The Thirty First Call From The Hospital

He nodded. “Her heart is very tired, ma’am. It has been for a while, by the look of things. We can keep her comfortable. She has paperwork on file here that says she doesn’t want machines.”

“She doesn’t. She told me that herself. More than once.”

“Then I think you should try hard to reach your husband.”

“How long?”

He looked at his hands. “I’d be surprised if she saw the sun come up. I’m sorry.”

That was call number four. Then five and six, back to back, standing in the parking lot in the wind with the smell of cut milo coming off the fields east of town.

Around call twelve I looked up the hotel. He had told me the name, a big chain place by the Denver convention center. I called the front desk.

“I’m trying to reach a guest. It’s a family emergency.”

The girl was kind. She typed for a while. “Ma’am, I’m not showing anyone by that name.”

“He’s with a dealer group. Farm equipment. Irrigation.”

More typing. “I don’t have an agricultural group in house this week. We’ve got a dental convention and a wedding block.”

I thanked her. I sat down on the curb by the ambulance bay.

I worked for a dentist. I thought, well, isn’t that something. I could have gone to Denver myself.

I want to be honest about what I knew by then, sitting on that curb. I knew. Not the particulars. But a wife knows the shape of a thing long before she is handed the thing. There had been a year of the phone face down on the counter. There had been a new cologne. There had been a conference in Kansas City in the spring that his own boss, at the company picnic, didn’t seem to remember.

So I got up off the curb and kept calling. Not for me. For her.

Because the thing I could not stand was not that my husband was lying to me. It was that a woman who had rocked him through the croup and hemmed his prom tuxedo and driven to Manhattan every single Saturday of his freshman year with a cooler of food was going to leave this world asking for him, and he was not going to be there.

Thirteen. Fourteen. Fifteen.

They moved her out of the busy part of the emergency room to a bed at the end, number nine, where they could pull the curtain all the way around. A night nurse came on at seven. Her name was Denise. She was about my age, with reading glasses on a beaded chain and a voice like a warm dish towel.

“You’re the daughter-in-law,” she said.

“Yes.”

“You the one who’s been in the parking lot on the phone?”

“Yes.”

“Any luck?”

“Not yet.”

She looked at me a second longer than she needed to. Then she went and got me a blanket out of the warmer and a cup of ice water with a bendy straw, and she set a box of tissues on the rail without making anything of it.

“You sit,” she said. “I’ll be in and out all night. You need anything, you say my name.”

Sixteen through twenty-two, I made from that chair, with the phone on my knee, quietly, so Evelyn wouldn’t hear the voicemail message. “You’ve reached Keith. Leave me something good.”

I had always thought that message was charming.

Around nine, Pastor Dan came. I had not called him. Denise had. That is how a town works. Her aunt sat two pews behind Evelyn.