She looked back down at her mug, and I let it go, folded it up and filed it somewhere in the back of my mind where I’d examine it later, when there was room.
“Okay,” she said. Quiet. Certain enough. “Okay. Let’s do it.”
She didn’t sound entirely sure, and honestly, neither was I. But across the table from me she’d lifted her chin, just a fraction, and underneath all the exhaustion and the grief and the sleepless night sitting in her eyes, there was something else. Something that looked almost like relief. Like she’d been waiting without knowing it for someone to hand her a way forward, however crooked it turned out to be.
We’d figure out the rest as we went. We always had.
FIVE
ELLIE
In the course of my thirty years, I’d made several questionable decisions. I’d once let Daniel talk me into entering a chili cook-off with a recipe we invented at eleven o’clock the night before. I‘d bought a truck at nineteen that turned out to have significant opinions about starting in cold weather. I’d agreed to adopt a cat named Chairman Meow from the shelter and discovered, too late, that Chairman Meow regarded the concept of indoor living as a personal affront.
None of that had adequately prepared me for standing outside the hospital chaplain’s office at ten-thirty in the morning, about to ask a complete stranger to marry me to my best friend.
“We should have stopped for coffee on the way back from the courthouse,” I said. The words came out before I’d quite decided to say them, which was becoming a theme.
Daniel looked at me sideways, with the expression he reserved for when I was being absurd and he was choosing to engage with it anyway. “You want to go get coffee first. You hate coffee.”
“I want to do a lot of things first. Coffee happens to be the most socially acceptable one.”
He looked at me for a moment with that steady gaze that had been quietly infuriating me for twenty-two years, because it wasn’t fair that he could simply be that calm. He’d always been able to just absorb the chaos and stand in the middle of it, solid and unhurried, while I was experiencing what I could only describe as a full internal weather event. Thunderstorms. Possible hail. Probable tornados.
“We don’t have to do this,” he murmured.
“We’re doing it.” I turned back to the door, squaring my shoulders because somewhere, sometime, I’d read it was a power pose and could make me feel more confident. “But I reserve the right to be insane about it inside while appearing normal on the outside.”
“That’s basically your default setting.”
“Daniel.”
“Knocking on the door now,” he warned, and did.
The chaplain was a small woman in her sixties named Reverend Patsy Aldean, who reading glasses pushed up into her neat silver bob and the unflappable quality of someone who’d spent decades being called upon to do profoundly difficult things on extremely short notice and had long since made her peace with it. Her face gave nothing away except competence, and her office smelled like old books and someone’s recent and optimistic attempt at an air freshener. She listened to our explanation—or rather, to Daniel’s explanation, because he was apparently the one who had decided he was handling this part, which I was choosing to be grateful for rather than annoyed by—with her hands folded on her desk, her expression attentive and without judgment.
When he finished, she looked at us both for a moment, in the considering way of someone taking a quiet and accurate measurement.
“You want to get married in your grandfather’s hospital room,” she said to me, “so that he can see it before he passes.”
“Yes,” I said. This was technically accurate, even if it was the kind of accuracy that left out approximately everything. “We already have the marriage license.” We’d picked it up bright and early this morning, first thing, arriving at the county clerk’s office before the tea in my thermos had gone cold. I’d managed not to be sick while handing over my driver’s license and signing my name, which I was counting as a personal victory.
She nodded once, the question having been answered to her satisfaction. It either meant she’d seen considerably stranger things in the course of her work in this hospital, or she was being extraordinarily kind. Possibly both. “Give me ten minutes.”
She gave us twelve, which we spent sitting on a bench in the hallway not talking about anything that mattered. The corridor hummed around us—the distant squeak of a trolley wheel, the low murmur of a PA system, the ordinary sounds of a place where important things happened all the time to other people. It was fine. It was normal. It was completely sustainable behavior and not at all the behavior of two people who’d agreed, in full sobriety and presumably sound mind, to get married in twelve minutes.
When we got to Grandpa’s room, Daniel held the door for me, his hand a brief pressure at the small of my back as I crossed the threshold. I entered first.
Grandpa was awake, propped against his pillows with the bed cranked up and a thin hospital blanket tucked across his lap, the television on low in the corner showing something he was clearly not watching. A sudoku book lay open on the tray table, the pencil in his hand as he worked through it with the grimand focused determination of a man who refused, on principle, to allow a stroke to affect his number placement. He looked up when we came in, his gaze dropping to our clasped hands with the precision of a man who’d been paying close attention to us for twenty-two years.
His gaze slid to Reverend Aldean standing behind us.
Then he looked back at us.
Even though I’d been thinking about this moment on and off for the better part of the morning, I was entirely unprepared for his eyes to go bright and his chin to do that thing I’d seen only a handful of times in my life. He pressed his lips tight together for a moment before he trusted himself to say anything at all. It was the look of a man who has wanted something for a very long time and has begun to make his peace with the possibility that it might not come—seeing it walk through the door anyway.
“Well,” he said at last, and his voice was gruff and unsteady in equal measure. “It’s about damn time.”
Daniel made a sound beside me that was almost a laugh, low and warm and a little rough at the edges. I was busy trying to locate my ability to breathe, which seemed to have wandered off somewhere in the last thirty seconds.
