The Ride Home From My Heart Surgery

The Kitchen Table

My neighbor Suzanne was standing on the porch when we pulled up with her reading glasses pushed up in her gray hair. She is seventy-one and I have never once lied to her successfully. She looked at the wristband, and her face did the thing a face does when it has already worked it out.

“Nadine Lomax,” she said. “Heart surgery. And not a word.”

“Don’t start.”

“I’m continuing. Your porch light was off for a week and you were supposedly in Tulsa for ladies’ business.” She took my bag out of Otis’s hand and gave him a look that was very nearly a handshake. “Thank you for bringing her.”

Inside, Suzanne had stacked four pillows against my headboard because she had called a nurse friend and asked what I would need. That is the difference between neighbors and family: one of them went and found out.

I sat at my kitchen table with my phone buzzing across the wood in short, angry lurches. Otis stood by the back door, hat in his hand, as if waiting to be told whether he was allowed to be there.

“Sit down, Mr. Mabry,” I said. “You’ve driven ninety miles for me today.”

He sat. The phone buzzed. I turned it face down, and it buzzed on its face.

By the time Otis had finished the tea Suzanne made him, the phone said forty-eight.

I did not turn it over to look. Suzanne read it off the lock screen and went to find me something to eat that did not come from a hospital.

Otis set down his cup.

“Mrs. Lomax,” he said, “I need to tell you something before I go, and I’d ask you to hear all of it.”

I looked at him.

“I sit on the board of Dunmore Community Hospital. Eleven years now. Vice chair.” He turned his hat once in his hands. “Your son’s company is one of three finalists for the roofing contract on the new east wing and the main building. It’s a three-year contract. About two hundred and twelve thousand dollars. The board votes Thursday night, in the cafeteria, in the open, like we do everything.”

The kitchen had gone very quiet. The phone, for a moment, did too.

“I didn’t know that when I offered you a ride,” he said. “I’d have offered it if you were the mother of a man I couldn’t stand. I knew it somewhere past the county line, when you said the name. I’d rather you heard it from me tonight than from somebody else on Thursday.”

“You’re not going to do anything to my son,” I said. “Not on my account.”

“No, ma’am. I’m not.” He said it so simply that I believed him. “I won’t carry what I saw today behind a closed door and use it. But anything that matters to that contract gets said out loud, in front of the people it matters to. If a fair question comes up Thursday, I won’t lie to a room.”

“What question?”

“I don’t know yet.” He stood and put his hat on. “Your son’s a good roofer. I only wanted you to know I’d be sitting at that table, and that I was in a hospital doorway today at one o’clock. I’d come, if I were you. Sit in the back. You don’t have to say a word.”

He went out through the screen door and I heard the truck start, and then the gravel, and then nothing.

Suzanne put a bowl of her chicken and rice in front of me.

“He’s either a very honest man or the most dangerous one in the county,” she said.

“Maybe both,” I said, and ate.