The Nurse Who Waited Thirty Years

By evening the kitchen had filled. Pastor Ellis came with a pan of scalloped potatoes and stayed an hour, saying nothing, holding Dad’s other hand. Two old men from the veterans club stood at the foot of the bed, and one of them saluted, and my father opened an eye and said, “At ease.”

Lemuel Pratt came last, eighty-eight years old and leaning on a cane, with a paper sack in his coat pocket.

He stood in the doorway looking at Yvonne, who sat in a kitchen chair beside the bed. His mouth worked.

“Well, I’ll be,” he said. “It’s the mail girl.”

“Mr. Pratt?”

“You got taller.” He crossed the room one slow step at a time and set the sack in her lap. Inside were soft pink and white peppermints in cellophane twists. “I bought a bag of those at the Co-op every Saturday for thirty years. I told myself it was for the grandkids. Truth is I always kept one in my coat for you.”

Yvonne held the sack in both hands. Lemuel sat in the rocker, and there the two of them stayed all evening with the bag between them.

I noticed that nobody in that kitchen had asked how she knew my father. They had not needed to. Half of them had been on Route 2 that summer, and they had watched a nine-year-old ride along in the mail seat, and none of them had said a word to my mother or to me.

His last days

Dad lived two more days, and they were good days, the way Dr. Reinholt had said they might be. Friday he was awake most of the afternoon, propped up with his hat on the bedpost where he could see it. He asked about the cows, which we sold years ago, and Zeb said they were fine.

Friday night he asked Yvonne to read to him. She took my mother’s Bible from the lamp table, black leather held together at the spine with electrical tape, and it fell open on its own to the twenty-third Psalm.

When she came to the valley of the shadow she looked up. He nodded, small, as if to say go on.

“Thy rod and thy staff, they comfort me,” she read.

“I carried a mailbag,” said my father. “Funny how a man can be useful his whole life and not know it.”

“You were useful.”

“I was lucky,” he said. “I was standing where I was standing.”

Saturday morning, at ten till six, the first gray light came into the yard and a rooster started up at the Pratt place. I held his right hand. Zeb stood at the foot, Brendan in the doorway with his cap in his hands. And Yvonne sat on his left, where she had sat two nights and a day, with the old card resting between his hand and hers.

She did not hum. The whole room seemed to breathe in the same slow time, and my father drew a long, easy breath and let it out and did not draw another.

It was very quiet. The cats didn’t stir.

Yvonne put her forehead against his temple.

“Thank you for getting me out the window, Mr. Bernard,” she said. “I’ll tell everybody I meet.”

We sat there until the funeral home van came up the drive. When the men asked, gently, whether anyone wanted to take anything, Yvonne slipped the card from under his hand and put it back in her pocket, and I did not say a word about it. It was hers. It had always been hers.