Chapter 13 #3
“No, Roger. I’m not being difficult and I’m not punishing anybody.
I did that job for six years and it took everything I had and gave me a coat and a seat at a table.
” She looked out at the yard. “I’ve got work.
Actual work, with my name on it. If I take that chair I will have gotten out of one house and walked straight into another one. ”
A long silence on the line.
“Yes,” Roger said at last. “Yes, all right. That’s the right answer and I knew it before I called.”
“Then why did you call?”
“Because in forty years nobody has ever once said no to me in a straight sentence,” he said, “and I find I wanted to hear how it was done.”
* * *
Nobody had said a word to Larry Shepard about the wing in five weeks, not since the radio told him, which Mila thought was the single most cowardly thing that family had done all year, and she included herself in that.
She went on the last Sunday in April and did the day and the weather and the state of Nikki’s second field, and she got all the way to the end of it without saying the word building, and she was reaching for her coat when he brought his hand down flat on the rail.
“What.”
His eyes went to the window. Then to her. Then to the window again.
It took her a minute. The window looked out on the lane and the lane went south, and south, eventually, is Baltimore.
“Ah,” Mila said. “Right.”
She sat back down.
“You want me to say it out loud. All right.” She put the coat over the arm of the chair.
“On the twenty-fourth of March your son went to the hospital board and asked them to take your name off the front of that building. They’re doing it at the end of the fiscal year.
The long-stay unit is going to be named for the night nurses instead, and he’s paying for the whole of it himself and he’s made it impossible for anybody to ever say so, and he did not ask you, and he did not ask anybody, and he says he’d do it again. ”
Larry lay there and looked at the ceiling.
His face was doing nothing, because his face could not do anything, and Mila sat in that chair and understood that she had absolutely no idea what was happening in front of her.
“I’m sorry,” she said. “About the name. I know what that cost you.”
And Larry Shepard said, “No.”
“Larry—”
“No.”
He got it out with everything he had, and then he did it again, and then his hand came across the blanket and took hold of two of her fingers and did not let go, and Mila sat very still and made herself get it right, because she was the only person in that house who could and because he had exactly one word to spend.
Not no, I am not angry. That was too small and he was not a small man.
“You’d have done it yourself,” she said. “If you could have.”
His fingers tightened.
She sat with that for a while. Fifty years of a man who never told anybody anything, and a building with his name cut into it that he had fought for two years and then paid for, and a son who had said the worst sentence of his life inside it.
“Do you want me to tell him?” she said. “That you’re not angry. I could tell him tonight, he’d — Larry, it would take about four seconds and he’d sleep.”
“No.”
“Why not?”
The hand did not move.
And Mila, sitting in a back room in a house she did not live in, with her father-in-law’s fingers in hers, worked out the last of it and did not like it and did not argue.
He was going to say it himself. With his own mouth, in his own time, in however many months it took, and he was not going to have his daughter-in-law carry it down the hall for him like a tray.
“All right,” she said. “Then you’d better get on with the talking.”
And Larry Shepard made a sound she had not heard out of him since January, which was, unmistakably, a laugh.
He had four words by then. No stayed the flagship. He added yes, which he used sparingly and with obvious contempt, and here, which meant about nine different things, and, to the enormous excitement of the therapist and the total indifference of Larry, water.
And before she left that Sunday she sat down in that chair and told him about the gate.
She had not meant to. The day and the weather were done, and instead she told a mostly-silent man about forty minutes in an aisle, and the thing about a wall having one setting, and how frightened she was of the whole arrangement.
He listened. He was, it turned out, the best listener she had ever met, which was a spectacular irony in a man who had spent fifty years not saying anything.
When she finished he lay there a while with his eyes on the ceiling. Then he said it, and he put everything he had behind it.
“No.”
She did not have to work at that one. She had gotten good at him.
“I know,” said Mila. “Don’t be like you. You’ve been saying it since February.”
His fingers moved once on the rail.
“I heard you,” she said. “The first time.”
* * *
She set the third conversation for the second of May and named the subject herself, on the phone, in six words.
“The second of May. My work.”
And then she hung up, and stood in the barn office with her hand on the receiver and the index card still pinned to the wall above it, and understood that she had just opened the gate a good deal wider than forty minutes in an aisle, and that she had done it on purpose, and that she was frightened.