The Nurse Who Waited Thirty Years

“Did you ever try to find him?”

“When I was twenty-three I drove up to Wendell on a Saturday in June. I got as far as the post office parking lot. I sat in my car two hours and could not make myself go in.”

“Why not?”

“What do you give a man for a life? A casserole? I thought, one day I’ll have something real to bring him.” She looked at the ceiling. “Then Mama got sick. Then it was shifts, and the divorce, and the next summer, and the next. And I started reading the obituaries.”

“The obituaries?”

“The Wendell Courier puts them online. Every Thursday for ten years, before my shift, I pulled up the page. I was afraid I’d see his name. And every Thursday I’d feel it go out of me when I didn’t.”

“Tonight I read the census at shift change and there he was, eighty-four, room 412. I asked Karen to give him to me. I never ask for anybody. I told her, ‘I knew him once,’ and she looked at me a long minute and said, ‘Then go.'”

I understood then about Karen, and the two patients in the end rooms. Nobody on that floor had known the story. They had only known the face of a woman who had never asked for a thing.

The last thing he asked her

Dad woke again toward five. The window had gone faintly gray and a cart rattled somewhere with the first breakfast trays. He turned his head on the pillow and found her.

“You been here all night,” he said.

“Yes, sir.”

“Don’t you have a bed?”

“Not tonight.”

He studied her with his clouded eyes. Then he said, very slowly, “Yvonne. I’ve got something to say, and I want you to hear it.”

She leaned in. “I’m listening.”

“You don’t owe me a thing.”

“Mr. Bernard…”

“I mean it. I did what anybody would do. I was the man standing there.” He stopped to breathe, and it cost him, and none of us moved. “But if you’ve got to pay something, and I can see you do, being your mother’s girl, then there’s a way.”

“Anything. You name it.”

My father smiled. It was a small, tired smile, the one he wore on Saturday afternoons with the ball game on the radio.

“Sit with me,” he said. “That’ll do it.”

Yvonne put her head down on the blanket beside his hand, and her shoulders shook, and I let her be.

“I’ll sit,” she said into the sheet. “As long as you want.”

“Good girl,” said my father.

He closed his eyes. When I looked down his other hand had come to rest in mine, and for the first time in two years I felt him grip.