“No.” I kiss the top of her head. “Stay by the phone.”
She almost laughs. She walks me to the door and watches me pull out of the driveway.
The hospital at night is buffed floors and a smell that reminds you nothing good happens after midnight. A nurse walks me back and tells me things in a low voice, careful with every word. Her tone is soft, caring as she says the words I don’t want to hear.
Heart failure.
Advanced.
“We’re keeping him comfortable.”
Then she opens a door and there he is.
Sterling was always a big man. A man who filled a doorway on purpose, who used to press the flat of his hand between my shoulder blades to steer me through a room I could’ve walked fine on my own.
The man in this bed is none of that.
He’s gone small under the blanket. There are tubes taped to the back of a hand spotted with age, the wrist above it thin, a monitor over the bed counting and beeping. His eyes are open.
They find me and they hold.
For a second neither of us has a thing to say.
“You didn’t have to come,” he says. His voice comes out rough, barely there.
“I know,” I say.
I don’t sit. There’s a chair pulled up close, somebody’s idea of comfort, and I stand behind it instead with a hand on the back of it. He watches me not sit and doesn’t say a word about it. The room is quiet except for the machine and, somewhere down the hall, a television blares.
His breath comes in short pulls, working for each one. There’s a cup of water on the tray, a straw bent toward him, sitting out past where he can reach it. I move it in. He gets his mouth on the straw and takes a little and eases back into the pillow, spent by the effort. I don’t make anything of it. Neither does he.
A nurse comes in and does quiet work on a bag hung from a pole, writes something on the whiteboard, and goes out again, and none of it moves the green number over the bed. His eyes track her out and come back to me. He’s working up to something. I can see the cost of it in his throat before he gets to it.
“I called your show,” he says. “A few times.”
“I know.” I found that out from my mother, who picked his voice out of a thousand callers because she spent a lifetime learning to read him. I don’t tell him that. I don’t tell him what it did to me, hearing my own father ask a stranger with my voice how a man goes about making amends. “I know you did.”
He nods, once. It takes more out of him than it should.
“Is there anyone I should call,” I ask. It isn’t kindness. It’s a thing a person asks.
His mouth moves, not quite a smile. “Who would you call.”
There’s the answer. There’s no one. No wife. No friend killing time in the waiting room with a bad coffee. A country club’s worth of men who’d shake his hand and not one who’d sit up thenight for him. He built that. A little more every year, on purpose. And this is what it got him. Four walls and a monitor and a son who should’ve stayed home.
“Get some rest,” I tell him, because I’ve got nothing better and because I need the hall.
Out past the door I put my back to the wall and take out my phone and stand there with my thumb over her name longer than I want to admit. He ruined my mother, just like he tried to ruin me.
He told my mom once that her own mother was dead when the woman was alive, living, and wanting to know her family. She’s got more right to hate him than anybody else. I call her anyway. She should get the choice. He never once gave her one.
She picks up on the second ring, glad, because she thinks it’s a regular night.
“Mom,” I say. “It’s about Sterling.”
The glad goes out of her voice. “Tell me.”
“He’s dying. Tonight, tomorrow, they won’t say. He collapsed.” I keep it flat, because any emotion I have for him, needs to be shared in the confines of my home. Not here. Not near him. “I thought you should know. That’s all. You don’t have to do a thing with it.”
