The Name He Wrote on the Line

“I know what you think of me,” he said.

“I don’t think you do,” I said. “I think you’re scared to death for your daddy. So am I. That’s most of what I think this morning.”

He laughed, but there was nothing funny in it. “You want to know what I’m scared of? I watched my mother lose everything once. I’m not going to watch it happen to him.”

“What do you think is going to happen to him?”

“If he doesn’t come out of this right, somebody has to sign for everything he worked his whole life for, and it’ll be you. And then wherever you go, whatever you sign, some other man, some nursing home. There’s nothing left of him.”

He said the last part to the window. I understood then that it was not really the house he was talking about.

It was his father. It was the only thing of Ron’s he thought he could still hold onto.

“That’s for your daddy to decide,” I said. “Not you. Not me. And the house is in his name, Brian. Nobody gets it by signing a paper in a hospital room.”

“He’ll decide what you tell him.”

I set my cup down. “Then I won’t tell him anything. If you want, I’ll ask the notary to talk to him with me out of the room. You can be out too. Let him say it to a stranger.”

That stopped him. He looked at me for a long second, the first time all day he had looked straight at my face, and then he looked back down at his bagel.

“I’m not trying to steal from him,” he said quietly.

“I know you’re not,” I said. And I did know it, mostly. “But you told that nurse I’d be in a home. You said it like I wasn’t standing there. That was not a scared thing to say. That was a mean thing.”

His jaw worked. He did not answer.

I stood up. “Drink your coffee. It’s got cream in it.”

I left him there. I am not proud of how good it felt to walk away first, but I did not say anything else, and I did not slam anything, and I think the Lord will let me have that much.

When I got back upstairs, the world had changed a little. Ron was sitting up.

The nurse had backed off his pain medicine, and a physical therapist named Jeff, a big man with a gray ponytail, was helping him swing his legs over the side of the bed.

“Here she is,” Ron said. His voice was rough, but it was his. “Debbie, this fella wants me to walk to Kansas.”

“Just to the nurses’ station,” Jeff said. “Kansas is Saturday.”

I watched Ron shuffle down the hall with a walker, the red pillow clamped to his chest with one arm, Jeff’s hand on the gait belt around his waist, the back of his gown tied shut because I had tied it myself.

He made it to the nurses’ station and back. When he sat down on the edge of the bed, he was sweating and gray, and he was grinning like he had climbed a pole in an ice storm.

After Jeff left, Ron held up his left hand and looked at it. His fingers were puffy and shiny, swollen up like sausages from all the fluid they had pumped into him during surgery.