The Name He Wrote on the Line

I will tell you the part that makes me look less right, too. Four Thanksgivings ago, after Brian called his father only to borrow money for a transmission, I said in the kitchen that he only called when he needed something.

I said it to Ron, not to Brian. But Brian was standing in the hall. He heard it.

He did not come for Christmas that year, and I knew why, and I never went to him and said I was sorry.

So when he said I would be in a home within a year, I knew some of that was the stroke and some of that was the turkey and some of it was a twelve-year-old boy on a laundromat floor.

The stroke was real. Two years before, I had woken up with my left hand not listening to me, and Ron drove me to the hospital in Tulsa in his pajama pants. It was a small one. They caught it early.

I got everything back except some of the grip in my left hand. I still drive. I still type the bulletin every week and run the church office and carry the Wednesday night casseroles down to the fellowship hall.

But Brian had seen me in a hospital bed then, gray and frightened and slurring my words. Maybe that was the picture he kept of me. Maybe he really did believe I could not take care of his father.

That was the strongest thing on his side, and I knew it. Who was going to help a man out of a recliner six weeks after his chest was wired shut? A woman with a weak left hand?

I sat there and thought about that for a long time while Ron slept.

Around ten, a respiratory therapist came in and made Ron blow into a plastic thing with a ball in it.

He woke up enough to do it, coughing and holding the red heart pillow the hospital gives every bypass patient against his chest.

“Hurts,” he said.

“I know it does.”

“Was Brian here?” He frowned at the ceiling. “I dreamed Brian was here.”

“He was,” I said. “He’s coming back at two.”

He drifted off again before I had to say anything more, and I was ashamed at how grateful I was.

At eleven I went down to the cafeteria for coffee. I needed to walk, and I needed to stop staring at that folder, which Brian had left on the windowsill with his name typed in capital letters on the front page.

Brian was in the cafeteria. He was sitting alone at a table by the windows with a cup of coffee and a bagel he had not touched, looking out at the parking lot where the wind was blowing trash across the lanes.

I could have gone back up. I thought about it. Then I got two coffees, put cream in one because I knew he took it that way, and carried them over to his table.

He looked at the cup and then at me. “What’s this?”

“It’s coffee, Brian. You’ve had coffee in my kitchen a dozen times.”

He did not pick it up, but he did not push it away either, so I sat down across from him in my cardigan with my coat back upstairs and my hands around my own cup.