The Chair in the Hospital Hallway
“Marcia,” she said. “What did Daddy mean? About the roses?”
I had been keeping that for thirty years. It was strange to hand it over in a chapel at seven in the morning, with the sun coming through a shepherd’s blue robe.
“Your mother’s favorite flower was a yellow rose,” I said. “Ed told me that first fall we were married. And on the ninth of March every year, I drive over to Greensburg, to the cemetery on the hill, and I put a dozen yellow roses on her grave. I have done it every year since 1997.”
Kristen did not move.
“Ed couldn’t stand to go on that day. He would go the Sunday after, by himself. But I thought somebody ought to be there on the day itself, to remember that a woman died that day and left a girl behind who was missing her. I never told you, because I didn’t want you to think I was trying to take anything. It wasn’t for you to know. It was for her.”
Kristen put both hands over her face.
“Every March I go up there,” she said, through her fingers, “and there are always yellow roses, and I thought it was Daddy. I thought he had a standing order at the florist. I’ve been so grateful to him.” She took a ragged breath. “It was you. The whole time, it was you.”
“It was me.”
She was crying so hard she couldn’t breathe. I did not touch her. I have learned that when a person breaks, the best thing you can do is not rush to put her back together, so I sat with my hands in my lap while she wept, and the shepherd’s blue light moved slowly across the floor.
When she finally lifted her face, it was blotchy and wet and twelve years old and forty-four at the same time.
“I barred you from his room,” she said. “I wrote ‘family only’ on a form and I left your name off it. You sat out there four days, and I walked past you. I said that thing about the vending machines. How can you even look at me?”
“Because I know why you did it,” I said. “Your daddy was the last thing you had of your mama’s house. And I was the one you decided, a long time ago, you needed to guard him from. You were so scared you didn’t know what to do with your hands. I would rather you had been kind. But I was never angry at you for being scared.”
“I don’t deserve that.”
“Nobody gets what they deserve,” I said. “That’s the whole point of grace.”
She laughed, a short wet one, and then she did something that nearly stopped my heart. She slid down the pew until her shoulder touched mine, and she leaned her head against me, the way Ellie does, and she stayed there.
We buried Ed on Monday at the Baptist church in Cutler’s Ford, in the plot he had bought for the two of us, with the burley farmers standing in the back in their church jackets and the road crew in a solid row of orange vests. Kristen had saved me a place in the family pew. “I don’t want you in the back,” she said. The program in my hand read: Edward Dole. Beloved husband of thirty years to Marcia Jean Dole. Father of Kristen Hargis. I looked at it a long time, and I did not wipe my face.