Chapter 27
TWENTY-SEVEN
Idon’t sleep. Each time I close my eyes, I see my father, the way I remember him—yelling at me, calling Josie names, telling me I’ll never amount to anything—without him.
He was wrong. I know I proved that over and again, but he never learned it from me.
His information was all second-hand. Never from my mouth.
I’ve never been one to gloat, but I feel like facing off with him would’ve been a time to do it.
To prove I am everything without him, to show him what I achieved despite him.
To show him my family. My perfect fucking family that gets to live their lives because I walked away from my parents when I was eighteen.
I will not cry for this man because he doesn’t deserve the effort it takes.
Josie holds on to me most of the night. She said she would.
Near dawn I give up on rest and lie there listening to her breathe and the furnace kick on and off.
I think about a man I’ve spent most of my life trying not to think about.
Every time I get close to sleep the nurse’s voice comes back, and I’m awake again, thinking about how my life would’ve been different if I had listened to him.
Thank god I didn’t.
By the time the sun comes up I know I’m going back. Not because he asked. He didn’t. Because I’ve spent months telling strangers to go while the other person’s still breathing, and I’d be a coward to lie here and not do the thing I hand out for free five nights a week.
Josie doesn’t ask where I’m going. She hands me coffee in a travel cup and my keys, and says she’ll be home all day, that the twins are bringing the babies over, and all I have to do is call if I need her.
The thing is, I need her all the time, but she doesn’t owe Sterling shit. He’s not worthy of her presence.
I text Bex.
No show tonight, something has come up. Rerun?
Bex
I’ll take care of the show. You take care of you.
Going into business with someone as young as Bex was a risk—one that has paid off—she knows how to run a show and does it effortlessly.
Harrison texts before I’m out of the driveway, asking if I want him to tag along. I tell him no. He’s been my second, my best friend, my go-to, for as long as I can remember, but this part I need to do on my own. He lets me know he’ll be around all day, and I know he will be.
The drive across town is slower than it should be. Christmas lights hang off the houses, most of them dark this early. I can’t wait to be out looking at lights with my family.
I’m in no hurry to walk back into that smell and take the long way, driving past the house I grew up in.
There was a time when I thought I’d buy it but wanted nothing to do with it.
I don’t know who lives there now. I could find out, but what’s the point.
I just hope whoever it is, is a better husband and father than the man who owned it previously.
I’m in no hurry to walk back into that smell.
There are more cars in the parking lot now. Shift change, more people on staff. I see Nick, standing by his car. I park and get out, walking toward him.
“Paige told Mack.”
“And you what?”
He holds his hands up. “I’m here for rounds and saw you pull in,” he says in his defense. I feel like an ass.
“I’m sorry, I’m on edge.”
“I get it,” he says. “I know you don’t need anyone. In the event you do, tell the nurses to page me and I’ll stop by.”
I nod and follow him in. Everyone says hi to him, even the pretty nurses. I look at him and shake my head. “What’s going on with Teagan?”
“Nothing, why?”
“Did you ask her out yet?”
He pauses at the bank of elevators and runs his hand through his hair. “I asked her out for coffee.”
“Did you go?”
Nick shakes his head slowly.
“Why not?”
“Well, I didn’t exactly set a time.”
I want to slap my face. “What did you say to her?”
“Um . . . Do you want to get coffee sometime?”
I shake my head, pull out my phone and type out exactly what he needs to say to her. “You’re making me look like I don’t know what I’m doing,” I say as I text him. “Those words, Ashford. Stop letting me down.”
“Thanks,” he says I start to walk away.
“Ask her out before someone else does.” I lift my hand in a wave and continue down the hall.
The room’s different in the daylight. Smaller. I stand in the doorway and watch Sterling for a moment.
“He’s comfortable,” the nurse says.
“Does that mean he’s getting better?”
She shakes her head and walks into the next room.
I take the chair this time. I don’t decide to. My legs do it for me, and I’m sitting before I’ve caught up to the fact that last night I wouldn’t.
He turns his head on the pillow. Looks at me in the chair, and the tightness goes out of his face.
“You came back,” he says.
“I did.”
For a while neither of us spends any words.
I ask if he’s in pain. He says no, which is either true or the last lie of a proud man, and I let him keep it.
I watch him breathe instead. It’s work now, every one of them, his chest lifting, holding, going down a little slower than it should.
His hands lie on top of the blanket, the big knuckles I remember gone knobbed and loose.
The heat ticks in the vent. Out in the hall a cart rolls past and fades.
Then he says it, no wind-up, straight at me before I’m ready for it.
“I was proud of you,” he says. “Every day. I was too stupid to say it.”
I built a whole life on the certainty I would never hear that sentence. Now the words linger in the room, out of a man who can barely take a breath. My throat works. I look at the shape of his feet under the blanket until I trust my voice.
“I wish you’d said it sooner,” I tell him.
“I know.” He doesn’t look away from it. “I wasted it. All of it.”
His eyes go to the window and come back. “Noah has your eyes,” he says. “And your mother’s stubbornness.”
My jaw sets hard. “You don’t get to talk about Noah like you knew him.”
The old him would have come up off that pillow, reminded me whose roof I learned to talk under, put that flat hand between my shoulder blades and moved me where he wanted me. This one closes his eyes and takes it, and when he opens them there’s no fight in there at all.
“You’re right,” he says. “I don’t.”
That’s new. I’ve known this man my whole life and never once heard him agree with me. I wasn’t braced for that.
After that the fight goes out of both of us. There isn’t enough time left to waste on it.
“This radio thing,” he says. His voice is going thin, and he waits between sentences to gather the air for the next. “People call you. About their lives.”
“They do.”
“And you tell them what to do.”
“Sometimes. Mostly I listen and tell them what they already know. They just want someone to tell and when it’s a stranger they can take it or leave it.”
“Give me one,” he says. I must look at him funny, because the corner of his mouth moves. “A call. One you remember.”
I think about it. “A man phoned in a while back. Married a long time, and he’d forgotten his own anniversary. No card, no dinner, nothing. Wanted me to fix it before she got home.”
“What did you tell him.”
“Go home and see her, see her the way he did on the day they got married.” I lift a shoulder, keeping things short. “He rang back the week after to say it worked.”
He’s quiet for a while. “I never once saw the day coming,” he says. “Any of them. Birthdays. School things. I was always somewhere else, doing something I’d told myself mattered more.” His eyes close. “It didn’t.”
“You could always talk to anybody,” he says after a while. “Even small. I thought it was a weakness in you. Something soft that wanted toughening out of you.” His eyes hold mine. “It was the best thing about you. I had it backward, along with the rest.”
I don’t know what to do with that, so I do nothing with it.
“Can I ask you something,” I say. He waits, because talking costs him and listening doesn’t. “All those years, you knew where I was. Why this? Why a hospital, and not a phone, any of the ten thousand days before this one? Why not in the grocery store after you berated my daughter-in-law?”
He’s a long time answering. “Because now there’s nothing left to lose by it,” he says. His eyes hold on me. “Don’t wait for the day it costs you nothing, son. There isn’t one. You just get old enough to quit pretending there is.”
“You married the Preston girl,” he says.
“Josie. Yeah.”
“I told you not to.”
“I remember.”
“She was always the right one.” He says it to the ceiling, not to me. “I was wrong about her. I’ve been wrong about most things.”
I can’t get anything up past that. I sit with my elbows on my knees, my hands hanging between them, and look at the floor until the burn behind my eyes eases off enough to be sure of my face.
When I can talk, I say, “She forgave me things I never earned. She’s better at it than I am.
Better than you ever managed.” It comes out harder than I plan. He takes it. He doesn’t argue.
“Do something for me,” he says. It’s the first thing he’s ever asked me for. His jaw works around it, this man who never in his life had to work for a word. “Tell your mother I’m sorry I wasted her life.”
She was in this room last night. Maybe he tried and couldn’t get it out, or she didn’t stay to let him. Either way it falls to me to carry. I think about the red in her eyes, the level of her chin, and how she walked out of here on her own two feet.
“I’ll tell her,” I say. I nod on it, so he knows I mean it.
I stay until the light goes down. He drifts, comes back, drifts again, the stretches of talk getting shorter each time he surfaces, until the quiet runs longer.
When a nurse comes in for her round I take it for what it is.
I stand. I put my hand on his shoulder, a thing I have never once done.
He brings his up over it, cold and with almost no weight in it.
Neither of us says the word for what this is.
“Go home to her,” he says. “Don’t sit here on my account.”
So, I go. At the door I look back. He’s watching me. I lift a hand. He gets his up off the blanket, barely, and that is the last of it.
The house is dark when I pull in. I sit in the truck a minute in the cold before I can make myself go inside.
Josie’s awake when I come up, sitting in our bed with the lamp on and a book.
She doesn’t ask how it went. She pulls back the covers on my side.
I strip out of those hospital-smelled clothes and climb in, and she folds herself against my back and holds on.
I don’t cry. I don’t do a single thing. I lie there in her arms and let the night run out.
The phone goes before the light. Josie’s hand gets it first and passes it to me.
It’s the night nurse. She’s kind about it.
He went sometime before dawn, she says. In his sleep.
She uses the word peaceful, and I don’t argue with her, though I sat in that room and I know what it was.
He died a few hours after I walked out. Alone, in a room with no one in it.
That’s not peaceful. That’s just what he had left.
I set the phone on the nightstand. Josie doesn’t tell me she’s sorry. Sorry isn’t the right word, and she knows it. She fits herself against me and we lie there while the room goes from black to gray.
There’ll be calls to make once the sun’s up, but first I’ll walk to the end of my property where my mom has been staying and knock on the door. She’ll know as soon as she opens it, and I tell her what he said.
To me.
Not to her.
I’ll tell the kids after, though there’s not much to tell them. They never had a grandfather in that man. There will be no grief for him. The rest of the world will go on not knowing, which is how he must’ve wanted it.
I keep coming back to the chair I finally sat in, the thing he finally said, and how all of it turned up a lifetime too late to do either of us any good.
We got what we got.
It’ll never be enough.
It was something.