The Nurse Who Waited Thirty Years

“I’ll take your two in the end rooms,” she said. “You stay.”

“Karen, you don’t have to.”

“Did I ask your opinion?” said Karen, not unkindly, and went away down the hall.

I should have asked why. A woman gives up half her work and her supper to sit with an old man she has never met, and his own daughter asks her nothing. But my mother used to say you do not pry at a bedside. If a person sits down beside the dying, she has her reasons, and she will tell you when she is ready.

Around midnight I did ask her name.

“Yvonne,” she said, and turned the badge over so I could see. “Yvonne Jacoby.”

“Beatrice Meeker. Kolar, before.”

“I know. It’s on the board.”

“What made you stop when you came in?”

She was quiet a while.

“I knew a man once with that name,” she said at last. “On the census at shift change I saw it and I wondered if it could be the same one.”

“He’s from Wendell, up north. He carried the mail out there thirty years.”

She made a small sound, half a laugh and half something else.

“Did he,” she said.

Her eyes had filled and she had not blinked, so the water stood in her lashes like water in a cup. She looked down at his hand under hers and kept looking.

Leaning

At one in the morning she began to hum.

It was so low I thought it was the heater. Then I heard the tune and the hair stood up on my arms.

It was “Leaning on the Everlasting Arms.”

That was Dad’s hymn. He sang it off key in the truck with the windows down every Sunday of my childhood, on the way home from church. The choir sang it at my mother’s funeral six years ago because he asked them to, and he sat through all three verses with his hat on his knee and his jaw working. I had not told this woman one word about my family beyond my own name.

I sat with my hands in my lap and listened to a stranger hum my father’s favorite song in a hospital room in Wichita, and I prayed the way I do when I have run out of words. No asking. Just leaning.

Karen came by at two and put a cup of coffee in my hand. Dad’s breathing had a long, slow, uneven rhythm, like wind in dry milo.

“He’s comfortable,” Yvonne said, without looking up. “He isn’t in any pain. I would never leave him in pain.”

There was something in how she said it that went past training. It sounded like a promise, and it sounded as if it had been made a long time before tonight.