“Um . . . Do you want to get coffee sometime?”
I shake my head, pull out my phone and type out exactly what he needs to say to her. “You’re making me look like I don’t know what I’m doing,” I say as I text him. “Those words, Ashford. Stop letting me down.”
“Thanks,” he says I start to walk away.
“Ask her out before someone else does.” I lift my hand in a wave and continue down the hall.
The room’s different in the daylight. Smaller. I stand in the doorway and watch Sterling for a moment.
“He’s comfortable,” the nurse says.
“Does that mean he’s getting better?”
She shakes her head and walks into the next room.
I take the chair this time. I don’t decide to. My legs do it for me, and I’m sitting before I’ve caught up to the fact that last night I wouldn’t.
He turns his head on the pillow. Looks at me in the chair, and the tightness goes out of his face.
“You came back,” he says.
“I did.”
For a while neither of us spends any words. I ask if he’s in pain. He says no, which is either true or the last lie of a proud man, and I let him keep it. I watch him breathe instead. It’s work now, every one of them, his chest lifting, holding, going down a little slower than it should. His hands lie on top of the blanket, the big knuckles I remember gone knobbed and loose. The heat ticks in the vent. Out in the hall a cart rolls past and fades.
Then he says it, no wind-up, straight at me before I’m ready for it.
“I was proud of you,” he says. “Every day. I was too stupid to say it.”
I built a whole life on the certainty I would never hear that sentence. Now the words linger in the room, out of a man who can barely take a breath. My throat works. I look at the shape of his feet under the blanket until I trust my voice.
“I wish you’d said it sooner,” I tell him.
“I know.” He doesn’t look away from it. “I wasted it. All of it.”
His eyes go to the window and come back. “Noah has your eyes,” he says. “And your mother’s stubbornness.”
My jaw sets hard. “You don’t get to talk about Noah like you knew him.”
The old him would have come up off that pillow, reminded me whose roof I learned to talk under, put that flat hand between my shoulder blades and moved me where he wanted me. This one closes his eyes and takes it, and when he opens them there’s no fight in there at all.
“You’re right,” he says. “I don’t.”
That’s new. I’ve known this man my whole life and never once heard him agree with me. I wasn’t braced for that.
After that the fight goes out of both of us. There isn’t enough time left to waste on it.
“This radio thing,” he says. His voice is going thin, and he waits between sentences to gather the air for the next. “People call you. About their lives.”
“They do.”
“And you tell them what to do.”
“Sometimes. Mostly I listen and tell them what they already know. They just want someone to tell and when it’s a stranger they can take it or leave it.”
“Give me one,” he says. I must look at him funny, because the corner of his mouth moves. “A call. One you remember.”
I think about it. “A man phoned in a while back. Married a long time, and he’d forgotten his own anniversary. No card, no dinner, nothing. Wanted me to fix it before she got home.”
