The Booth by the Window

The room in Salina

The hospice was a low brick building with a garden out back and a smell of lilacs and floor wax. A woman about fifty, in scrubs, with Hal’s long jaw, met us in the hall. Ellen, his sister’s daughter, down from Wichita. She had slept four nights in a chair.

“You’re the busboy,” she said, and before I could answer she put her arms around me, a stranger, and held on. “He talks about you more than his own students. And he talked about his students all the time.”

“His students?”

“He taught shop at Lindell High for thirty-four years. Half the shops in this part of Kansas have somebody in them who learned it from my uncle.”

I thought: I told him I wanted to be a diesel mechanic, and he sat there and listened as if it were news.

“Go in,” Ellen said. “He’s been awake for you.”

The room was small and bright, with a window on the garden. He lay propped up, thinner than I remembered, hair combed flat with water. Someone had hung the tan coat on the back of the door. My brown tape was still on the shoulder.

“Is the booth empty?” His voice was thin, but it was the same dry even voice.

“Yes, sir. I held it.”

“For how long?”

“Four Thursdays.”

“The room let you?”

“Donna did. Vern’s crew ate at the round table.” I tried to laugh. “I think they’re all right.”

“They are.” His eyes closed and opened. “Don’t be hard on them. They’re good people who were busy. Come in, Wade. I can’t hardly lift my arm.”

I sat and took the hand he held out, the one with the missing fingertip. The bones of it felt like a bird’s.

“Good morning, Hal.”

It was one in the afternoon. He smiled, the whole smile this time, the one I had only ever seen the edge of.

“Good morning, son.”

“Is that coat of your father’s still behind your seat?” he asked after a while.

“Yes, sir.”

“Good. Somebody in your family ought to be warm.”

I put my head down on the edge of the bed. His hand came down on my hair, light and slow, the way my father’s used to.

“I never had a son,” he said. “Maryann and I tried. It wasn’t to be. So I had a lot of them in shop aprons, a few semesters each, and I loved every one. And then I was a retired man with a dead wife and a rented house, and I went to a diner where nobody knew me, and a boy said, sit anywhere you like.” A long breath. “Thursdays were the best part of my week. Since she passed.”

“They were mine too,” I said into the blanket.

He let me stay there as long as I wanted.