The Ride Home From My Heart Surgery

Ninety Miles

Otis Mabry’s pickup was an old Ford the color of a faded barn, with a folded quilt on the bench seat. He lifted my bag in as if it were made of eggshells, set the seat belt across me in a way that avoided the incision, then drove the first ten miles at a speed I could have run beside.

We were quiet for a while. Tulsa thinned into pasture and bean fields with the light going gray and gold across them.

Eventually, because ninety miles is a long time and I had spent the morning swallowing everything, I started to talk. I told him my husband had been a roofer, and that our son had taken the business over when Lester died, and that I had kept the books for Lomax Roofing and Restoration every Friday afternoon for eleven years without ever being paid a dime for it, because that was what you did.

Otis kept his eyes on the road.

“Lomax Roofing,” he said. “On Fourth Street.”

“That’s us.”

“Neil’s your boy.”

“Do you know him?”

There was the smallest pause. A mile marker slid by.

“I know of him,” Otis said. “Small town. His truck’s got a good reputation. Crews show up when they say.”

Around the forty-mile mark, my phone began to buzz inside my bag.

I ignored it. It was Neil. Then it was Rhonda. Then it was Neil again.

“You might want to get that,” Otis said.

“It can wait.”

I did not find out until later what had set them off. About thirty minutes after I left the curb, the hospital’s discharge nurse called the emergency contact on my chart, which was Neil, to confirm that Mrs. Lomax had a safe ride home and someone to stay with her the first seventy-two hours. She did not know she was the first to tell him. She said open-heart. She said I was not to lift ten pounds or be left alone, and that she was relieved a family member was handling things.

I imagine there was a very long silence on Neil’s end of that call. There was one in Otis’s truck when my phone went off for the twelfth time.

“Ma’am,” he said finally, very carefully, “forgive me. Is it that you can’t answer, or that you won’t?”

I watched the bean fields go by.

“I have been answering that phone for thirty-eight years,” I said. “Today I would like to be a person who is allowed not to.”

Otis nodded slowly.

“That’s your right,” he said.

The phone stopped. Then, before I could breathe out, it started again.