The Stranger in the Next Chair
I did not know what I was looking for.
“Did he give you a name?” I asked Harvey.
“No, ma’am. I never asked.” He took his glasses off his forehead and held them. “I should have. I watched that boy for six hours. Didn’t seem like he wanted to be asked.”
“What did he look like?”
Harvey thought. “Twenty, twenty-two. Short haircut, the kind they give them. Tan boots, the desert kind, you know the ones. Plain brown work jacket, no patches, nothing. Called your father sir every time he opened his mouth.”
“A soldier.”
“Stood like one,” Harvey said. “I’ve been looking at them since I came home in 1966. You can’t hide it.”
I should explain how my father came to be alone.
Dad was seventy-nine that spring. His heart had been telling on him since Christmas: short of breath at the barn gate, a gray look around the mouth. Dad told the doctor in Carrow it was heartburn, and the doctor, who has known him thirty years, said, “Vernon, I’d like the VA to look at it anyway,” and Dad said fine in the tone of a man agreeing to a root canal.
The VA scheduled the stress test for one long day. If the numbers looked bad, they said, they might go straight on to a catheterization the same afternoon, and he should plan on being there until suppertime.
I offered to take him. I offered three times.
The first time, he said, “I’ve got the van.”
The van is a white Ford run by the volunteer drivers from the Disabled American Veterans chapter in our county. Four or five old men ride down together on appointment days, ninety miles each way, and a retired lineman named Rex drives.
The second time, he said, “You’ve got work.”
I do the books for the county extension office. I told him I could take the day.
The third time he put his fork down at Sunday dinner, and Duane stopped chewing, because we both knew what was coming.
“Julie,” Dad said. “I will not have you lose a day’s pay sitting in a plastic chair watching me wait. I waited for the Army for two years of my life. I know how to do it. You’ve buried your mother and you’ve done the books for that office for twenty-six years and you’ve never missed a day, and I will not be the reason you start.”
That was my father. He did not say I love you. He said I will not be the reason you lose a day’s pay, and I understood it perfectly, and it made me furious.
He left on the van at 5:15 that morning.
I went to work.
At 2:24 that afternoon, the phone on my desk lit up with a number I did not know, and when I answered, a nurse with a gentle voice said, “Mrs. Quigley? This is Heather in the cardiology clinic at the VA in Columbia. Your father listed you as his contact.”
My stomach dropped through the floor of the building.
“Is he all right?”
“He’s stable,” she said. “The stress test showed some changes. Dr. Haddad would like to go ahead with the catheterization this afternoon, at four. Your father has signed the consent. But I wanted to call because he’s been very quiet, and I would feel better if there were family here.”