The Thirty First Call From The Hospital

Then Kim, my own sister, who had driven over from Abilene and who knew nothing at all except what she had heard on the sidewalk. “Thirty-one times, Keith,” she said, and squeezed his arm, right on the burn. “That’s some kind of wife.”

One after another. Forty-five minutes of it. Not a single unkind word, not one. Just the whole town filing past him with their hands out, telling him, tenderly, that his mother had used her last clear breath on me, and how many times I had called.

By the end he was not standing so much as hanging there.

He sat down in the front row of folding chairs with his elbows on his knees and his peeling face in his hands, and he cried the way I have only ever seen a man cry at a graveside. Nobody went to him. It wasn’t meanness. It was that everyone had already said the kindest thing they knew to say.

I went on shaking hands.

He tried to talk to me that night in Evelyn’s kitchen, after the last car had pulled away. The counters were stacked with other people’s dishes. Scalloped potatoes, ham loaf, three kinds of bars, a green bean casserole in a blue pan with a strip of masking tape on the bottom that said Hadley in ballpoint.

“What did you tell them?” he said.

I was running hot water in the sink. “Not a thing.”

“Tracey. The whole town was looking at me like…”

“I told them you were traveling. I said it to every person who asked me for three days. That’s all I ever said.”

“Then how do they…”

“Your mother, Keith. Your mother told them. I didn’t have to.”

He sat down hard at the table, in his father’s chair.

“The call,” he said to the tablecloth. “The last one. Somebody answered it.”

“Yes.”

“What did she say to you?”

I turned off the water. I dried my hands on the red gingham, hers, which I was still wearing.

“She said you were in the shower. She said you were in Maui. She said it was dinner time and my calling was keeping her from relaxing, and she told me to stop.”

He put his hand over his eyes.

“So I stopped,” I said. “I went back in and I held your mother’s hand until it was over. That’s the whole story. You can ask Pastor Dan. You can ask the nurse.”

“It didn’t mean anything. Trace, I swear to you. It was a mistake, it was a stupid…”

“I know what it was.”

“Let me fix it. Tell me what to do and I’ll do it.”

I thought about that. I did him the courtesy of thinking about it.

“You can dry,” I said, and handed him a towel.

He dried. He didn’t know where anything went in his own mother’s kitchen. I had to tell him which cupboard.

The funeral was Monday at ten. Grace Methodist was full to the back wall and out into the vestibule. Pastor Dan preached on Ruth, who would not leave her mother-in-law. “Where you go, I will go.” He never once looked at Keith while he did it, and he never once had to. He told the story of four o’clock in the morning from the pulpit, gently, the pie crust and the aprons and the thirty-one calls, and left out the traveling. He didn’t need it. It was in that room already, sitting in the front pew with a peeling nose.

I stayed in Salina sixteen more days.

People have asked me why I didn’t leave that night. The answer is the casseroles.