The Ride Home From My Heart Surgery

The Days Between

I will say what I did over the next few days, because it matters to the people who think I planned something.

I did nothing. I slept. I walked to the end of the hallway and back twice a day with Suzanne at my elbow. I made a list on a legal pad of everything I would not carry anymore, and it had four things on it. It was not a list about revenge. It was a list about what a woman can reasonably be expected to haul alone.

On Wednesday I found a paper sack on my porch with six tomatoes the size of softballs and a note that said, No need to answer this. O.M.

I thought about what I would do if I were a different kind of mother. A mother who called Darla, the board chair, whom I had known since church rummage sales. A mother who rang Milt, the banker, whose father had hired Lester in 1984. I could have done it in five minutes, with the phone already in my hand.

But I kept thinking about the curb. I had said okay for so many years that my son believed it was a bottomless supply, like water from a tap. If I picked up the phone now and took a swing at him from behind a screen door, I would only be saying okay in a different voice.

So I did not call anyone. On Thursday afternoon I pressed my lavender cardigan, took the wristband off at last with kitchen scissors, and put it in a drawer. Then I asked Suzanne to drive me to the cafeteria.

The Cafeteria

Dunmore Community Hospital is a low brick building with a new east wing going up in steel and tarp. On the night of a bid vote, they set up four long tables in a horseshoe in the cafeteria and about eighty folding chairs facing them. By a quarter to seven, every chair was taken.

That is how it is in a town of three thousand, where half the county has an in-law on one of the bids. A group of women from the First Baptist quilting circle sat together in the second row with their purses in their laps.

Suzanne and I took the last two seats at the very back, by the kitchen door. I had a cane, which I hated, and a pillow I held against my chest the way the nurses told me to.

At the head table sat five people. Darla, the chair, in a gray suit and reading glasses, who had run the Dunmore library for thirty years and could silence a room by looking at it. Milt, the banker. A man from the school board and a retired veterinarian. And at the end, in a plain brown sport coat and the same taped glasses, Otis, with a legal pad in front of him and his hands folded on top of it.

He did not look toward the back. He looked at his pad, and he looked perfectly calm.

The first finalist was a firm out of Ardmore. They were polite and fast, and they sat down to modest applause.

Neil and Rhonda went second.

He wore the good gray jacket I had bought him for Lester’s funeral. Rhonda had a clicker and a laptop and had spent real money on the slides. There was a photo of the Lomax Roofing trucks lined up in a row, and a photo of Lester on a rooftop in 1995 with a hammer and a grin, and a headline in clean white letters: