Chapter 26
TWENTY-SIX
The cold comes in hard the week after the national news. Frost on the inside of the windows by morning, the county road slick going into town, everybody at Ralph’s talking about the weather like it’s the only thing that’s ever happened to anybody.
Harrison and Katelyn love the house they found online.
He confirmed they can have a wave pool in the backyard, heated.
They spend most of their time with five grandbabies, giving Peyton and Elle time to Christmas shop.
And there was the day when Harrison and I babysat while everyone went shopping. It was either that or go to the mall.
Our listeners have tripled in the last week. Paige convinced Ben to put billboards up, announcing the show in certain cities. Where she came up with the idea, I’ll never know. I don’t know if it’s working or not but she and Bex say our numbers are climbing.
Josie and I are cleaning up after dinner when my phone rings. A local number I don’t know. I almost don’t answer it but my gut tells me I need to.
“Is this Liam Westbury?” The woman says my name with some hesitation.
“It is.”
She tells me her name and where she’s calling from, and then she says my father’s name. Sterling. She says a neighbor found him on his kitchen floor and called it in, that he’s stable for now, that he’s asking for no one. But my name is the one on his chart.
“You’re listed as his next of kin,” she says.
There it is. Not a wife. Not a friend. Me. The son who quit speaking to him a lifetime ago is the only name he wrote on his medical records.
I stand there with a dish towel in my hand.
“Mr. Westbury?”
“I heard you.”
I hang up, set the phone face down, and go back to drying the pan, because it’s easier than thinking about the phone call. Josie’s watching me. She doesn’t ask.
She waits until I’m ready.
“That was the hospital,” I finally say. “Sterling collapsed. A neighbor found him.”
“How bad.”
“I don’t know. He’s stable.” I put the pan in the rack. “He’s got me down as next of kin.”
She dries her hands and stands in front of me, close, not touching yet, letting me get there on my own.
“I’m not going,” I tell her, and I hear how fast it comes out, which is how I know I’ve been arguing it in my head already.
“He doesn’t get to do this. Fall down and have me come running because he has no one else.
He had my whole life to pick up a phone, and he fucking waited until I was vulnerable. ” I push my thumbs into my eyes.
Josie wraps her arms around my waist and rests her head against my chest.
“You’ll regret it if you don’t,” she says, adding nothing else because what else is there to say.
“I hate him.”
“I know,” she says, hugging me tighter.
I clear my throat, kiss her forehead and then her lips. “I don’t want to do this, but I have to.”
She nods. “Do you want me to come?”
“No.” I kiss the top of her head. “Stay by the phone.”
She almost laughs. She walks me to the door and watches me pull out of the driveway.
The hospital at night is buffed floors and a smell that reminds you nothing good happens after midnight. A nurse walks me back and tells me things in a low voice, careful with every word. Her tone is soft, caring as she says the words I don’t want to hear.
Heart failure.
Advanced.
“We’re keeping him comfortable.”
Then she opens a door and there he is.
Sterling was always a big man. A man who filled a doorway on purpose, who used to press the flat of his hand between my shoulder blades to steer me through a room I could’ve walked fine on my own.
The man in this bed is none of that.
He’s gone small under the blanket. There are tubes taped to the back of a hand spotted with age, the wrist above it thin, a monitor over the bed counting and beeping. His eyes are open.
They find me and they hold.
For a second neither of us has a thing to say.
“You didn’t have to come,” he says. His voice comes out rough, barely there.
“I know,” I say.
I don’t sit. There’s a chair pulled up close, somebody’s idea of comfort, and I stand behind it instead with a hand on the back of it. He watches me not sit and doesn’t say a word about it. The room is quiet except for the machine and, somewhere down the hall, a television blares.
His breath comes in short pulls, working for each one.
There’s a cup of water on the tray, a straw bent toward him, sitting out past where he can reach it.
I move it in. He gets his mouth on the straw and takes a little and eases back into the pillow, spent by the effort.
I don’t make anything of it. Neither does he.
A nurse comes in and does quiet work on a bag hung from a pole, writes something on the whiteboard, and goes out again, and none of it moves the green number over the bed.
His eyes track her out and come back to me.
He’s working up to something. I can see the cost of it in his throat before he gets to it.
“I called your show,” he says. “A few times.”
“I know.” I found that out from my mother, who picked his voice out of a thousand callers because she spent a lifetime learning to read him.
I don’t tell him that. I don’t tell him what it did to me, hearing my own father ask a stranger with my voice how a man goes about making amends. “I know you did.”
He nods, once. It takes more out of him than it should.
“Is there anyone I should call,” I ask. It isn’t kindness. It’s a thing a person asks.
His mouth moves, not quite a smile. “Who would you call.”
There’s the answer. There’s no one. No wife.
No friend killing time in the waiting room with a bad coffee.
A country club’s worth of men who’d shake his hand and not one who’d sit up the night for him.
He built that. A little more every year, on purpose.
And this is what it got him. Four walls and a monitor and a son who should’ve stayed home.
“Get some rest,” I tell him, because I’ve got nothing better and because I need the hall.
Out past the door I put my back to the wall and take out my phone and stand there with my thumb over her name longer than I want to admit. He ruined my mother, just like he tried to ruin me.
He told my mom once that her own mother was dead when the woman was alive, living, and wanting to know her family. She’s got more right to hate him than anybody else. I call her anyway. She should get the choice. He never once gave her one.
She picks up on the second ring, glad, because she thinks it’s a regular night.
“Mom,” I say. “It’s about Sterling.”
The glad goes out of her voice. “Tell me.”
“He’s dying. Tonight, tomorrow, they won’t say. He collapsed.” I keep it flat, because any emotion I have for him, needs to be shared in the confines of my home. Not here. Not near him. “I thought you should know. That’s all. You don’t have to do a thing with it.”
She’s quiet a long time. Long enough that I check the screen to see if the call dropped.
“I’ll come,” she says.
“You don’t owe him that.”
“I know what I owe him,” she says. “I’m not coming for him.”
“Harrison will bring you,” I tell her and hang up.
I call my best friend because I can’t drive back to my house and then come here again. I won’t. Once is enough.
“Hey, Josie said you went to the hospital. Is everything okay?”
“Not really. Can you do me a favor?”
“Anything.”
“Drive around back and pick my mother up and bring her here.”
“I’m on my way.”
I pace the halls and ignore the nurses when they ask me if there’s anything they can do.
A few of them know me and the history I have with my father.
It’s not a secret. Most of the town, the country club, and every place in between knows we had a falling out thirty-some years ago.
It wasn’t until my mother left him that he moved out of town, out toward the college where he taught.
Harrison escorts my mom down the hall. We hug tightly and then I show her which room is Sterling’s.
“You want me in there with you?” I ask.
“No, baby.” She pats me on the chest. I can’t even tell you the last time she ever called me baby. “This one’s mine.”
She goes in. The door eases shut behind her.
Harrison finds a vending machine with coffee and brings me a cup. It’s times like this when I wish I had a flask of something good to ease the thoughts in my mind. We don’t talk. We stand in silence or he watches me pace.
When I’m near him, he says, “You don’t have to know if it’s the right thing. You just have to do the next thing.”
His words give me pause. They’re deep, meaningful, and very much Harrison. He lost his dad early, like the twins, and can barely remember a thing about him.
“You don’t have to stay.”
“I know,” he says. He waits with me, thumbing through his phone and pretending the whole time he isn’t watching me.
Down the corridor a machine chimes and goes quiet.
A man works a mop across the far end and never looks up once.
I text Josie an update and tell her to go to bed.
She sends one back telling me she and Katelyn are watching a movie.
The clock on the wall barely moves. I don’t know when I arrived, but it’s long enough that a nurse changes shift, long enough that I read the fire evacuation map on the wall until I could draw it from memory.
When the door opens, my mother comes out with her eyes red and her chin level. She isn’t falling apart. I’m happy to see it. He doesn’t deserve her kindness.
She takes both my hands. “Thank you for calling me,” she says. “You didn’t have to. He wouldn’t have.”
“He doesn’t deserve it,” I say. It comes out harder than I mean, or exactly as hard as I mean. I can’t tell anymore.
“No,” she says. “He doesn’t.” She squeezes my hands once and lets them go. “But I didn’t go in there for him. I said goodbye for me. I’ve been waiting a long time to be the one who got to walk out of the room.”
Harrison comes up to us. He doesn’t ask how we are or what the plan is. “Come on,” he says. “I’ll get you both home. He’ll still be here in the morning. And if he’s not, well you did your part.”
He doesn’t leave this up for discussion, he walks behind my mother and me, making sure we’re getting into his rental.
For the life of me, I can’t remember if he ever met Sterling, and I don’t know if I ever told him about the grocery store incident with Peyton.
I’m sure if I had, Harrison would’ve introduced himself.
It’s probably for the best.