The Last Waltz I Saved for Vonnie

She got sick that fall. It started as a pain she blamed on lifting church pans. By October they found it in her pancreas. By Thanksgiving they told us what that meant, in a small room in Wichita with a box of tissues placed in the middle of the table where nobody could reach it without admitting why.

She asked for the number. They gave her a range. She said, “I see,” and thanked them, and asked where the restroom was. In the hallway she fixed my collar, which did not need fixing, and said, “Well. That’s that. Now we get to be practical.”

We kept her home. It was the one thing she asked for. By Christmas we had a hospital bed in the front room, by the window that looks out over the milo stubble to the road, so she could see who drove by. A hospice nurse named Brenda came three times a week, and Tamra took a leave and moved into the back bedroom.

On the second Saturday of December she called me to the bed. I had been sitting in the recliner, doing nothing, which I’d gotten good at.

“Loyd,” she said, “it’s Saturday.”

“I know it is.”

“You’ve got a dance.”

I said I wasn’t going to any dance. I said I’d sit right here.

“You’ll go,” she said, “and you’ll come back and tell me who wore what.”

I laughed, because I thought she was joking. She was not a woman who joked about that. She said that if I sat in that chair and did nothing but watch her, she would feel like a patient, and she did not care to feel like a patient on Saturdays. She wanted every detail. Who brought a new husband. Whose dress didn’t fit. Whether Elton’s steel was out of tune again.

So I went. I put on my good shirt and my brown felt hat and drove the twelve miles in the dark. Iola Dunning was running the door in Vonnie’s place, with the cigar box and the stamp. When she stamped my hand she wouldn’t meet my eyes, and I didn’t make her.

I came home at eleven and sat on the edge of the bed and told Vonnie everything. Nobody had a new husband. Elton’s steel was a quarter tone flat on the high end and he blamed the humidity.

She listened with her eyes closed, a smile only at the corners of her mouth. At the end she asked what the last waltz was.

“Tennessee Waltz,” I said.

“Mm. Well. Somebody has to play it.”

We did that five Saturdays. She got thinner. She slept more. The last Saturday in January was the one she chose to talk.

I had just come in and was hanging my hat on the nail by the door. Tamra had gone to bed. The house was quiet except for the little pump that fed the oxygen.

“Come sit,” Vonnie said.

I sat. Her hand lay on the blanket like a bird’s foot. I took it, and she squeezed harder than I thought she could.

“I’m going to ask you two things,” she said, “and you’re going to say yes to both, and you’re not going to ask me why.”

I have never in my life said no to that voice. “All right,” I said.