The Name He Wrote on the Line

I kept my hands folded in front of my cardigan and I let him look, because I had promised him I would not put words in his mouth.

“Can I change it?” he asked Kim.

“It’s your document,” she said. “If you want to change something, you can strike it and write in the change, and you’ll initial it before you sign. I’ll note it in my book.”

“Then I need a pen.”

Brian already had his out. He held it toward his father across the foot of the bed, a nice black one from his work, with the click top.

Ron did not take it.

He turned his hand over on top of the clipboard and held it out to me, palm up, the way he used to hold it out at the end of the church service for me to take when we walked out to the truck.

I had a pen in my cardigan pocket. It was a plain blue ballpoint I had brought from the church office, the same one I had used on Monday night in the waiting room to write down everything the surgeon said so I would not forget it.

I stepped up beside the bed and put it in his fingers.

His hand shook. The surgery and the medicine and the swelling had all gotten into it, and he held the pen like a man who has not written anything in a week, which he had not.

He drew one line through Brian’s name. It took him two tries to get it straight.

Then, above it, slow, in letters that wandered a little up the page, he wrote Deborah Ann Larkin.

He wrote his initials beside it. R.W.L. Then he turned to the last page and signed his whole name on the line at the bottom, the way he signs his checks, with the little hook on the L.

Kim leaned over and looked at the change. She wrote in her record book. Then she pressed her stamp onto the last page and signed beside it, and it was done.

Brian came around the side of the bed so he could see the page. He stood there beside me and looked at my name for a long, long time.

I did not move. I want to be honest that part of me wanted to say something. A small, ugly part of me had a whole sentence ready. I swallowed it.

Brian looked at his father. His face had gone a dull red all the way up from the collar of his quarter-zip.

“Dad,” he said. Just that.

Ron reached for my hand and found it. His grip was weak and his fingers were swollen, and he squeezed as hard as he could.

“Son,” he said, “I love you. I’m proud of you. You came all the way up here, and I know why you did it, and I don’t hold it against you.”

He took a breath, and it cost him. The red pillow was pressed against his chest.

“But I married her,” Ron said. “I didn’t marry you. You don’t get to decide where she lives, or who sits at my table.”

Brian opened his mouth. Nothing came out. He closed it again.

Kim was very busy putting her stamp back in her zippered bag.

“I heard what you said to the nurse this morning,” Ron said. “I was out of it, but I wasn’t deaf. That woman sat up with me two nights in a chair that doesn’t lean back. She’s not going to any home. She’s going to ours.”