Chapter 8
CHAPTER EIGHT
It was still dark when Margo got to Bernie’s, five-fifteen, the porch light on—the small one with the moth-yellow bulb he’d never replaced.
He answered before she knocked, leaning against the doorframe with his coat over one arm.
“You’re early,” he said.
“I’m on time.”
“Which is early.” He stepped back to let her in.
He was dressed. A small bag by the door—the one with the intake instructions and the list of things to pack.
“I made you oatmeal,” she said.
“I can’t eat oatmeal right now, Margo.”
She opened the refrigerator and slid the Tupperware inside. “It’s for later, when you can.” She stood up and looked at him, then at the bag by the door. “You ready?”
Bernie picked up the bag and headed for the door. “Let’s go.”
The hospital was the one south of town with the new wing, where the orthopedic surgeons did the knees.
The waiting area was beige and full of fluorescent light at five forty-five in the morning.
The chairs were hard plastic, the kind that made you aware of your own spine.
The intake nurse was a woman in her thirties with a clipboard and a voice trained for early hours.
Margo handed over Bernie’s insurance card and filled in the lines that needed filling. Relationship to patient: friend.
The nurse called Bernie back. Margo stood up with him. The nurse, gently, “You can wait here. We’ll come get you when he’s in recovery.”
Bernie stopped at the door. “Margo?”
“Yes?”
“Don’t leave.”
“Bernard. I’m here.”
The book she’d brought was a mystery she’d been trying to read for two months. She opened it and tried again. She looked at the page, closed it and put it back in her bag.
The waiting area had nine chairs and three other people in it—a woman about her age, knitting, a man in his fifties on his phone, scrolling and a teenager with headphones and a textbook open in her lap. Nobody looked at anybody.
Margo got coffee from the urn in the corner and drank it. It was terrible, but she drank it anyway.
She watched the clock. The clock was an institutional one, white with black hands, hung over the door to the back. Bernie had been in surgery for forty minutes when Margo stopped watching and started looking at the floor instead.
Her phone buzzed. Eleanor.
She stepped outside to take it. The morning had started while she was inside—the sky going from black to the color it went before it remembered to be blue. The air was cold. She tucked her free hand under her elbow.
“Eleanor.”
“How is he?”
“He’s in surgery.” Margo watched a woman cross the lot carrying flowers and a balloon.
“How long?”
“Forty-three minutes.”
Eleanor paused. “And?”
“It’s a knee replacement, Eleanor.” She pulled her coat tighter against the wind. “They do them all the time.”
“Yes, they do them all the time. I’m just asking how he is.”
“I don’t know yet. He’s having surgery, Eleanor. I’m having coffee.” She took a sip before it could get any colder.
“How are YOU?”
Margo turned away from the wind.
“I don’t know,” she said.
“Mm.”
“I don’t know what kind of question that is, Eleanor. I’m fine. I’m in a parking lot. I’m waiting. Don’t mm at me.”
“I didn’t mm.”
“You were about to.”
“Margo. Go back inside. Drink the bad coffee. Call me when he’s in recovery.”
Margo shifted her weight and looked at the sky, which had finally decided on blue. “Okay.”
“And eat something.”
“Goodbye, Eleanor.”
She put the phone in her pocket, stood outside for another minute, and went back in.
The surgeon came out at eight-twenty. Margo stood up, the book sliding off her lap.
“Ms. Turner?”
“Yes.”
“Mr. Klein is in recovery. The surgery went well. Full knee replacement, no surprises. He’ll be in recovery for about an hour and then we’ll move him to a room. Six to eight weeks for full rehab, but he’ll be on his feet with a walker tomorrow.”
“That soon?”
“Tomorrow morning. We get them up early. Easier on the body.”
“Okay.”
“Any questions?”
“No.”
“You can wait here. Someone will come get you when he’s awake enough for visitors.”
Margo sat back down in the same chair she’d been sitting in for two and a half hours. She picked up the book again and opened it. She read the first sentence three times before she gave up and closed it.
The nurse came at nine-twenty.
“He’s awake. You can come back.”
Margo followed her through the door, down a hall where someone’s TV murmured through a half-open door, into a room that smelled like disinfectant and something faintly metallic underneath.
Bernie was on the bed with the blanket up to his waist, eyes closed. His left leg was wrapped in something white and bulky. His face was the wrong color—paler than usual, but with two patches of pink high on his cheekbones, like a child fresh from sleep.
“Bernard.”
He opened them slowly. Tracking around the room. Finding the ceiling first. Then the curtain. Then her.
When he found her, he smiled—wide, completely undefended, his whole face open. She had never seen him do that. Not in the booth. Not anywhere.
“You’re still here,” he said.
His voice was thick.
“Where else would I be?”
“Don’t know.” The smile didn’t fade. He looked at her like she was something he hadn’t expected to be in the room. “You’re still here.”
“Bernard. They gave you a lot of drugs. Go back to sleep.”
“Okay.”
His eyes closed. The smile stayed for another second. Then his expression softened back into the one she knew—the one he’d worn for decades—and he was asleep.
The monitor beeped steadily. The IV dripped. Outside the room a nurse said something to another nurse about Mr. Patel in 4B.
Margo moved to the chair beside the bed and sat down. The vinyl was cold through her slacks.
The drugs, she thought. The man just had surgery. The man was on enough painkillers to take down a horse. He’d have smiled at the curtain like that if the curtain had been the first thing he’d seen.
The monitor beeped. Bernie breathed. The light through the small high window was the color it had been a minute ago, and the minute before that, and the minute before that. Margo sat in the chair beside her oldest friend and watched him sleep and waited to be told she could go home.