She’s quiet a long time. Long enough that I check the screen to see if the call dropped.
“I’ll come,” she says.
“You don’t owe him that.”
“I know what I owe him,” she says. “I’m not coming for him.”
“Harrison will bring you,” I tell her and hang up.
I call my best friend because I can’t drive back to my house and then come here again. I won’t. Once is enough.
“Hey, Josie said you went to the hospital. Is everything okay?”
“Not really. Can you do me a favor?”
“Anything.”
“Drive around back and pick my mother up and bring her here.”
“I’m on my way.”
I pace the halls and ignore the nurses when they ask me if there’s anything they can do. A few of them know me and the history I have with my father. It’s not a secret. Most of the town, the country club, and every place in between knows we had a falling out thirty-some years ago. It wasn’t until my mother left him that he moved out of town, out toward the college where he taught.
Harrison escorts my mom down the hall. We hug tightly and then I show her which room is Sterling’s.
“You want me in there with you?” I ask.
“No, baby.” She pats me on the chest. I can’t even tell you the last time she ever called me baby. “This one’s mine.”
She goes in. The door eases shut behind her.
Harrison finds a vending machine with coffee and brings me a cup. It’s times like this when I wish I had a flask of something good to ease the thoughts in my mind. We don’t talk. We stand in silence or he watches me pace.
When I’m near him, he says, “You don’t have to know if it’s the right thing. You just have to do the next thing.”
His words give me pause. They’re deep, meaningful, and very much Harrison. He lost his dad early, like the twins, and can barely remember a thing about him.
“You don’t have to stay.”
“I know,” he says. He waits with me, thumbing through his phone and pretending the whole time he isn’t watching me. Down the corridor a machine chimes and goes quiet. A man works a mop across the far end and never looks up once. I text Josie an update and tell her to go to bed. She sends one back telling me she and Katelyn are watching a movie.
The clock on the wall barely moves. I don’t know when I arrived, but it’s long enough that a nurse changes shift, long enough that I read the fire evacuation map on the wall until I could draw it from memory.
When the door opens, my mother comes out with her eyes red and her chin level. She isn’t falling apart. I’m happy to see it. He doesn’t deserve her kindness.
She takes both my hands. “Thank you for calling me,” she says. “You didn’t have to. He wouldn’t have.”
“He doesn’t deserve it,” I say. It comes out harder than I mean, or exactly as hard as I mean. I can’t tell anymore.
“No,” she says. “He doesn’t.” She squeezes my hands once and lets them go. “But I didn’t go in there for him. I said goodbye for me. I’ve been waiting a long time to be the one who got to walk out of the room.”
Harrison comes up to us. He doesn’t ask how we are or what the plan is. “Come on,” he says. “I’ll get you both home. He’ll still be here in the morning. And if he’s not, well you did your part.”
He doesn’t leave this up for discussion, he walks behind my mother and me, making sure we’re getting into his rental. For the life of me, I can’t remember if he ever met Sterling, and I don’t know if I ever told him about the grocery store incident with Peyton. I’m sure if I had, Harrison would’ve introduced himself.
It’s probably for the best.
TWENTY-SEVEN
