I sign jerseys. A goalie stick. Two casts. One kid’s forearm, over the kid’s objection that it would wash off, which I say is the entire point of skin.
A boy named Theo, nine, shows me the scar down the middle of his chest like a man producing credentials. New valve, six weeks out. He wants to know if it hurts to get hit into the boards.
“Yeah,” I say.
Theo nods, satisfied that an adult has told him the truth.
I like him for knowing the difference.
“My mom’s got one of those,” I say, and tap my own sternum.
The stitches were barely two days old. I had stood in a rural hospital hallway and watched them wheel her out, and I had not let myself feel it until right now, in front of somebody else’s kid.
Hospital hallways do that.
Strip everything down to breathing.
A valve.
A monitor.
A mother with her hand cold in mine.
“Does she cry about it?” Theo asks.
“No. She argues with the Jell-O.”
Theo laughs so hard the monitor beside his bed registers an opinion.
I stay two hours past when I should have left.
On the way out, I pass the family services desk and slow without meaning to.
A woman sits behind it with three folders open, a phone tucked between her shoulder and ear, and a plastic bin full of donated socks at her feet. Behind her, a bulletin board lists meal vouchers, parking passes, parent showers, and laundry hours.
Things nobody thinks about until a hospital owns the day.
I look back toward the elevators.
Somewhere upstairs, Theo is six weeks out from a new valve and asking whether getting hit into the boards hurts.
Somewhere across town, my mother is learning how to sleep with a new sound inside her chest.
For a second, I cannot move.
The woman at the desk looks up. “Can I help you?”
I shake my head.
No.
That is the problem.
I keep walking.
In the parking garage, the cold finds the back of my neck.
I sit in the truck without starting it.
