The Ride Home From My Heart Surgery

The Curb

Behind me, a car pulled up with its hazard lights blinking, and four people spilled out of it all at once.

There was a big bunch of balloons, red and yellow and one enormous silver one that said WELCOME HOME. There was a girl of about eight carrying a handmade sign with the letters getting smaller toward the right side, because she had run out of room. There was a man in a golf shirt, a woman in a church dress, and a teenage boy holding a gas station bouquet as if he were afraid it might bite him.

A nurse wheeled an older man out through the sliding doors. He had the same plastic wristband I did. He had a bandage on his neck and a very tired face, and when he saw the balloons the whole face came apart.

The girl threw herself at his knees. The woman in the church dress put both hands over her mouth. The teenager, who had clearly promised himself he would not, started to cry.

I looked at them for exactly as long as a person can bear to, and then I looked down at my own lap. I had a neighbor named Suzanne who watered my ferns, and a key in a cracked flowerpot, and a hospital’s worth of instructions. I could manage.

I pressed my palm flat against my chest, just under the collarbone, where the incision began. The skin under the cardigan was hot and tight. I could feel my own heartbeat knocking against my hand, steady and a little slow.

It was a bypass and a valve repair, seven hours on the table, and four days in a bed that beeped every time I fell asleep.

And I had told my son it was “a small procedure.”

I want to be fair to Neil. I told him a procedure. I said a few days in Tulsa, and when Rhonda asked what kind I said, “Ladies’ business, honey, you don’t want to know.” My husband Lester dropped dead of his heart at sixty-one on a roof in August, and in the eleven years since, every time I sat down too quickly at a family dinner, Neil’s whole face went gray. So I had decided to carry this one on my own and hand it over afterward, tidy and finished, like a casserole dish returned washed.

That was my mistake, and I own it. But the Uber part belonged to him.

The Volunteer

“Ma’am?”

The man in the navy vest had not left. I had stopped noticing him, which I suppose was the idea. He had a badge that read OTIS, and underneath it VOLUNTEER, and he was somewhere past seventy, tall and slightly stooped, with a white crew cut and glasses held together at the hinge with a dot of black tape. He had wheeled me down from the fourth floor, talking the whole elevator ride about his tomato plants.

“Policy says I stay with you until your ride comes,” he said. “That’s not a problem. I’m glad to.”

“They are not coming,” I said. It came out flatter than I meant. “My son is very busy today.”

“I heard.” He said it gently. He did not pretend he had not been standing six feet away. “I didn’t mean to. There’s not much room under a canopy.”

“I’ll call a car,” I said. “You don’t have to wait.”

“You do that. I’ll wait anyway.” He lowered himself onto the concrete planter next to my wheelchair, joints cracking. “My shift ended at two. I figure I’ll sit a bit.”

The balloons had gone inside by then. The clock above the entrance said ten past one.

“Where’s home, ma’am?”

“Dunmore.”

“Is that so. I live out on County Road 9, past the grain elevator. I come up to Tulsa Tuesdays and Thursdays. My wife had her valves done here, and when she passed I figured I’d give a little of it back.” He put the taped glasses on. “I’m headed home anyway, and a truck with a bench seat is easier on the stitches than a little car. I’d be glad of the company. If you’d allow me.”

I did not say yes right away. I had been warned about strangers on the radio for forty years. Then I did something I would not have done at fifty. I asked the charge nurse.

The charge nurse came out when Otis waved to her.

“Mr. Mabry has taken more of my patients home than the hospital shuttle,” she said. “I’d put my own mother in his truck. Mrs. Lomax, it’s your call, and I’ll note it in the chart either way.”

“All right,” I said. “Thank you. I’d be grateful.”

He stood up as if I had given him something.