The Caps My Wife Knit for the Ward

I pulled up by the side doors of Fayette County Memorial, same as always, and I sat there a minute with the engine running and the heater going.

I had not been inside that hospital since Margie’s last appointments. The last time I walked through those doors there had still been some hope left in the building for us.

I carried the basket in. A young fellow at the front desk asked if he could help me, and I said I was looking for wherever the knitted caps were supposed to go.

He gave me a look I could not read, and then he said, that would be the family room up on the infusion floor, second floor, the elevator is right around that corner.

I rode up with the basket held against my chest, and the elevator smelled like every hospital that ever was, and my heart was going harder than that short little walk called for.

The doors opened on the second floor and I followed the signs down the hall to a room with a glass door and a hand lettered sign that said Family Room, and I stopped in the doorway, and I could not make myself go in.

The Circle in Her Chairs

There were six women in that room, sitting in a circle of chairs, and every single one of them had knitting needles going in her lap.

The chairs were the same mismatched chairs that had always been up on that floor, and there was a card table with a coffee urn and a stack of paper cups, and a window with the gray light coming through it.

And by the door, on the floor, there was a grocery sack, open at the top, already half full of soft knitted caps in every color.

For a second I could not make sense of what I was seeing. It was as though I had driven eighteen miles backward in time and Margie herself was going to be in one of those chairs with her glasses down on her nose.

A gray haired woman in a red cardigan looked up at me first. She had reading glasses down on her nose and she looked at me over the top of them.

She set her knitting down in her lap, slow, and she looked at the oak basket in my arms, and her whole face changed.

“You’re Margie’s Walt,” she said. It was not a question. She said it the way you say a name you have been holding in your mouth, waiting for the person to walk in.