The Thirty First Call From The Hospital

He came in wearing a canvas barn coat over his sweater, with his Bible and a thermos, like a man who intended to stay.

“Tracey.” He hugged me sideways. “How’s our girl?”

“Sleeping. Mostly. She squeezed my hand a while ago.”

“Where’s Keith?”

“He’s traveling. I’m trying to reach him.”

Pastor Dan has a way of looking at you that is not nosy but is not fooled, either. He looked at me that way. Then he pulled the other chair around to the far side of the bed and sat down.

“Then we’ll sit with her till he comes,” he said.

He read to her. The twenty-third Psalm, and then the one hundred twenty-first, the one about lifting up your eyes to the hills, which I thought was a funny choice for Kansas until he got to the part about the Lord keeping your going out and your coming in.

I slipped out twice more to call. Twenty-three. Twenty-four. Twenty-five through thirty in one terrible stretch around eleven-thirty, when her breathing changed and Denise put two fingers on her wrist and held them there a long time.

“Is it now?” I asked.

“Not just yet,” Denise said. “But I’d make your calls, honey.”

So I went out to the hallway by the vending machine, and I made call thirty-one.

And you know how that one went.

When I came back in and sat down and took Evelyn’s hand, Pastor Dan looked up from his Bible.

“Get him?”

I opened my mouth. What came out was, “No.”

It was not exactly a lie. I had not gotten him.

“You all right?”

“I’m fine.”

“You’re white as that sheet.”

“I’m fine, Pastor. I’m done calling, is all. I’d rather be in here.”

He studied me. Denise, at the foot of the bed writing on her clipboard, had stopped writing.

“All right,” he said gently. “Then you’re in the right place.”

Nobody said anything else about it. Denise turned the overhead light down. Somebody two curtains over was watching a ball game with the sound low. The clock above the sink said eleven fifty-eight.

I held her hand.

I am going to tell you something about those hours that I didn’t expect. They were not the worst hours of my life. I thought they would be. I had just found out what my marriage was, in a hospital hallway, from a stranger who called me honey. I should have been in pieces.

But there is a kind of quiet that comes down when you finally stop trying to drag somebody to where they ought to be. I had spent eight hours, and if I am truthful about nineteen years, calling a man who was not going to pick up. And now I had quit, and both my hands were free.

I used them. I rubbed lotion into Evelyn’s knuckles, the lavender kind from my purse. I combed her hair back off her forehead with my fingers, because she would have hated for the pastor to see her with it flat. I told her the pecans were coming down early this year. I told her I would finish the crusts and that I would try, I would truly try, not to overwork them.

Pastor Dan prayed some and dozed some. It was a little before four when she woke.

I felt it first. Her fingers, which had been slack for hours, closed around mine with real strength, the way she would grab my wrist in the grocery store when she saw someone she didn’t want to talk to.

“Evelyn?”