The Stranger in the Next Chair
The vinyl was still warm.
That is the first thing I remember, and I have gone over that afternoon so many times that I trust it more than I trust most of what I remember about my own wedding. I walked into the cardiology waiting room at the VA hospital in Columbia at eight minutes to four, and my father was sitting in the second row of chairs with his Army cap on his knee and his right hand shaking in his lap. The chair on his left was empty. I put my palm flat on the seat without thinking, the way you check a stove, and it was warm. A paper cup of coffee sat on the floor beside the chair leg, still giving off a little steam.
“Dad,” I said.
He did not look up right away. He was watching his own hand, the way you would watch a dog that had wandered in off the road and did not belong to you. My father is Vernon Quigley. He farmed four hundred acres outside Carrow, Missouri, for fifty-one years. In my whole life I had never seen that man’s hands do anything he had not told them to do.
“Where’d he go?” he said.
“Who, Dad?”
“The boy.” He turned his head and looked at the empty chair. “He was just here.”
I took the hand. He let me. I want that on the record, because Dad did not let anyone take his hand. Not at the funeral, not at the hospice, not in the church parking lot when the ice was bad. But he let me hold it that afternoon, and the shaking ran up through my own wrist and into my chest.
“Somebody was sitting with you?” I said.
“Six hours,” he said. “He never left. Not once, except to get the coffee.”
I got up and went to the front desk.
The volunteer behind the desk wore a green vest with a name tag that said Harvey, and I would guess he was past eighty himself. He had reading glasses pushed up on his forehead and the patient look of a man who has told people where the elevators are for eleven years.
“I’m Vernon Quigley’s daughter,” I said. “The man in the second row. I called about ten minutes ago from the road.”
“I took your call,” Harvey said. “I told your dad you were parking.”
“Was there a young man sitting with him?”
Harvey’s face changed. It softened, and then it went worried, the way a face does when a man thinks he may have done something wrong.
“His soldier,” he said. “Yes, ma’am. He was here all day. I told him you were parking, and he stood up and said, ‘Then you’re in good hands, sir.’ Your dad said, ‘Wait.’ But he was already walking. He went out the east doors.” Harvey pointed. “Four minutes ago. Maybe five.”
I ran. I am fifty years old and I carry fifteen pounds I did not carry at forty, and I ran through the lobby of a veterans’ hospital in my work shoes with my purse banging on my hip. I went out the east doors into the April wind and stood on the sidewalk and looked at a parking lot with four hundred cars in it and a few people in jackets walking toward their trucks.