The Stranger in the Next Chair
“Quiet.”
“Yes, ma’am.” She paused. “In my experience, quiet worries me more than loud.”
I do not remember grabbing my keys. I drove ninety miles in one hour and nineteen minutes, which I am not proud of.
I called the clinic desk from the highway when I was ten minutes out, and a man named Harvey said, “I’ll tell him you’re on your way, ma’am,” in a voice so calm it steadied my hands on the wheel.
The VA lot was full. I circled the garage twice. I took the first open space, which was far from the doors, and I did not lock the truck properly, and I ran.
That was the afternoon. He was gone four minutes. I missed him by about as long as it takes to say a short prayer.
My father came out of the catheterization at 5:40 with a new stent in the left anterior descending artery, the one the nurses call the widowmaker, and a lecture from Dr. Haddad about salt that he accepted the way he accepts all lectures, by nodding and then doing what he planned.
He had been about ninety percent blocked in that artery. The cardiologist told me so with her hand on my arm in the hallway outside recovery. She said that if he had put it off another month she would not have liked to guess. I only nodded, and then I went into the restroom and held on to the sink until my knees agreed to hold me.
He woke around eight. He looked small in the bed. He was never small, and I was not ready for it.
“Julie.”
“I’m here.”
“I can see that.” He closed his eyes and opened them. “You drove like a fool, didn’t you?”
“A little.”
He looked up at the ceiling tile, and he said, in a different voice, “I want to tell you about the boy.”
I leaned in.
“I was sitting there at ten o’clock after the test,” he said. “They told me it would be a while. They said they’d see about the cath. And I sat there and I started to think, and I want you to understand, I wasn’t afraid of dying. I’m seventy-nine. I’ve had a long run.”
“Dad.”
“But I sat in that room and my hand started to shake. Like it’s doing now.” He held it up, off the blanket, and I saw it tremble. “It started in the left, and then the right, and I put them both between my knees so nobody would see. And the more I tried to stop it, the worse it got.”
He stopped. I waited. My father did not like being hurried, even by silence.
“A boy came and sat down next to me,” he said. “He didn’t ask if the seat was taken. He just sat. He had a coffee, and he put it on the floor. He didn’t say a word for two hours, Julie. I want you to know that. Two hours. He just sat there beside me with his boots flat on the floor like he was waiting for the same train.”
I had to bite my lip.
“Around noon, it got bad,” Dad said. “I couldn’t keep them still. I looked down and he’d put his hand out, palm up, on the armrest between us. Not on mine. Next to it. Where I could see it.” He swallowed. “And he said, quiet, ‘Sir, you don’t have to be brave in here.'”