Four Hours in the Dark to Dad
My phone lit up the nightstand at 2:04 in the morning, and I knew before I touched it that it was not good news. Nobody calls with good news at two.
The number started with 573. Southeast Missouri. I did not know anyone down there anymore except one person, and I had spent ten years making sure I did not think about him.
“Hello?” My voice came out thick with sleep.
“Is this Lacey Dorn?” A woman, low and unhurried. “My name is Pauline. I’m the night nurse on the fourth floor at the medical center in Cape Girardeau. I’m sorry to call so late.”
I sat up. Tom, beside me, was already rolling toward the lamp.
“Is it my father?”
“It is. Melvin Pruitt. He was brought in this evening with pneumonia and fluid on his lungs. He’s stable, I want to say that first. But he’s been confused the last couple of hours, he’s frightened, and he keeps asking for you. He gave me your number himself.”
I could not make a word come.
“Would you be willing to speak to him?” Pauline said. “It might settle him.”
I heard a rustle, the clunk of a receiver passing from one hand to another, and then a sound I had not heard in ten years. A breath, wet and shallow, dragging in and out of a chest that did not seem to have room for it.
“Lacey?”
It was my father’s voice, and it was not. The one I carried in my head was big and dry and slow, a voice that could settle a calf or a whole church basement. This one was thin as paper.
“Lacey Ann?”
Ten years, and he still said both names.
“Dad,” I said.
He started to say something. A cough took it. The cough went on and on, and I held the phone against my ear with both hands and listened to him fight for air, and I could not do one thing about it.
Pauline came back. “He’s all right, honey. That’s the oxygen working against him.” A pause. “I’m not going to tell you what to do. But I’ve done this a long time, and I think you should come.”
“I’m four hours away,” I said.
“I know,” she said gently. “That’s why I’m calling now.”
I am going to tell you something I am not proud of, so you will understand the rest.
I knew my father’s phone number by heart. It was the same landline on the kitchen wall, with the long curly cord my mother used to stretch to the back door so she could watch the garden while she talked.
For ten years neither one of us dialed.
My mother, Sue Pruitt, died on an October night when I was twenty-two. Ovarian cancer, fourteen months from the first scan to the end. The last six weeks she was home with hospice, in the bed by the window, and I had moved back from Columbia to take the nights.
My father was a farmer. Rice and soybeans on a few hundred acres outside Advance, land his father had farmed before him, with a dozen head of beef cattle on the back pasture. He was a man who fixed things. Whatever was wrong, he went out and got a wrench.
He did not know what to do with a wife who was dying, and there was no wrench for it. So he went out to the shop.