The Ride Home From My Heart Surgery

What The Board Did

Darla did not slam a gavel. She folded her reading glasses into her breast pocket and turned toward Milt and said, “I don’t believe we can decide this tonight.”

“No,” said Milt. He looked very tired. “I move we reopen the bids for a ten-day period, and ask the three finalists to resubmit with references.”

“Second,” said the veterinarian.

“This is not a judgment on Mr. Lomax’s work,” Darla said, to the room, and I think to my son. “His crews have done good work in this county for fifteen years. It is a judgment on a representation made to this board in a public meeting that was not true. And on what a man does when his mother needs him. That is a thing a hospital board is entitled to weigh. We are asking the community to trust us with its sick.”

The vote was four to zero. Otis recused himself from it, which was the thing I think I admired most. He sat with his hands folded on the pad and did not raise one.

The contract went to the Ardmore firm two weeks later. Neil laid off a man in November who had worked for Lester, and I have not forgiven myself for that, though it was not my doing. Lomax Roofing held on. I did the numbers.

When Darla adjourned the meeting, I stayed in my chair and let the room clear. Women from the quilting circle came up one at a time and took my hands. One of them said, “Honey, I had no idea.” Another said, “My boy did me the same way, once.”

Suzanne went to bring the car around to the door.

The Parking Lot

Neil was waiting under the cafeteria light, next to Suzanne’s car, with his hands in the pockets of his funeral jacket.

I got out slowly, and Suzanne, a woman of tact when she chooses, found something to do inside the glove compartment.

“Mom,” he said.

“Neil.”

“I’m not going to say I’m sorry,” he said. “It’s too small a word.”

“You did this on purpose,” he said, not angrily. He said it the way a man tests a floor. “The volunteer. Coming tonight.”

“I did not know that man’s name until he was setting the brakes on my wheelchair,” I said. “I didn’t call anyone. You’ll want to think it was a trap. It wasn’t. He told me at my own kitchen table that he’d only say what was fair to say in the open. I came because I wanted to hear it said right.”

“You could’ve stopped it. After Rhonda said that, in front of everybody. You could’ve just stood up.”

“I could have.”

“Why didn’t you?”

I leaned on the cane and looked at him under the yellow parking lot light.

“Because I’ve stood up for you every day for forty-one years,” I said. “I stood up at the school when you got caught with the cigarettes. I stood up at the bank when your first truck loan went bad. I’ve stood up in this town so long that you never once had to find out what it feels like to stand by yourself. And on Saturday, at one o’clock in the afternoon, I couldn’t. I had no strength for it. I sat down.”

He covered his mouth with his hand.

“I’m not punishing you,” I said. “I want you to know that. I would never have taken that contract from you, and I’d have kept your books for free until the day I died. But I will not be the woman who says okay anymore. That was the last one. I used it up on the curb.”

He cried then, a grown man in a parking lot with his father’s shoulders. I did not go to him. Not yet. It had taken forty-one years to come and I did not want to hurry it.

When he had finished he wiped his face on his sleeve.

“What do you want me to do?” he said.

It was the first real question he had asked me in a decade.

“For six weeks,” I said, “I can’t drive. I have a follow-up in Tulsa every Wednesday for the first month. I need somebody to take me, sit in the waiting room, and bring me home. No speeches. No casserole. A ride.”

“Every Wednesday.”

“Seven forty-five in the morning. Don’t be late.”

“I’ll be there at seven,” Neil said.

I got back into Suzanne’s car. He shut the door for me, carefully, with both hands.