
Hank stopped with his hand on the doorframe.
The question shot through him with the force of a bullet and for one unguarded second he was assailed by a barrage of images.
Lorraine hissing at him in a courthouse hallway in Bozeman.
His prescription pad with pages gone missing.
Mornings he’d made Madi breakfast and driven her to school because Lorraine was passed out, sleeping off something.
He yanked his mind away from the memories of the woman he’d failed to fix because this was a dying man’s bedside and not the place for his burdens.
“The ones I can’t fix bother me every day of my life,” he said, soberly.
He let himself out into the June morning.
Town Hall smelled like floor polish and printer toner. Bonnie Watson’s desk sat where it had sat for thirty years, in the outer office, standing guard over the dark and empty inner one. She was sorting campaign flyers when Hank stepped into view
She took a single look at Hank’s face and set the flyers down. “How bad is he?”
“He’s got a few weeks,” he said. “Maybe less.”
Bonnie sat back slowly in her chair. Hank had delivered a lot of bad news to a lot of people, and he’d learned that the complicated ones to read were the ones like Bonnie. She just went still and silent, and a host of complicated emotions passed through her eyes. But that was all she gave him.
“All right,” she said at last, her voice steady, if a bit wooden. “What do you need from me?”